Undergraduate Research Symposium April 26, 2014 DISSOCIATING COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE EMPATHY W. Jake Thompson Advisor: Dr. Evangelia G. Chrysikou Department of Psychology University of Kansas
¡ Empathy: the ability to (a) correctly recognize the emotions of others, and (b) respond in an emotionally appropriate way to different situations (Hooker et al., 2010). § Cognitive Empathy: perspective taking, emotion recognition, placing oneself emotionally in a situation § Affective Empathy: personal distress, affective responsiveness, emotional contagion WHAT IS EMPATHY?
¡ Research on empathy in social situations indicates that there is a dissociation between these two processes (Masten et al., 2010). ¡ Empathy is not an automatic process, but requires significant cognitive resources (De Lissnyder et al., 2012). PREVIOUS RESEARCH
¡ Rumination hurts performance on processes that require cognitive flexibility such as empathy (Altamirano et al., 2010). ¡ The cognitive inflexibility and prevalence of rumination in depression have been closely associated with deficits in empathic processing that are associated with the disorder (Thoma et al., 2011). EMPATHY AND DEPRESSION
¡ The present study aims to build on past findings by exploring the extent to which ruminative thought in depression impacts an individual’s empathic abilities. ¡ We aim to: 1. Develop a behavioral measure of affective empathy. 2. Explore differences in empathic abilities within the context of major depressive disorder. CURRENT STUDY
¡ Emotional Load: “Think about a time when you were sad.” ¡ Non-Emotional Load: “Think about how one would normally make breakfast.” ¡ No Load: Straight into tasks. RUMINATION MANIPULATION
¡ Can participants accurately identify emotions? ¡ Reading the Mind in the Eyes (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). ¡ Performance evaluated by accuracy and reaction time. BEHAVIORAL MEASURE: COGNITIVE EMPATHY
¡ Do participants have an affective reaction to emotional stimuli? ¡ Lexical Decision Task § Emotional Prime: Happy, Sad, or Neutral Face. § Target: Positive, Negative, or Non-word. § High affective empathy should show greater priming effects. BEHAVIORAL MEASURE: AFFECTIVE EMPATHY
¡ Normally eyes see two slightly different but very similar images. ¡ When presented with very different images, the brain is unable to combine them, and the images alter between dominant and suppressed. BINOCULAR RIVALRY
¡ We found a significant interaction between depression and rumination/mood condition. § Rumination only had a significant effect on the depressed individuals. § Depression only had a significant effect on the “No Load” rumination condition. ¡ There was a significant difference between depressed and healthy participants within rumination conditions. ¡ We also found that rumination manipulation affected controls and depressed individuals differently. RESULTS – AFFECTIVE EMPATHY
ALL WORDS Interaction: F(2,48) = 4.13, p = .02 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 No Load Breakfast Emotional Reaction Time (ms) Controls Depressed p = .02 p = .14
RESULTS – COGNITIVE EMPATHY ¡ We found a marginally significant interaction between depression and rumination, and there were no significant main effects. § Depression once again only had a significant effect in the “No Load” condition, and rumination only had an effect for depressed individuals. § However, this relationship was not as strong as what was seen on the Lexical Decision task.
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 No Load Breakfast Emotional Reaction Time (ms) Controls Depressed READING THE MIND IN THE EYES Interaction: F(2,48) = 2.92, p = .06 p = .02
READING THE MIND IN THE EYES Interaction: F(2,48) = 2.92, p = .06 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 Controls Depressed Reaction Time (ms) No Load Breakfast Emotional p = .04 Non-Significant
¡ A MANOVA was conducted on the 5 subscales of the EAI. ¡ The rumination condition did not show an effect on responses. ¡ Depression did show a significant effect on responses to several subscales. EMPATHY ASSESSMENT INDEX
¡ Our findings support a dissociation between affective and cognitive empathy in depression during rumination on negative events. ¡ The negative rumination only had an effect on depressed individuals, and specifically affected the response to happy words in the affective empathy task. ¡ The differences on cognitive empathy were small, and only marginally significant. ¡ Findings from self-reports support the behavioral findings. CONCLUSIONS
This research was supported by the Center for Undergraduate Research, as well as the University Honors Program. A special thanks to Dr. Chrysikou and the Chrysikou Lab for their support and guidance throughout the project. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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