ArticleScientific reports2023
Empathy moderates the relationship between cognitive load and prosocial behaviour.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Empathy as a Mediator of the Relation between Peer Influence and Prosocial Behavior in Adolescence: A Meta-Analysis.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2025Pooled it
- How Verbal Intelligence Predicts Emotional Stability: The Moderating Role of Empathy.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Synergy between resilience and empathy in health sciences students: a cross-sectional study.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- The Role of Square Dancing in Psychological Capital: Evidence from a Large Cross-Sequential Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Divergent Neural Mechanisms of Self-Concerned and Prosocial Decision-Making Under High and Low Cognitive Loads.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Do goats exhibit prosocial motivation? Insights from a novel food-giving paradigm.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Relative social status alters the synchrony of attribute integration in altruistic decisions.iScience · 2025Article
- Topic modelling and sentiment analysis during COVID-19 revealed emotions changes for public health.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A Systematic Review of the Definition, Measurement, and Associated Factors of Pandemic Fatigue.China CDC weekly · 2024Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Cognitive load reduces both empathy and prosocial behaviour. However, studies demonstrating these effects have induced cognitive load in a temporally limited, artificial manner that fails to capture real-world cognitive load. Drawing from cognitive load theory, we investigated whether naturally occurring cognitive load from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic moderated the relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour (operationalised as support for public health measures). This large study in an Australian sample (N = 600) identified negative relationships between pandemic fatigue, empathy for people vulnerable to COVID-19, and prosocial behaviour, and a positive relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour. Additionally, we found that the negative effect of the pandemic on prosocial behaviour depended on empathy for vulnerable others, with pandemic fatigue's effects lowest for those with the highest empathy. These findings highlight the interrelationships of cognitive load and empathy, and the potential value of eliciting empathy to ease the impact of real-world cognitive load on prosocial behaviour.
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Registered trials
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.