The impact of empathy and reappraisal on emotional intensity recognition

ABSTRACT

Empathy represents a fundamental ability that allows for the creation and cultivation of social bonds. As part of the empathic process, individuals use their own emotional state to interpret the content and intensity of other people’s emotions. Therefore, the current study was designed to test two hypotheses: (1) empathy for the pain of another will result in biased emotional intensity judgment; and (2) changing one’s emotion via emotion regulation will modulate these biased judgments. To test these hypotheses, in experiment one we used a modified version of a well-known task that triggers an empathic reaction We found that empathy resulted in biased emotional intensity judgment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a bias in the recognition of emotional facial expressions as a function of empathy for pain. In experiment two, we replicated these findings in an independent sample, and further found that this biased emotional intensity judgment can be moderated via reappraisal. Taken together, our findings suggest that the novel task used here can be employed to further explore the relation between emotion regulation and empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• emotion regulation
• empathic accuracy
• reappraisal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We used SPSS to calculate the observed power for each of the individual factors in our ANOVA design, as well as for all the possible interactions. As noted by Prajapati, Dunne, and Armstrong (2010), in a power analysis for multi-factorial designs, each factor and interaction yields a different power. All the conditions that reached significance also produced moderate or large effects (according to Cohen, 1992) of at least 0.5. According to Hoenig and Heisey (2001) and Yuan and Maxwell (2005), studies yielding significant effects do not require posteriori power analysis, which can even be erroneous. A similar posteriori power analysis was calculated for experiment 2, resulting in similar levels of significance.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Marie Curie Actions CIG [grant number 34206] and the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel Young Investigator Research [grant number 145-14-15] awarded to H. Okon-Singer.