BACKGROUND To navigate successfully through their complex social environment, humans need both empathic and mnemonic skills. Little is known on how these two types of psychological abilities relate to each other in humans. Although initial clinical findings suggest a positive association, systematic investigations in healthy subject samples have not yet been performed. Differentiating cognitive...

OBJECTIVE To examine relationships between empathy, illness concepts, sibling relationship variables, and psychological adjustment among siblings of children with cancer. METHODS Participants were 29 siblings and 14 children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myelocytic leukemia, or non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Data included self- and parent-report questionnaires completed during a...

The sharing behavior o f 66 fourth-grade students was observed in two different experimental situations: (a) in the experimenter's presence (visible sharing), and (b) anonymously (invisible sharing). In addition, measures o f empathy and dependency were given to each child. For girls some support was found for a positive relationship between empathy and sharing in both o f the experimental cond...

Although empathy is crucial for successful social interactions, excessive sharing of others' negative emotions may be maladaptive and constitute a source of burnout. To investigate functional neural plasticity underlying the augmentation of empathy and to test the counteracting potential of compassion, one group of participants was first trained in empathic resonance and subsequently in compass...

How does race affect the human ability to share and respond to the suffering of others? Recent evidence provides novel insight into how and why race alters empathic neural response.

Empathy involves affective, cognitive, and emotion regulative components. The affective component relies on the sharing of emotional states with others and is discussed here in relation to the human Mirror System. On the other hand, the cognitive component is related to understanding the mental states of others and draws upon literature surrounding Theory of Mind (ToM). The final component, emo...

Little is known about how emotion recognition and empathy jointly operate in youth growing up in contexts defined by persistent adversity. We investigated whether adversity exposure in two groups of youth was associated with reduced empathy and whether deficits in emotion recognition mediated this association. Foster, rural poor, and comparison youth from Swaziland, Africa identified emotional ...

This research examines the role of trait empathy in emotional contagion through non-social targets-art objects. Studies 1a and 1b showed that high- (compared to low-) empathy individuals are more likely to infer an artist's emotions based on the emotional valence of the artwork and, as a result, are more likely to experience the respective emotions themselves. Studies 2a and 2b experimentally m...

The clinician-patient relationship is more intense in the field of psychiatry than in other specialities of medicine. In this context, an understanding of the personality assets and liabilities of a psychiatrist takes on special significance. In the present comparative cross-sectional study, the personality profile, positive mental health characteristics and empathy were studied in two groups o...