An integrated biobehavioral study of empathy

Abstract

Empathy, a crucial prosocial human trait, is mainly measured through questionnaires, but performance in tasks involving emotional stimuli, brain activity during these tasks, and genetic information also provide relevant clues. These approaches are developed separately or by combining only some of these factors. Integrating them into a single study and analysis may help to better characterize their relative load and to understand the complexity of empathy. The IRI empathy scale was administered to 65 participants, who later performed a lexical decision task on emotional words while their performance and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Three genetic polymorphisms, one in the OXTR gene (SNP rs2254298) and two in the AVPR1a gene (RS1 and RS3 regions), were also analyzed. Generalized linear models revealed that these biobehavioral factors jointly predicted emotional but not cognitive empathy. Reaction times and the amplitude of the LPP component of ERPs in response to emotional words, along with rs2254298 AA/AG genotype, were significantly associated with scores on the IRI personal distress subscale. Meanwhile, LPP amplitudes and AVPR1a-RS1 LL genotype significantly predicted scores on the empathy concern subscale. The balanced loading of all these factors in the models reinforces the desirability of a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to characterizing empathy.