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Aberrant cognitive empathy in individuals with elevated social anxiety and regulation with emotional working memory training
Kade, Saif A. du Toit, Simone A. Danielson, Craig T. Schweizer, Susanne Morrison, Amanda S. Ong, Desmond C. Prasad, Ashni Holder, Lauren J. Han, Jin Torok, Michelle
Kade, Saif A.
du Toit, Simone A.
Danielson, Craig T.
Schweizer, Susanne
Morrison, Amanda S.
Ong, Desmond C.
Prasad, Ashni
Holder, Lauren J.
Han, Jin
Torok, Michelle
Abstract
Social anxiety may disrupt the empathic process, and well-regulated empathy is critical for navigating the social world. Two studies aimed to further understand empathy in the context of social anxiety. Study 1 compared individuals with elevated or normative social anxiety on a measure assessing cognitive and affective empathy for positive and negative emotions conveyed by other people (“targets”), completed under social threat. Relative to individuals with normative social anxiety, individuals with elevated social anxiety had greater cognitive empathy and no differences in affective empathy, regardless of emotion type. As greater cognitive empathy can be maladaptive, Study 2 tested whether this could be down-regulated. Individuals with elevated social anxiety underwent emotional working memory training (eWMT) for negative emotional information, or control training (CT). Effects on an empathy measure completed under social threat were assessed. Cognitive empathy for negative emotions decreased following eWMT but not CT, and this was only evident for those with higher pre-training working memory capacity. Cognitive empathy for positive emotions and affective empathy were not affected. Overall, social anxiety is associated with aberrant elevated cognitive empathy for negative and positive emotions, and the deviation in cognitive empathy for negative emotions can be regulated with eWMT for certain individuals.
Keywords
social anxiety, empathy, working memory training, emotional working memory training, emotion
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Cognition and Emotion
Book
Volume
38
Issue
4
Page Range
605-623
Article Number
ACU Department
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.