Social brain
How are empathy and anxiety connected in the brain?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Empathy and anxiety are not directly linked, but instead connect through a shared tendency to worry and ruminate, which shows up as prolonged brain activity in emotional processing networks.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Cognitive traits, such as creative thinking and the indirect link between empathy and anxiety, are reflected in specific patterns of communication between frontoparietal and default mode networks.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Individual differences in social empathy are reflected in the magnitude of TPJ activation during the processing of socioemotional stimuli, such as looking at fearful faces.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Socioemotional processing and mentalizing depend on distributed networks; while empathy correlates with TPJ activation, traits like anxiety and worry correlate with prolonged activation in different nodes like the insula and medial prefrontal cortex.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Event-related fMRI of fearful vs neutral faces; empathy and anxiety as continuous predictors
- N
- N=49 · 55 recruited; 6 excluded for incomplete behavioral/MRI data
- Population
- Healthy right-handed young adults
- Outcome
- Overlapping fMRI correlates of empathy and anxiety during socioemotional face processing
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How are empathy and anxiety connected in the brain?
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49 participants in the final sample
A total of six participants were excluded from analyses due to incomplete behavioral data ( N = 1), incomplete magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data ( N = 4), and disclosed psychiatric diagnosis following consent ( N = 1), leaving 49 participants in the final sample (28 males, 21 females; Ages 18–33; M age = 22.00, SD = 4.04).
30 Fear trials
This task employed an event-related design, during which face stimuli were presented for 4 s in a pseudo-random order (Fear trials N = 30, Neutral trials N = 12).
Key findings
Although empathy and anxiety were not directly correlated behaviorally, they were indirectly linked through worry. Neuroimaging revealed that higher empathy was associated with greater temporoparietal junction activity when looking at fearful faces, whereas higher anxiety and worry were associated with prolonged insula and medial prefrontal cortex activity during neutral trials. Furthermore, people with high levels of anxiety, worry, and rumination showed decreased activation in frontoparietal attentional networks, suggesting poorer top-down control over emotional processing.
Methodology
Researchers scanned the brains of 49 healthy young adults using functional MRI while they viewed fearful and neutral faces and rated how negative the images made them feel. The participants also completed self-report questionnaires measuring their levels of empathy, anxiety, worry, and rumination. The study analyzed blood oxygen level-dependent signals in key brain regions to see how these traits changed brain activation and communication.
Limitations
This study is correlational and cannot prove that worry or rumination causally connects empathy to anxiety. Additionally, the sample was limited to psychologically healthy young adults, meaning the findings might not apply to clinical populations with diagnosed anxiety or empathy-related disorders. The researchers also relied entirely on self-report questionnaires to measure traits, which can be prone to subjective bias. Finally, the analysis did not explore how gender differences might affect these neural relationships.
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