"Affective empathy" refers to the ability to understand and share the feelings and emotions of others, allowing you to connect with them on an emotional level. In simple terms, it means feeling what others are feeling.
Full definition
What most people mean by «empathy» is
actually affective empathy — the ability to experience and respond to the feelings of others.
As expected, people who were more likely to troll had significantly lower levels
of affective empathy.
It seems intuitive that difficulties identifying emotions such as sadness, fear, and disgust might lead to deficits in
affective empathy for these emotions.
Though children scoring high on CU traits show poor response to treatment, some recent intensive programs have proved effective [48], and interventions involving, for example, emotion recognition training, have resulted in significant improvements
in affective empathy and conduct problems in children with high CU traits [49].
Again, however, these findings have not been consistent, with some studies finding no effects of CU traits
on affective empathy for sadness (e.g., Anastassiou - Hadjicharalambous and Warden 2008).
We predicted that participants with CD would be impaired in EA and would show emotion recognition and
affective empathy deficits relative to TD controls.
Therefore, it is difficult to ascertain whether our null findings reflect the fact that CU traits have a limited impact on emotion recognition and
affective empathy within CD populations, whether they are due to the fact that we had limited statistical power to detect differences between groups, or whether they are explained by the restricted range of CU traits in our sample (as few of our CD participants had very high levels of CU traits).
We also found significant positive correlations between the perspective - taking, fantasy, and empathic concern subscales of the IRI and
overall affective empathy, all rs > 0.35, ps < 0.010.
We also hypothesized that participants with CD / CU + would show reduced EA, emotion recognition, and
affective empathy relative to CD / CU - participants.
Cognitive and
affective empathy validates a part of the person's self that has long ago been invalidated, rejected, or abandoned by childhood caretakers, and in the resulting pain, by the self.
Relative to typically - developing (TD) adolescents, participants with CD showed deficits in emotion recognition and
affective empathy when viewing intense and emotionally - evocative video clips depicting targets talking about real autobiographical experiences, and such difficulties were particularly marked for disgust, sadness, and fear.
Along similar lines, and given that no «gold standard» for assessing empathy currently exists, future studies might use multi-method approaches, such as
assessing affective empathy via self - report, behavioral, and physiological outcome measures collected from the same individuals.
IQ was not a significant predictor
of affective empathy for any of the emotions, all standardised βs < 0.23, ps > 0.100, indicating that the findings were not influenced by group differences in IQ.
When assessing for potential confounds,
affective empathy for sadness, r = 0.40, p < 0.001, fear, r = 0.35, p = 0.002, and disgust, r = 0.36, p = 0.001, were positively correlated with IQ.
Indeed, we acknowledge that the present findings may be considered surprising given previous work showing that empathy deficits are more pronounced in those with CD and elevated CU traits than those with lower levels of CU traits (Jones et al. 2010; Schwenck et al. 2012) and theories predicting that
affective empathy deficits are uniquely related to CU traits (Blair 2005, 2013).
It has also been shown that individuals high in CU traits exhibit greater impairments
in affective empathy than those with low levels of CU traits, particularly for sadness (e.g., de Wied et al. 2012; Schwenck et al. 2012).
In an attempt to address this issue, we also treated CU traits as a dimensional measure by testing for correlations between CU traits and EA, emotion recognition, and
affective empathy within the CD group.
There were significant positive correlations between total IRI score and both overall EA, r = 0.23, p = 0.045, and
overall affective empathy, r = 0.54, p < 0.001.
Shared emotional response, or
affective empathy, occurs when an individual shares another person's emotions.
Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy: «
Affective empathy» refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others» emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another's fear or anxiety.
But
affective empathy is the ability to experience and internalise other people's emotions.
Put simply, cognitive empathy is the ability to predict how another person will feel and
affective empathy is sharing the emotional experience.
One area to change behaviour might be to teach trolls to become more empathic, in particular, targeting their low levels of
affective empathy.
Looking at outcome areas, twenty - one of the reports were concerned with subjects» scores on measures of cognitive and / or
affective empathy.
Robert Eres et al. at Monash University (2015) used voxel - based morphometry (VBM) to demonstrate that people with high scores for
affective empathy had greater gray matter density in the insula, while those with high scores for cognitive empathy had greater density in the midcingulate cortex and adjacent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (MCC / dmPFC).
For the children rated high on CU traits at baseline, this novel treatment significantly improved their levels of
affective empathy, and decreased conduct problem behavior, in comparison to standard PMT.
First, CU traits are related to empathy deficits, particularly impairments in sharing in another's feelings (i.e.,
affective empathy)[23, 24].
Compared with uninvolved adolescents, traditional, cyber and mixed bullies had lower levels of academic variables; traditional and mixed victims had higher levels of emotional problems and
affective empathy; and mixed bully - victims had lower levels of both academic and socio - emotional variables.
Participants watched films of actors recalling happy, sad, surprised, angry, disgusted or fearful autobiographical experiences and provided continuous ratings of emotional intensity (assessing EA), as well as naming the emotion (recognition) and reporting the emotion they experienced themselves (
affective empathy).
Taken together, it is evident that findings related to both cognitive empathy / emotion recognition and
affective empathy in youths with DBDs have been inconsistent across studies.
These results extend prior research by demonstrating
affective empathy and emotion recognition deficits in adolescents with CD using a more ecologically - valid task, and challenge the view that affective empathy deficits are specific to CD / CU +.
Studies employing questionnaire measures have consistently demonstrated lower levels of both cognitive and
affective empathy in children and adolescents with DBDs relative to healthy controls (e.g., Anastassiou - Hadjicharalambous and Warden 2008; Cheng et al. 2012; Cohen and Strayer 1996; Jolliffe and Farrington 2004).
In order to establish the validity of the EA task, we tested for associations between the measures of interest (EA, emotion recognition, and
affective empathy) and total IRI scores, as well as the perspective - taking, fantasy, empathic concern, and personal distress subscales.
Participants with CD also showed
affective empathy deficits for sadness, fear, and disgust relative to controls, all ps < 0.010, rs ≥ 0.33, whereas the CD / CU + and CD / CU - subgroups did not differ in affective empathy.