Task 7 Compassion and Empathy

Question 1

What is compassion

Answer 1

feelings of concern and warmth linked to the motivation to help elicited by witnessing suffering of others

Question 2

Brain areas tied to compassion

Answer 2

• Ventral striatum
• nucleus accumbens
• VTA
• mOFC
• sACC

Question 3

What is affective empathy

Answer 3

sharing in someone else’s feelings regardless of valence but with knowledge that the other person is the origin of this emotion

Question 4

Brain areas connected to affective empathy

Answer 4

• anterior insula
• aMCC

Question 5

What is cognitive empathy

Answer 5

Taking another person’s perspective –> inferring and reasoning about the beliefs, thoughts, or emotions of others

Question 6

Brain areas connected to cognitive empathy

Answer 6

• Temporoparietal junction
• superior temporal sulcus
• temporal poles
• mPFC
• PCC

Question 7

Interactions between socio-affective and socio-cognitive capacities

Answer 7

• empathy accuracy: ability to infer what someone else is feeling activates networks associated with affective empathy and ToM
• self-other distinction: enables differentiation between one’s own emotions and anohter’s emotions

–> egocentricity bias: tendency to project own emotional state on someone else

–> cognitive egocentricity: own knowledge about the situation can influence reasoning about what someone else is thinking about a given situation

–> emotional egocentricity: own emotional state can influence the judgement of someone else’s affective state

–> altercentric bias: another’s satte influences self-judgements

Question 8

Empathy, distress, and emotion regulation

Answer 8

• emotion regulation determines whether empathy-induced emotion has pos. or neg. outcomes

a) Cognitive reappraisal: pos. effects on mental health
b) Expressive suppression: neg. effects on mental health

–> affective empathy predicts greater affective distress BUT reappraisal protects against this
- cognitive empathy predicts lower distress (when emotion suppression does not occur)

–> emotion suppression moderates the effect of cognitive empathy on anxiety
- suppression is only protective when people are high in affective empathy

Question 9

Costs of empathy

Answer 9

• people tend to avoid empathy because it comes with cognitive costs