Xiao Wu1,2 · Xue‑Jing Lu1,2 · Li‑Bo Zhang1,2 · Si‑Rui Huo3  · Ya‑Zhuo Kong1,2 · Li Hu1,2

1 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China 

2 Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China 

3 Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China

Abstract

Empathy can be categorized into positive and negative empathy depending on the emotional valence experienced. When responding to others’ emotions, empathy involves three key subprocesses: emotion recognition, affective empathy, and motivational empathy. However, how these subprocesses operate to realistic positive versus negative stimuli remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we selected 96 real-life events with detailed contextual information and collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data. We observed lower within-subject and between-subject behavioral and neural similarity for positive empathy than for negative empathy. Although positive and negative empathy partially shared neural mechanisms underlying emotion recognition—evident in overlapping encoding regions and functional connectivity (FC)—they diverged notably in affective and motivational empathy. Negative empathy involved more complex encoding schemes and more convergent FC than positive empathy. These findings deepen our understanding of empathy dynamics, highlighting its multifaceted nature and the importance of distinguishing between positive and negative emotions in empathy research.

Keywords

Positive empathy; Negative empathy; Intrasubject similarity; Inter-subject similarity; Empathic response

[SpringerLink]