Two facets of affective empathy: concern and distress have opposite relationships to emotion recognition

ABSTRACT

Theories on empathy have argued that feeling empathy for others is related to accurate recognition of their emotions. Previous research that tested this assumption, however, has reported inconsistent findings. We suggest that this inconsistency may be due to a lack of consideration of the fact that empathy has two facets: empathic concern, namely the compassion for unfortunate others, and personal distress, the experience of discomfort in response to others’ distress. We test the hypothesis that empathic concern is positively related to emotion recognition, whereas personal distress is negatively related to emotion recognition. Individual tendencies to respond with concern or distress were measured with the standard IRI (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) self-report questionnaire. Emotion recognition performance was assessed with three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. Across two studies (total N = 431) anddifferent emotion recognition tests, we found that these two facets of affective empathy have opposite relations to recognition of facial expressions of emotions: empathic concern was positively related, while personal distress was negatively related, to accurate emotion recognition. These findings fit with existing motivational models of empathy, suggesting that empathic concern and personal distress have opposing impacts on the likelihood that empathy makes one a better emotion observer.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion recognition
• personal distress
• empathic concern

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article or its supplementary materials.

Notes

1 For insightful discussion regarding the weak relation between empathy and emotion recognition see also Olderbak and Wilhelm (2017).

2 After the emotion recognition tests in Study 1 we also administrated tasks designed to measure Emotion Differentiation (see Erbas, Ceulemans, Lee Pe, Koval, & Kuppers, 2014) and Verbal IQ (see Liepmann, Beauducel, Brocke, Amthauer, & Vorst, 2010 ). These are reported elsewhere (Israelashvili, Oosterwijk, et al., 2019). Importantly, across all three tests, the relationship between empathic response (EC, PD and EC*PD) and emotion recognition remained significant when controlling for verbal IQ. See supplemental materials [Table 3] for full statistical description.