Understanding individual variation in empathy enhancement

During our daily social interactions, observing others' experiences (e.g. emotion, sensation) can induce a similar experience of our own. When the experience we feel matches that of the person we are interacting with (e.g. feeling sad because you see your friend is sad), we are said to be empathising with them. Building a scientific understanding of how we empathise with others is extremely important as empathy plays a key role in supporting social relationships that are important for health and well-being.

We now know that we empathise with others in a variety of different ways. Results of recent research (including our own) have shown that our ability to mentally distinguish between and focus on the experiences of ourselves and others - our 'self-other control' - plays a key role in engaging the psychological systems that allow us to experience empathy.

Moreover, we have shown that it is possible to improve self-other control using behavioural training, and that in doing so we can enhance the ability to empathise with others. These findings indicate that self-other control modulation may be a promising tool to support empathy skills, which offers the potential for developing intervention approaches in groups where improving empathy would be useful (e.g. in healthcare professions or in groups with altered empathy including Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), alexithymia, psychopathy, mirror-sensory synaesthesia).

There are still many open questions regarding how our self-other control mediates our ability to empathise with others, which must be addressed before this knowledge can be used widely. The primary aims of our research focus on answering some of these questions. In particular: Can we train individuals' self-other control to enhance their performance across a range of empathy measures (including questionnaires and behavioural tests)?

Will certain types of individuals be more susceptible to empathy-enhancement procedures than others? Are empathy enhancement procedures effective in clinical, compared to non-clinical, populations? How does boosting empathy affect the brain? Can we stimulate certain parts of the brain to boost empathy?

Our primary working hypothesis is that improving individuals' self-other control, using behavioural training techniques, will enhance their performance in empathy tests. Second, we believe that the target of this training may benefit certain kinds of individuals more than others, depending on their levels of psychological traits related to social ability, and whether they suffer from a clinical condition.

We will integrate a range of methods to address our aims and hypotheses: individuals' empathy will be tested before and after self-other control training using a variety of established, and novel, empathy tests including psychometric, brain imaging, and brain stimulation investigations. Rather than restricting our analysis to one group, we will shift the state-of-the-art by testing people with a wide spectrum of empathic reactions including typical adults, ASD, alexithymia, and mirror-sensory synaesthesia.

This will broaden the implications of our work to provide insights on the relationship between self-other control and empathy across a variety of groups. In doing so, we will help to inform our understanding of empathy, clarifying the importance of self-other control, and provide the initial building blocks for future research aspiring to develop treatments and training programs to enhance it.