ArticleSchizophrenia research2012
How specific are emotional deficits? A comparison of empathic abilities in schizophrenia, bipolar and depressed patients.
Article in Schizophrenia research, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Facial emotion recognition deficits in bipolar disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2026Pooled it
- Overlapping and specific neural correlates for empathizing, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing: A coordinate-based meta-analytic study.Human brain mapping · 2021Pooled it
- Meta-analysis of emotion recognition deficits in major depressive disorder.Psychological medicine · 2015Pooled it
- Components of Empathy in Children: Factor Structure of the Empathy Quotient for Children (EQ-C).Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Reduced categorical congruence of cognitive and affective empathy in persons with psychotic disorders.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Sex Differences in Pain Contagion Determined by the Balance of Oxytocin and Corticosterone in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Rodents.Neuroscience bulletin · 2025Article
- Prosocial Helping Behavior: Conceptual Issues and Neural Mechanisms.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Sex-Differential Neural Circuits and Behavioral Responses for Empathy.Neuroscience bulletin · 2025Article
- Emotional awareness for self and others and empathic abilities in clinical depression during acute illness and recovery.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Empathic Accuracy Task: Indian Adaptation and Validation.Indian journal of psychological medicine · 2023Article
- Moving beyond the lab: investigating empathy through the Empirical 5E approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Altered empathy-related resting-state functional connectivity in patients with bipolar disorder.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2022Article
- Social Factors Predict Distress Development in Adults With Pre-existing Mental Disorders During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Dynamic face processing impairments are associated with cognitive and positive psychotic symptoms across psychiatric disorders.NPJ schizophrenia · 2021Article
- Do Social Cognition Deficits Recover with Abstinence in Alcohol-Dependent Patients?Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research · 2021Article
- Measuring Emotional Awareness in Patients With Schizophrenia and Schizoaffective Disorders.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Religiosity and Psychotic Ideation in Stable Schizophrenia: A Role for Empathic Perspective-Taking.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- A Short Empathy Paradigm to Assess Empathic Deficits in Schizophrenia.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Depressive symptoms in parents are associated with reduced empathy toward their young children.PloS one · 2020Article
- Connectivity of the Frontal Cortical Oscillatory Dynamics Underlying Inhibitory Control During a Go/No-Go Task as a Predictive Biomarker in Major Depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Empathy is a rather elaborated human ability and several recent studies highlight significant impairments in patients suffering from psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression. Therefore, the present study aimed at comparing behavioral empathy performance in schizophrenia, bipolar and depressed patients with healthy controls. All subjects performed three tasks tapping the core components of empathy: emotion recognition, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Groups were matched for age, gender, and verbal intelligence. Data analysis revealed three main findings: First, schizophrenia patients showed the strongest impairment in empathic performance followed by bipolar patients while depressed patients performed similar to controls in most tasks, except for affective responsiveness. Second, a significant association between clinical characteristics and empathy performance was only apparent in depression, indicating worse affective responsiveness with stronger symptom severity and longer duration of illness. Third, self-report data indicate that particularly bipolar patients describe themselves as less empathic, reporting less empathic concern and less perspective taking. Taken together, this study constitutes the first approach to directly compare specificity of empathic deficits in severe psychiatric disorders. Our results suggest disorder-specific impairments in emotional competencies that enable better characterization of the patient groups investigated and indicate different psychotherapeutic interventions.
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