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

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.