Aberrant cognitive empathy in individuals with elevated social anxiety and regulation with emotional working memory training

ABSTRACT

Social anxiety may disrupt the empathic process, and well-regulated empathy is critical for navigating the social world. Two studies aimed to further understand empathy in the context of social anxiety. Study 1 compared individuals with elevated or normative social anxiety on a measure assessing cognitive and affective empathy for positive and negative emotions conveyed by other people (“targets”), completed under social threat. Relative to individuals with normative social anxiety, individuals with elevated social anxiety had greater cognitive empathy and no differences in affective empathy, regardless of emotion type. As greater cognitive empathy can be maladaptive, Study 2 tested whether this could be down-regulated. Individuals with elevated social anxiety underwent emotional working memory training (eWMT) for negative emotional information, or control training (CT). Effects on an empathy measure completed under social threat were assessed. Cognitive empathy for negative emotions decreased following eWMT but not CT, and this was only evident for those with higher pre-training working memory capacity. Cognitive empathy for positive emotions and affective empathy were not affected. Overall, social anxiety is associated with aberrant elevated cognitive empathy for negative and positive emotions, and the deviation in cognitive empathy for negative emotions can be regulated with eWMT for certain individuals.

Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618001196235..

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• empathy
• working memory training
• emotional working memory training
• emotion

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sarah Certoma for helpful discussions and comments on this paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. SK (Conceptualization; Formal analysis; Methodology; Project administration; Writing – original draft; Writing – review and editing); SdT (Conceptualization; Methodology; Project administration; Writing – review and editing); CD (Conceptualization; Methodology; Project administration; Writing – review and editing); SS (Conceptualization; Methodology; Writing – review and editing); AM (Methodology; Writing – review and editing); DO (Methodology; Writing – review and editing); AP (Conceptualization; Methodology; Project administration; Writing – review and editing); LH (Conceptualization; Methodology; Project administration; Writing – review and editing); JH (Methodology; Writing – review and editing); MT (Methodology; Writing – review and editing); QJJW (Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Methodology; Supervision; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing)

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

1 For completeness, all analyses in this section were also repeated with the participants who did not follow protocol or who dropped out (n = 6) removed from the dataset. The results of these analyses were virtually identical to the results presented from the intention-to-treat analyses based on N = 40, and led to the same conclusions.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.