The association between acute stress & empathy: A systematic literature review

Empathy is a fundamental component of our social-emotional experience. Over the last decade, there has been increased interest in understanding the effects of acute stress on empathy. We provide a first comprehensive—and systematic—overview identifying emerging patterns and gaps in this literature....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews 2023-01, Vol.144, p.105003-105003, Article 105003
Main Authors: Nitschke, Jonas P., Bartz, Jennifer A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acute stress
Affect sharing
Contagion
Emotion
Emotion recognition
Emotions
Empathy
Female
Humans
Male
Mentalizing
Recognition, Psychology
Social cognition
Social support
Systematic review
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Summary:Empathy is a fundamental component of our social-emotional experience. Over the last decade, there has been increased interest in understanding the effects of acute stress on empathy. We provide a first comprehensive—and systematic—overview identifying emerging patterns and gaps in this literature. Regarding affective empathy, there is abundant evidence for stress contagion—the ‘spillover’ of stress from a stressed target to an unstressed perceiver. We highlight contextual factors that can facilitate and/or undermine these effects. Fewer studies have investigated the effects of acute stress on affective empathy, revealing a nuanced picture, some evidence suggests acute stress can block contagion of other’s emotions; but again contextual differences need to be considered. Regarding cognitive empathy, most studies find no conclusive effects for simplistic measures of emotion recognition; however, studies using more complex empathy tasks find that acute stress might affect cognitive empathy differentially for men and women. This review provides an important first step towards understanding how acute stress can impact social-togetherness, and aims to aid future research by highlighting (in)congruencies and outstanding questions. •There is evidence of spillover of stress from stressed to unstressed individuals.•Acute stress can block affective empathy/emotion contagion.•Most studies find no effects of acute stress on measures of emotion recognition.•Stress affects cognitive empathy differentially for men/women for more complex tasks.•Important boundary and contextual conditions for these effects are discussed.
ISSN:0149-7634
1873-7528
DOI:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.105003