Abstract
In order to truly empathise with another, we need to recognise and understand how they feel. Perception-action models of empathy predict that attending to another's emotion will spontaneously activate the observer's own conceptual knowledge for the state, but it is unclear how this activation is related to facial mimicry, trait empathy, or attention to emotion more generally. In the current study, participants did spontaneously encode background facial expressions at a conceptual level even though they were irrelevant to the task (the Emostroop effect; Preston & Stansfield, 2008), but this encoding was not associated with mimicry of the faces, trait empathy, the ability to resolve competing semantic representations (Colour-naming Stroop task), or the tendency to be distracted by emotional information more generally (Intrusive Cognitions task). Our results suggest that trait empathy increases attention to emotional information, but conceptual encoding occurs across individuals as a natural consequence of attended perception.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 119-128 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Cognition and Emotion |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2012 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Correspondence should be addressed to: Alicia Hofelich, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. E-mail: ajhof@umich.edu Research was funded by a grant from the Rackham Graduate School to AJH and from the University of Michigan to SDP. The authors thank Brent Stansfield for input on the task, design and analysis. Amy Ross, Brianna Miller, Joshua Carp, and Bhargavi Sampath helped with the collection and pre-processing of data.
Keywords
- Emotion
- Empathy
- Facial expression
- Individual differences
- Stroop