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Abstract:
The current symposium sheds light on the dual role of empathy, and explores how different components of empathy may act as protective or risk factors in the context of stress and stress-related disease.
Social abilities, such as empathy, build the foundation of successful human interaction and cooperation. With the growing interconnectedness of countries and people, these skills are becoming increasingly important. This applies on a global scale in dealing with political, economic, and environmental crises, and on the individual level, in mastering the challenges of professional and family life. Despite its clear adaptive nature, some researchers argue that empathy has “a dark side”. Given the constant confrontation with others’ suffering, it can lead to exhaustion and burnout, and bias moral decision-making.
There is the widely-shared view that the multi-faceted concept empathy involves three components. First, it entails a cognitive component, referred to as theory of mind (ToM) or perspective taking, which describes the capacity to understand others’ thoughts, intentions or emotions. Second, it entails an affective component, known as experience sharing or emotion contagion, describing individuals’ tendency to vicariously feel others’ emotional states. Third, empathy involves a motivational component, termed compassion. It describes a sense of care involving the wish for others’ well-being. Although the three components often co-occur, they relate to distinct socio- emotional outcomes. Whereas an increased tendency to react with empathic distress has been associated with higher levels of depression and burnout, compassion has been related to lower levels of depression and burnout, lower stress reactivity, and increased prosocial behavior. Given that individuals can differentially engage specific components of empathy dependent on context and personal goals, this inherent flexibility renders empathy amendable to experimental manipulations and psychological interventions.
In this symposium, we present evidence for the link between different components of empathic processing with stress and stress-associated health outcomes. Hereby, the first three presentations focus on trait differences in empathy and related constructs, while the last presentation reports on the effects of long-term empathy training. In presentation 1, Katja Wingenfeld outlines results on the short-term associations between stress, social exclusion and empathy in patients with borderline personality disorder compared to healthy controls. The next two presenters take more of a long-term perspective. Ruth Marheinecke reports on the health consequences of experiencing psychological repression measures in the former German Democratic Republic, and how these consequences are modulated by interpersonal abilities. The presentation by Christiane Wesarg focuses on the experience of trauma in refugees, emphasizing the role of compassion in whether or not trauma victims develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Lastly, Lara Puhlmann hones in on the effects of empathy-based mental training on levels of the brain derived neurotrophic factor and associated stress system activity in presentation 4. Overall, our symposium highlights the role of empathic abilities in shaping how humans deal with psychosocially stressful experiences, both benign and traumatic in nature.
