Our Emotions affect Our Ability to Empathise, Study Suggests

Rebecca Lewis October 17, 2013

Our ability to empathise may depend largely on our own emotional state. What’s more, when we are obliged to make sudden decisions, we find it hard to show empathy, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences conducted a series of experiments in an effort to explore further the science of empathy. Participants in the study were grouped in pairs of two and were exposed to either pleasant or unpleasant stimuli. For example, participant 1 was shown a picture of maggots whilst feeling slime in her hand, and participant 2 was shown a picture of a puppy whilst feeling a soft, fleecy fur in the skin. Both the participants can see the visual stimuli shown to one another.

After the activity, the pairs were asked to evaluate the emotional experiences of each other.

The researchers noticed that when both participants were exposed to the same type of positive or negative stimuli, they found it easy to guess their partner’s emotions. For example, when one participant had to interact with a stinkbug, it was easier for him or her to imagine how unpleasant seeing and touching a spider was like for the other person. But when one is presented with pleasant stimuli but the other one was presented with unpleasant stimuli, the participants’ ability to empathise was reduced.

The researchers concluded that the participants’ emotional states distorted their assessment of the other person’s emotion. Specifically, those who interacted with positive stimuli evaluated their partner’s unpleasant experiences as less severe than they really were. On the other hand, those who interacted with negative stimuli rated their partner’s pleasant experience to be less likely positive.

Furthermore, the participants’ assessment of their partner’s emotions was less accurate when they are forced to make immediate decisions, the researchers found.

Using the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI), the researchers were able to identify the specific area in the brain, the supramarginalgyrus,whichis responsible for helping a person distinguish his or her own emotional state from that of other people. “This was unexpected, as we had the temporo-parietal junction in our sights. This is located more towards the front of the brain,” said Claus Lamm, one of the study authors.

Their study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience

Source of this article:

Empathy Strongly Affected By Our Own Emotional State