The meaning in empathy: Distinguishing conceptual encoding from facial mimicry, trait empathy, and attention to emotion

Abstract

In order to truly empathise with another, we need to recognise and understand how they feel. Perception–action models of empathy predict that attending to another's emotion will spontaneously activate the observer's own conceptual knowledge for the state, but it is unclear how this activation is related to facial mimicry, trait empathy, or attention to emotion more generally. In the current study, participants did spontaneously encode background facial expressions at a conceptual level even though they were irrelevant to the task (the Emostroop effect; Preston & Stansfield, 2008), but this encoding was not associated with mimicry of the faces, trait empathy, the ability to resolve competing semantic representations (Colour-naming Stroop task), or the tendency to be distracted by emotional information more generally (Intrusive Cognitions task). Our results suggest that trait empathy increases attention to emotional information, but conceptual encoding occurs across individuals as a natural consequence of attended perception.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Empathy
• Facial expression
• Individual differences
• Stroop

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research was funded by a grant from the Rackham Graduate School to AJH and from the University of Michigan to SDP.

The authors thank Brent Stansfield for input on the task, design and analysis. Amy Ross, Brianna Miller, Joshua Carp, and Bhargavi Sampath helped with the collection and pre-processing of data.