Dispositional Perspective-Taking and Empathic Concern Modulate the Impact of Cognitive Load on Empathy for Facial Emotions

Abstract

Meeting other people involves the importance to share their experiences and to understand their perspectives or, more simply, to empathize with them. Empathy research distinguishes two main dimensions of empathy, the affective sharing and the cognitive understanding. In the present study, we focus on the impact of cognitive load on empathy to pain, fear, happiness, and neutral facial emotions. Participants had to judge the intensity of the emotion when looking to facial expressions (empathize group), or with an additional eight-digit memory task (cognitive load group). While we assumed that cognitive load would reduce empathy, inconsistently with previous findings, our results did not show any significant effect of group. Interestingly, regression analyses showed that perspective-taking and empathic concern were positively related to pain, fear, and happiness ratings within the cognitive load group. These results reveal that when judging empathy under high cognitive load, dispositional empathic concern and perspective-taking could allow individuals to override the supposed deleterious cognitive load effect on empathy.