Empathic concern and personal distress are empathic responses that may result when observing someone in discomfort. Even though these empathic responses have received much attention in past research, it is still unclear which conditions contribute to their respective experience. Hence, the main goal of this study was to examine if dispositional empathic traits or rather situational variables are more likely to evoke empathic concern and personal distress and how the two empathic responses influence motor responses. We presented pictures of persons in psychological, physical, or no pain with matched descriptions of situations that promoted an other-focused state. Approach-avoidance movements were demanded by a subsequently presented tone. While psychological pain led to more empathic concern, physical pain led to higher ratings of personal distress. Linear mixed-effects modelling analysis further revealed that situational factors, such as the type of pain but also the affect experienced by the participants before the experiment predicted the two empathic responses, whereas dispositional empathic traits had no significant influence. In addition, the more intensely the empathic responses were experienced, the faster were movements initiated, presumably reflecting an effect of arousal. Overall, the present study advances our understanding of empathic responses to people in need and provides novel methodological tools to effectively manipulate and analyze empathic concern and personal distress in future research.

Introduction

When observing another person in distress, as in an emergency situation, an empathic response might be triggered that ultimately motivates us to act in a certain way (e.g., rush to help). Generally, the notion of empathy refers to our understanding and responding to the affective state of another person [1]. Often it is defined as the similarity between the emotional states of the observer and a target person, with the observer knowing that the target is the source of her or his own feelings [2,3,4]. While there is no agreed-upon definition, empathy is thought of as a multi-dimensional concept that encompasses different empathic phenomena [5]. The distinction between affective and cognitive empathy has largely prevailed in empathy research [6]. On the one hand, affective empathy is thought to refer to the experience of an affective state congruent with those of the observed person, including phenomena such as emotional contagion and affective resonance [5,7]. On the other hand, cognitive empathy refers to putting oneself in the shoes of the other, which is thought to depend on the effortful cognitive process of perspective taking [5,8], which some authors however consider a precursor or precondition of empathy [9]. Moreover, it is further important to distinguish between trait and state empathy, the former relating to a person’s general ability to show empathy and the latter to the transient empathic responses triggered in a specific situation.

Of special importance for the present work are two affective empathy-related concepts that take into account both the role of the self-other distinction in empathy [2,3] and the motivational consequences of empathy. These concepts are empathic concern and personal distress ([3,9,10,11]; for a critical evaluation of these concepts in relation to empathy, see [12]). Empathic concern, often also called sympathy, is an other-focused emotional response of sorrow or concern that results from the comprehension of the target’s emotional state but differs from it [4,5,13]. Personal distress is a self-focused aversive response that results from the apprehension of another’s distress and is similar to the target’s state (e.g., [4,9]). Importantly, the observer’s experience of such a specific empathic response is assumed to have certain motivational consequences on behaviour. For instance, it has been proposed that empathic concern leads to an altruistic motivation and helping behaviour in order to reduce the other’s suffering, whereas personal distress leads to an egoistic motivation to reduce the own unpleasant feelings [14,15]. Crucially, there appears to be a link between empathy and approach- and avoidance related motivations, the latter being related to the triggering of specific actions [5,16]. Thus, situational emotional concern might trigger approach behaviour (e.g., care, helping), whereas personal distress might give rise to avoidance behaviour (e.g., withdrawal).

In contrast to these elaborated conceptual assumptions concerning the two empathic responses, their empirical investigation is scarce until today. Thus, it remains unclear when humans experience more empathic concern and when more personal distress. In this work, it is hypothesized that the two empathic responses are differentially influenced by dispositional empathy and situational factors such as type of the presented pain and the affect experienced by the observer when encountering a person in pain. Moreover, it is unclear whether the altruistic and egoistic motivations underlying empathic concern and personal distress, respectively, differentially impact on behaviour. Here, we assume that such a biasing influence of the two empathic responses on the motor system can be revealed in a movement compatibility task demanding approach-avoidance movements.

Which specific empathic emotion is experienced by an observer in a given situation (situational empathy) is not necessarily strongly related to his or her general tendency to empathise with others in a specific way (dispositional empathy) [9]. More recently, [17] proposed that individual factors in interaction with situational factors determine whether the observation of another in need leads to empathic concern or personal distress. Examples for individual factors are empathic traits, but also abilities of emotion regulation, and the emotional background of the observer (i.e. depressive mood). Situational factors might be the context, the emotion, and the level of arousal induced by the situation. In order to measure situational empathic responses, researchers have frequently used rating scales including various adjectives that are either typically associated with empathic concern (warm, tender, moved, compassionate, sympathetic, soft-hearted) or personal distress (alarmed, upset, worried, disturbed, distressed, troubled, perturbed, grieved) (e.g., [10,18]). In the following, we refer to these rating scales as Empathic Response Scale. The most commonly used instrument to measure individual differences in trait empathy, namely the general disposition to feel empathic concern or personal distress for persons in pain, is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) [19,6].

The few behavioural studies that have investigated the relationship between dispositional and situational empathic responses indicated only modest correlations. Thus, [20] assessed dispositional empathic concern and situational empathic concern in response to the Katie Banks tape that told a story about a girl who had lost her parents and was responsible for her younger siblings [21]. The correlation between dispositional and situational measures was moderate (r = .28). [22] applied the same instruments and a single videotape about deprived children to induce empathy. Again, their results revealed correlations between dispositional empathic concern and situational empathic responses (empathic concern: r = .35, personal distress: r = .24). Finally, using seven sad excerpts of a TV show that participants rated with regard to their experience of empathic concern, [23] found a similar correlation between dispositional and situational empathic concern (r = .26). These results accord with those of a recent meta-analysis that included also numerous unpublished studies [24], reporting a mean effect size of r = 0.35 for the association between dispositional empathic concern and the feeling state of “being moved” that the authors equate with the concept of empathic concern.

The moderate correlations reported above suggest that other factors than just individual differences in dispositional empathy influence situational empathic responses. According to [10], the type of pain is crucial with regard to the specific empathic response elicited. That is, physical pain is assumed to evoke more personal distress in the observer, whereas psychological pain can evoke more personal distress or empathic concern, depending on the focus on the self or the other (see Fig 1) [17,25]. Specifically, a self-focused state, in which one projects oneself into the situation of the target, has been proposed to lead to higher personal distress, whereas an other-focused state, in which one focuses onto the target’s reaction, should lead to higher levels of empathic concern [1,10,26]. In support of this assumption, studies that induced psychological pain by presenting participants short stories such as that about Katie Banks found more personal distress under the instruction to maintain a self-focused state and increased empathic concern under the instruction to direct the focus onto the other [1,27]. A potential limitation of these studies is that they did not investigate the relation between dispositional and situational empathic responses.

The behavioural studies reporting moderate correlations between dispositional and situational empathic responses [20,22,23], did not explicitly control for the self- or other-focus participants adopted during the experiment. Consequently, it cannot be excluded that the focus adopted by participants varied, thereby influencing measures of situational empathic concern and personal distress. Moreover, to our knowledge, only [22] assessed the general tendency for positive and negative affect with the Positive and Negative Affective Schedule (PANAS) [28], even though other researchers [17] proposed that emotions and the arousal induced by a given situation play an important role in triggering empathic responses. For instance, [22] hypothesised that dispositional empathic concern is associated with experiencing both negative and positive dispositional affect because of persons’ general ability to accept their emotions instead of repressing them, whereas dispositional personal distress is associated with dispositional negative affect. However, they found that participants’ general tendency to experience negative affect correlated positively with their dispositional personal distress but not empathic concern. The tendency to experience positive affect, on the other hand, correlated negatively with dispositional personal distress but not with empathic concern. At least to our knowledge, the influence of situational positive and negative affect on the situational empathic responses has not yet been investigated.

Another issue concerns the fact that most studies relied on the spontaneous occurrence of situational empathic concern and personal distress in individuals following the presentation of only a single or very few tapes [20,22] or just a few video excerpts [23]. Given that situational empathy was assessed on so few occasions, it is also possible that the observed correlations are bound by potentially low reliability of the situational empathy score. Thus, it would be interesting to investigate whether the previously reported empathic effects replicate when participants are presented with other scenarios. Related to this point, so far research on empathic responses have not taken into account the variation of social stimuli due to sampling [29], leaving generalizations of findings across stimuli questionable. However, it is now possible to address this issue by conducting statistical analysis using linear mixed-effects (LME) modelling, in which both participants and stimuli are jointly included as random factors (cf. Method section). Together, it appears that the relationship between situational empathic responses and dispositional empathy is in need of further investigation, specifically by manipulating situational empathic responses more systematically and by using a large number of empathy-inducing stimuli. Thereby, more reliable situational empathy scores will be obtained and advanced statistical analysis becomes possible.

Also, as outlined earlier, it has not been investigated, at least to our knowledge, how the altruistic and egoistic motivations following from the two empathic responses translate into motor behaviour. Thus, previous studies analysing motor performance were mainly concerned with the general impact of empathy on information processing, reporting shorter response times (RTs) for empathy-inducing than control stimuli [30,31,32,33], but see [34]. Moreover, studies concerned with empathic concern and personal distress used too few trials to warrant an analysis of motor performance. Thus, by employing a larger number of empathy-evoking stimuli, it will become possible to investigate whether the two situational empathic responses differentially influence motor behaviour with regard to the following two aspects. First, according to [35], personal distress is accompanied by higher levels of physiological arousal than empathic concern. Since arousal is a variable known to enhance response speed [36], these two empathic responses might influence response time (RT) differentially. Second, empathic concern might lead to an altruistic motivation to reduce the target’s suffering, whereas personal distress might result in an egoistic motivation to reduce one’s own suffering by withdrawing from the situation [14,15]. We assume that these motivations manifest themselves in motor predispositions for approach or avoidance movements, respectively.

Whether such a biasing impact on the motor system is due to automatic affective versus controlled empathic processes is difficult to answer. However, whether the influence of empathic processes on the motor system is independent of the specific task goals can be examined. Thus, according to the feature-based definition of automaticity [37], an empathic influence on motor processing independent from the specific task goals could be conceptualised as “automatic” in this specific sense. In the movement compatibility task (see Method section for details) this can be accomplished if participants perform choice responses depending on another, empathy-unrelated, stimulus rather than on the empathic stimulus. To illustrate, [38] found faster withdrawal (key release) and slower approach movements (key press) to a visual go-/nogo-signal, when presented 500 ms but not when presented 100 ms after observing another person in physical pain, which presumably induced personal distress. On the one hand, this particular result demonstrates that empathic responses influence motor behaviour independent of task goals (automatically) in a movement compatibility task. On the other hand, it indicates that the time course of the underlying empathic or motivational process is presumably rather slow. Thus, it is conceivable that a cognitive rather than a fast automatic empathic process biases the motor system. Until now, at least to our knowledge, no study has investigated whether and how empathic concern and personal distress influence approach-avoidance motor behaviour in a goal-independent manner.