Empathy is a crucial psychological process that involves understanding and sharing the feelings of others. Traditional views suggest that empathy is a stable ability acquired early in life and remains unchanged. Recent empirical studies, however, have found that empathy is malleable and can be regulated by different social motives.

Does a cold environment produce individuals devoid of compassion, while a loving environment maintains empathy? Addressing this question, Dr. ZHOU Yuqing from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and her team conducted a series of experiments on the plasticity of empathy in different social environments.

Combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational modeling, they aimed to elucidate the neural and computational process by which individuals learn or unlearn empathy by observing empathic or non-empathic individuals. The results were published in PNAS on Feb. 21.

"Empathy ratings increase or decrease depend on whether empathic or non-empathic responses are observed. Interestingly, the neuronal response to pain in others also changed," said Dr. ZHOU.

The neural changes measured in the fMRI scanner were reflected in altered connectivity of the anterior insula, a brain region associated with empathy processing. The researchers further demonstrated that these neural changes can be explained by mathematical learning models.

To further validate the robustness of the research findings, they conducted multiple control experiments to rule out the influence of social desirability, instructional effects, anchoring effects, and imitation effects on changes in individual empathy. Taken together, this implies that the increased or decreased empathy in the experiment is truly induced by learning from others and not merely imitated or displayed to please others.

In summary, this study demonstrates that empathy is socially transmitted and that adults can learn and unlearn empathy by observing others, highlighting the important role of the social environment in shaping individual empathy.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Scientific Foundation of the Institute of Psychology of CAS, the German Research Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.