The relationship between trait empathy and memory formation for social vs. non-social information

Abstract

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 and affective aspects of empathy, we assumed that cognitive empathy would be positively associated with general memory performance, while affective empathy, due to enhanced other-related emotional reactions, would be related to a relative memory advantage for information of social as compared to non-social relevance.

Methods: We investigated in young healthy participants the relationship between dispositional cognitive and affective empathy, as measured by Davis' Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113-126, 1983), and memory formation for stimuli (numbers presented in a lottery choice task) that could be encoded in either a social (other-related) or a non-social (self-related) way within the task.

Results: Cognitive empathy, specifically perspective taking, correlated with overall memory performance (regardless of encoding condition), while affective empathy, specifically empathic personal distress, predicted differential memory for socially vs. non-socially encoded information.

Conclusion: Both cognitive and affective empathy are associated with memory formation, but in different ways, depending on the social nature of the memory content. These results open new and so far widely neglected avenues of psychological research on the relationship between social and cognitive skills.

Keywords: Affective empathy; Cognitive empathy; Personal distress; Perspective taking; Social memory.

Figure 1

Example of a lottery choice slide presented during memory encoding. Each circle represents a lottery, which could have a financial gain (positive numbers on green part of a circle) or a financial loss (negative numbers on red part of a circle) as an outcome. A choice had to be made which of the two lotteries would actually be played. In half of the trials, the financial gain or loss of the lottery played was assigned to the participant (non-social encoding condition), in the other half to another person in need (social encoding condition; see text, for details). In an active choice condition, participants selected the lottery to be played themselves, while in a passive choice condition, the computer made the choice randomly. (A slide in the beginning of each trial announced the respective experimental condition of the trial, i.e. whether it was social vs. nonsocial and whether it was active or passive). After the choice had been made, the chosen lottery was marked, and finally the outcome of both lotteries was shown. Memory for all numbers presented in the lottery task was assessed in a subsequent recognition memory test. During performance of the lottery choice task, participants were not aware that a recognition memory test for the numbers would follow.

Figure 2

Relationship between empathy and memory performance (difference hit rate – false alarm rate). (a) Perspective Taking correlated with overall memory performance (p < 0.001), (b) while Personal Distress correlated with differential memory for socially vs. non-socially encoded numbers (difference social memory – non-social memory, p = 0.025).