Do we all empathize in the same way? Clearly not. However, the differentiation that people make on how we see life and how we treat others, being more rational or more emotional, goes even further from this simple appreciation. A team of scientists from the University of Monash (Australia) has discovered that the brain of rational people is physically different from that of more emotional people.
“ People who have high levels of affective empathy are often the ones who feel quite scared when they watch a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene. On the contrary, those with high cognitive empathy are more rational, for example, when a psychologist advises a patient ”, says Robert Eres, leader of the study.
The changes that empathy causes in our brain, divided into affective (the ability of the individual to respond appropriately to the emotional state of another person) and cognitive (the ability to understand or feel what the other person is thinking) were the objective of this research work. To do this, the scientists had 176 participants who measured with voxel-based morphometry , the amount of gray matter they had in certain parts of the brain.
The results revealed that people with affective empathy showed more density of gray matter in the insula , located in the center of the brain; On the other hand, people with cognitive empathy had more gray matter in the cingulate gyrus , an area located in the middle area of the brain that plays key functions in the brain activity of the limbic system.
According to the researchers, this “provides validation that empathy is a multi-component construct, suggesting that affective and cognitive empathy are differentially represented in brain morphometry .”
The work has been published in the journal NeuroImage.
