Regulating mirroring of emotions: A social-specific mechanism?

Abstract

There is evidence that humans mirror others’ emotional responses: brain responses to observed and experienced emotion overlap, and reaction time costs of observing others’ pain suggest that others’ emotional states interfere with our own. Such emotional mirroring requires regulation to prevent personal distress. However, currently it is unclear whether this ‘empathic interference effect’ is uniquely social, arising only from the observation of human actors; or also from the observation of non-biological objects in ‘painful’ states. Moreover, the degree to which this interference relates to individual differences in self-reported levels of empathy is yet to be revealed. We introduce a modified pain observation task, measuring empathic interference effects induced by observation of painful states applied to both biological and non-biological stimuli. An initial validation study (N=50) confirmed that painful states applied to biological stimuli were rated explicitly as more painful than non-painful states applied to biological stimuli, and also than both painful and non-painful states applied to non-biological stimuli. Subsequently, across two independent discovery (N=83) and replication (N=80) samples, the task elicited slowing of response times during the observation of painful states when compared to non-painful states, but the magnitude of this effect did not differ between biological and non-biological stimuli. Little evidence was found for reliable relationships between empathic interference and self-reported empathy. Caution should therefore be taken in using the current task to pursue an individual differences approach to empathic interference, but the task shows promise for investigating the specificity of the mechanism involved in regulating emotional mirroring.

Role of fantasy in emotional clarity and emotional regulation in empathy: A preliminary study

“…Personal distress has been described as affect sharing, similar to that seen in affective empathy but without a distinction between the self and other, thus resulting in self-oriented distress rather than an empathic reaction (Preston and De Waal, 2002;De Vignemont and Singer, 2006;Decety and Jackson, 2006). Based on previous studies (Gallese and Goldman, 1998;Harari et al, 2010;New et al, 2012;De Meulemeester et al, 2021;Sowden et al, 2022) and our results, an explanation for empathic personal distress may be that individuals imagine and immerse themselves in others' experiences using lower-level automatic body sensations (emotional contagion), and the accompanying negative emotions are regulated by one's metacognition. On the other hand, frequency of personal distress could contribute to whether or not one engages in successful empathic interaction.…”