Understanding Individual Variation in Empathy and Empathy Enhancement, 2022-2023

Banissy, Michael and Edgar, Chris and Bird, Geoff (2025). Understanding Individual Variation in Empathy and Empathy Enhancement, 2022-2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857581

During our daily social interactions, observing others' experiences (e.g. emotion, sensation) can induce a similar experience of our own. When the experience we feel matches that of the person we are interacting with (e.g. feeling sad because you see your friend is sad), we are said to be empathising with them. Building a scientific understanding of how we empathise with others is extremely important, as empathy plays a key role in supporting social relationships that are important for health and well-being.

We now know that we empathise with others in various ways. Recent research results have shown that our ability to mentally distinguish between and focus on the experiences of ourselves and others - our 'self-other control' - plays a key role in engaging the psychological systems that allow us to experience empathy. Moreover, it has been shown that it is possible to improve self-other control using behavioural training and that in doing so, we can enhance the ability to empathise with others. These findings indicate that self-other control modulation may be a promising tool to support empathy skills, which offers the potential for developing intervention approaches in groups where improving empathy would be useful.

This project aimed to address many open questions regarding how our self-other control mediates our ability to empathise with others. In particular, Can we train individuals' self-other control to enhance their performance across various empathy measures (including questionnaires and behavioural tests)? Will certain types of individuals be more susceptible to empathy-enhancement procedures than others? Can we stimulate certain parts of the brain to boost empathy?

Data description (abstract)

Previous work has shown that enhancing self-other control (our ability to differentiate and focus on our own and others' experiences) through behavioural training shows promise in improving empathy. Prior work in this domain has focussed on questionnaire and sensorimotor-based (viewing physically painful images) measures of empathy. We know less about the potential for self-other training to benefit empathy when seeing emotive stories or whether specific individuals are more susceptible to empathy-enhancement procedures than others. Here, multiple datasets were collected: 1) the development of a new empathy task that involved the collection of emotive stories from participants who rated their own emotions when sharing the stories and completed measures of psychological traits (e.g., personality, trait emotional intelligence) via online testing - data was collected from both those who gave emotive stories and observers who rated affect in the stimuli, 2) behavioural investigations (online and in-person experimental sessions) of how self-other training impacted empathy performance on the newly developed emotional story based empathy task, 3) investigation of how individual differences in psychological traits (e.g., alexithymia, trait emotional intelligence) contributed to differences in the outcomes of self-other training on empathic performance (online testing), and 4) neuroscience investigation to determine how stimulating a region of the brain thought to contribute self-other processing (the right temporo-parietal junction) impacted empathy task performance when combined with self-other training (in person experimental sessions). Participants across all studies were recruited via opportunistic sampling methods (either through academic institutions or online platforms) with an age range of 18-65 years old. Key findings include that self-other control training can modulate performance on emotional story-based empathy tasks, that the benefits of self-other control on empathy may relate to a decrease in experiencing personal distress, and that individual differences in aspects of alexithymia contribute to outcomes of self-other training on empathy performance.

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