title: Empathy costs: Negative emotional bias in high empathisers.
abstract: Excessive empathy has been associated with compassion fatigue in health professionals and caregivers. We investigated an effect of empathy on emotion processing in 137 healthy individuals of both sexes. We tested a hypothesis that high empathy may underlie increased sensitivity to negative emotion recognition which may interact with gender. Facial emotion stimuli comprised happy, angry, fearful, and sad faces presented at different intensities (mild and prototypical) and different durations (500ms and 2000ms). The parameters of emotion processing were represented by discrimination accuracy, response bias and reaction time. We found that higher empathy was associated with better recognition of all emotions. We also demonstrated that higher empathy was associated with response bias towards sad and fearful faces. The reaction time analysis revealed that higher empathy in females was associated with faster (compared with males) recognition of mildly sad faces of brief duration. We conclude that although empathic abilities were providing for advantages in recognition of all facial emotional expressions, the bias towards emotional negativity may potentially carry a risk for empathic distress.
authors.affiliation: Ilia State University, Cholokashvili Avenue 3/5, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia.
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Chikovani
authors.affiliation: Ilia State University, Cholokashvili Avenue 3/5, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia.
authors.forename: Lasha
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Babuadze
authors.affiliation: Ilia State University, Cholokashvili Avenue 3/5, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia.
authors.forename: Nino
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Iashvili
authors.affiliation: Ilia State University, Cholokashvili Avenue 3/5, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia.
authors.forename: Tamar
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gvalia
authors.affiliation: Ilia State University, Cholokashvili Avenue 3/5, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia; King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, PO Box 69, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8 AF, UK. Electronic address: simon.2.surguladze@kcl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Surguladze
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Empathy; Facial expressions; Reaction time; Response bias; Sex effect