title: 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.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  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.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Münster, Fliednerstr. 21, 48149 Münster, Germany ; Division of Mind and Brain Research, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Mitte, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors: Ullrich
authors: U
authors: Wagner
authors: Division of Mind and Brain Research, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Mitte, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors: Lisa
authors: L
authors: Handke
authors: Division of Mind and Brain Research, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Mitte, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors: Henrik
authors: H
authors: Walter
keywords: Affective empathy; Cognitive empathy; Personal distress; Perspective taking; Social memory