How an imbalance in empathy types relates to mental health
An imbalance between understanding others' emotions and sharing them is linked to distinct mental health symptoms, often driven by how strongly we react to emotions.
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Empathic disequilibrium as a new framework for understanding individual differences in psychopathology
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How an imbalance in empathy types relates to mental health
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425 participants were initially recruited
To ensure sufficient statistical power is achieved, 425 participants (73.53% females, aged 18–72) were recruited from the general population through advertisements placed on social media during October and November 2020.
17 participants were excluded for failing attention checks
Seventeen participants who did not pass two or more attention checks were excluded from the analyses leaving a total of 408 participants.
What they did
Researchers measured different empathy components, emotional reactivity, and psychological symptoms in 408 adults recruited from the general population using online questionnaires. They calculated the degree of imbalance between participants' cognitive empathy (understanding emotions) and emotional empathy (sharing emotions) to see how this imbalance predicts traits like anxiety, depression, and autism. To ensure the reliability of their findings, they split the sample into a discovery group of 123 participants and a replication group of 285 participants.
What they found
Individuals with emotional-empathy dominance (feeling emotions more than understanding them) showed higher anxiety and social autistic traits, both of which were mediated by heightened emotional reactivity. In contrast, those with cognitive-empathy dominance (intellectually understanding emotions more than feeling them) reported higher depressive symptoms, psychopathic tendencies, and non-social autistic traits. The balance between empathy components was a stronger predictor of these mental health profiles than overall empathy levels.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because this study relied on a cross-sectional design, it cannot prove whether empathy imbalances cause psychological symptoms or if those symptoms cause the imbalance. The data was gathered entirely through self-report measures, which assess participants' self-perceptions rather than their objective empathic skills in real-world scenarios. Additionally, the sample was highly skewed toward female participants, limiting the generalizability of the sex differences found, and the findings may not perfectly translate to individuals with clinical diagnoses.
Key terms
- cognitive empathy
- The intellectual capacity to recognize, identify, and understand another person's emotional state.
- emotional empathy
- The visceral capacity to share, feel, and experience the emotions of another person.
- empathic disequilibrium
- An intra-individual imbalance where a person has significantly unequal capacities for cognitive versus emotional empathy.
- emotional reactivity
- The intensity, speed, and duration with which a person experiences and recovers from emotional arousal.
- transdiagnostic approach
- An approach to mental health that examines shared psychological processes across multiple clinical diagnoses instead of treating each disorder in isolation.
- cross-sectional study
- A study design that analyzes data collected from a population at a single point in time, preventing conclusions about cause and effect.
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How is 'empathic disequilibrium' defined within this study's framework?
Common questions
Does having an empathy imbalance mean someone has a psychological disorder?
No. The researchers found that empathic disequilibrium is normally distributed in the general population, meaning many healthy people experience slight imbalances without having a clinical disorder.
Why would high cognitive empathy combined with low emotional empathy link to depression?
The authors suggest that logically understanding what other people are feeling without being able to emotionally connect with them might foster feelings of loneliness and emptiness, which are core features of depression.
How does emotional reactivity explain the link between empathy and anxiety?
For individuals who feel others' emotions intensely but struggle to logically comprehend them, high emotional reactivity acts as the underlying mechanism that translates this imbalance into heightened anxiety.
Did the study observe any differences between men and women?
Yes. On average, male participants showed a slight tendency toward cognitive-empathy dominance, whereas female participants tended to exhibit a more even balance between emotional and cognitive empathy.
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