What is it about?
Social interaction requires you to both feel with others (empathy) and understand what they are thinking (mentalizing). This study shows that these two social capacities are independent, thus, being good in one doesn't mean you're good in the other. However, some people are distracted by feeling with another's emotion, which impairs their mentalizing performance. This mechanism is mediated by an inhibitory influence of empathy-related (anterior insula) on mentalizing-related (TPJ) neural activity.
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Why is it important?
The two research lines on empathy and mentalizing are striving, but in relative isolation. In a real-life interaction, it is likely that both capacities will be required simultaneously. The study demonstrates that the neural networks can be activated in parallel, but are still distinct. Nevertheless, they do interact during online social understanding of others. This research lays the foundation for investigating social affect and cognition in psychopathology, developmentally across the life span and in training studies.
Perspectives
It is a fascinating finding that the two routes to representing others emotions and thoughts are independent in such a large, relatively representative sample. I hope next steps will allow linking these capacities to actual (pro-) social behavior.
Philipp Kanske
Technische Universitat Dresden
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Are strong empathizers better mentalizers? Evidence for independence and interaction between the routes of social cognition, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, April 2016, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsw052.
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