ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2021
Adaptive Empathy: Empathic Response Selection as a Dynamic, Feedback-Based Learning Process.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- Empathy dimensions and patient-centered care during dental training: a cross-sectional study.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- How social media shapes urban image and conative tourism behaviour among Chinese Generation Z: an extended SOR model.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Disrupted self-referential processing and empathy-based interventions in mental disorders: neural mechanisms, cognitive biases, and therapeutic integration.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- A dual-fMRI investigation of interpersonal emotion regulation: Predicting strategy selection and implementation success from effective brain connectivity.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The Body Can Balance the Score: Using a Somatic Self-Care Intervention to Support Well-Being and Promote Healing.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- IKEA effect and empathy for robots: Can assembly strengthen human-agent relationships?PloS one · 2025Article
- Experience and advice consequences shape information sharing strategies.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Adaptive empathic response selection is sensitive to multiple dimensions of social interaction.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- The Reward-Related Shift of Emotional Contagion from the Observer's Perspective Correlates to Their Intimacy with the Expresser.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Do positive emotions prompt people to be more authentic? The mediation effect of gratitude and empathy dimensions on the relationship between humility state and perceived false self.Current issues in personality psychology · 2023Article
- Inter-brain plasticity underlies empathic learning in social interactions.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Biobehavioural Synchrony in Musculoskeletal Care.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Empathy allows us to respond to the emotional state of another person. Considering that an empathic interaction may last beyond the initial response, learning mechanisms may be involved in dynamic adaptation of the reaction to the changing emotional state of the other person. However, traditionally, empathy is assessed through sets of isolated reactions to another's distress. Here we address this gap by focusing on adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to learn and adjust one's empathic responses based on feedback. For this purpose, we designed a novel paradigm of associative learning in which participants chose one of two empathic strategies (reappraisal or distraction) to attenuate the distress of a target person, where one strategy had a higher probability of relieving distress. After each choice, participants received feedback about the success of their chosen strategy in relieving the target person's distress, which they could use to inform their future decisions. The results show that the participants made more accurate choices in the adaptive empathy condition than in a non-social control condition, pointing to an advantage for learning from social feedback. We found a correlation between adaptive empathy and a trait measure of cognitive empathy. These findings indicate that the ability to learn about the effectiveness of empathic responses may benefit from incorporating mentalizing abilities. Our findings provide a lab-based model for studying adaptive empathy and point to the potential contribution of learning theory to enhancing our understanding of the dynamic nature of empathy.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.