Impaired Cognitive Empathy in Outpatients with Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Background. In recent years, a growing number of researchers showed significant interest in psychological and social interventions to manage chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) pain. Cognitive and emotional empathy is an attractive and valuable sociopsychological factor that may provide protection and resilience against chronic MSK pain. However, its effect on outpatients remains underexplored. Objective. To compare the empathy ability between chronic MSK pain outpatients and healthy controls and explore the relationship between cognitive/emotional empathy and chronic pain. Methods. Patients with chronic MSK pain ( n = 22 ) and healthy controls ( n = 26 ) completed the pain assessment and empathy ability task, utilizing a multidimensional empathy assessment tool with satisfactory reliability and validity (i.e., the Chinese version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET-C)). Results. The data indicated that the chronic MSK pain outpatients had impaired cognitive empathy (i.e., lower squared cognitive empathy accuracy: Student’s t = − 2.119 , P = 0.040 , and longer task completion time: Student’s t = 3.382 , P = 0.002 ) compared to healthy controls, and cognitive empathy was negatively correlated with pain intensity ( r = − 0.614 , P = 0.002 ). Further, the impaired cognitive empathy was present in identifying positive, but not negative emotions. Conclusion. These results indicate that chronic MSK pain is associated with impaired empathy ability. Our studies contribute to offering a potential direction for developing psychosocial interventions to treat chronic MSK pain.

Effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions on empathy: A meta-analysis

“…Previous studies have found that many diseases had empathy disorders, such as psychiatric disorders (Decety and Moriguchi, 2007 ; Bragado-Jimenez and Taylor, 2012 ; Schreiter et al, 2013 ) and chronic pain (Sohn et al, 2016 ; De Tommaso et al, 2019 ; Ma et al, 2020 ; Mu et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ). It would be meaningful to see if the extension of MBIs to these subjects could improve their empathy.…”

“…Empathy also facilitates helping behavior, cooperation, and altruism (Feldmanhall et al, 2015 ). Impaired empathy is manifested by lacking understanding of the pain and plight of others, difficulty to be impressed, and appearing indifferent in real life, which is common in many psychiatric disorders (Decety and Moriguchi, 2007 ; Bragado-Jimenez and Taylor, 2012 ; Schreiter et al, 2013 ) and chronic pain (Sohn et al, 2016 ; De Tommaso et al, 2019 ; Ma et al, 2020 ; Mu et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ).…”

Cross‐cultural adaptation and clinical application of the Perth Empathy Scale

“…Seven theoretically informed models based on increasing complexity were assessed (see Supporting Information: Figure ). First, we examined a one‐factor model (model 1) comprised of a general factor, then a two‐factor model (model 2) generally distinguishing between cognitive and affective components of empathy (Cuff et al, 2016), and a three‐factor model (model 3) that distinguished valences in cognitive empathy (Rueda et al, 2015; Zhang et al, 2021). Second, another three‐factor model (model 4) was constructed that distinguished between negative and positive valences in affective empathy (Löchner et al, 2022; Yan et al, 2021).…”

Enhanced Empathic Pain by Facial Feedback

“…Perspective-taking and reading facial expressions are both cognitive evaluative aspects of empathy [5]. The term "emotional empathy" is used to describe the vicarious sharing of emotion; the emotional components engage a partial affective sharing of others' affective states [6]. For instance, individuals vicariously experience the unpleasantness associated with the pain someone else is feeling.…”