Distinguishing the relationship between different aspects of empathic responding as a function of psychopathic, autistic, and anxious traits

Abstract Although deficits in cognitive and emotional empathy are associated with specific developmental and neurological disorders, such as autism and psychopathy, little is known about the relationship between individual differences in psychopathic, autistic, and anxious traits, and behavioral measures of cognitive empathy, empathic concern, and affective sharing. Particularly, investigations of empathy rarely consider anxiety, or distinguish between different components of emotional empathy. Presently, healthy adults completed trait questionnaire measures and the Multifaceted Empathy Test, a performance-based task tapping cognitive empathy and multiple aspects of emotional empathy elicited by emotionally-charged realistic images. Heightened coldhearted psychopathic traits were associated with reduced empathic concern and affective sharing in response to affective images, and were unrelated to cognitive empathy performance. As expected, autistic traits were not associated with emotional empathy. Increased trait anxiety was linked to greater affective sharing, and arousal in particular, but this was driven by arousal elicited by contextual rather than social aspects of the stimuli. Thus, while coldhearted psychopathic traits appear to disrupt empathic processes thought to motivate altruistic behaviors, trait anxiety may influence subjective affective experience without instilling greater emotional empathy.