The Empathic Personality Disposition: Disentangling Genetic and Environmental Influences on Personality-Empathy Relations During Adolescence

• In Event: Growing up in a Social Context: Brain and Emotional Development From Infancy to Early Adolescence

Abstract

Empathic tendencies- the inclinations to understand and feel other persons’ emotions while maintaining self-other distinction and other-oriented focus (Uzefovsky & Knafo-noam, 2016), are considered individual traits or capacities that are vital for psychological adjustment (Stern & Cassidy, 2018). A recent meta-analysis showed that empathic tendencies are largely heritable and that environmental processes affect cognitive and emotional empathic tendencies to different degrees (Abramson, Toccaceli, Uzefovsky, & Knafo-Noam, 2020). However, less is known about specific mechanisms that account for these influences and their development over time. This study sought to examine how genetic and environmental factors influence emotional and cognitive empathic tendencies, and how they develop during early adolescence. Moreover, to shed light on possible mechanisms that create empathic tendencies, this study has examined personality (based on the Big-five approach) as a core system of individual differences that account for differences in empathy. Twin adolescents from 733 families rated their empathy and personality traits at age 11 (N = 1176), and again at age 13 (N = 821). Parents rated adolescents’ emotional empathy and adolescents performed an emotion recognition task, indicating cognitive empathy. Using a Machine Learning algorithm, we constructed emotional and cognitive ‘empathic personality dispositions’ indexes, which indicate the prediction of empathic tendencies from personality characteristics and by that reflect the personality characteristics that dispose a person to be more empathic. These indexes provided robust empathy predictions (R2=.17-.24) that were better than the average Big-five scales predictions and were validated by relations with non-self-report empathy measures. Examining the content of these indexes (Figures 1-2) revealed that the emotional empathic personality disposition is characterized mainly by personality items representing trust, compassion, and emotional reactivity, whereas the cognitive empathic personality disposition is characterized mainly by items of trust, compassion, and openness to experiences. At age 13 (more than at age 11), cognitive empathy was also predicted by items representing extraversion and social dominance. Twin modelling analyses revealed that adolescents’ empathic tendencies and personality dispositions were influenced by genetic (27% - 44%) and environmental factors. Additionally, they showed that along development, genetic factors account mainly for stability, whereas environmental factors account mainly for change in personality and empathic tendencies. Most importantly, the analyses revealed that empathy and personality are influenced by shared genetic and environmental factors. This finding suggests that the same neurobiological mechanisms and environmental processes affect a person’s empathic tendencies and the personality characteristics that dispose that person to be more empathic. The content of the personality disposition indexes (e.g., the prediction of empathy by emotional reactivity and social dominance) implies on specific processes (e.g., cortisol reactivity; change in adolescents’ social structure) through which genes and environment create individual differences in adolescents’ empathy. By that, it may help scientists get one step closer to understanding how empathic tendencies are shaped along development.

Authors

• Lior Abramson, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Eran Eldar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author

• Noam Markovitch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author