When people interact face-to-face, their bodies and emotions naturally fall into a common rhythm. A recent study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion found that certain psychopathic traits correspond to this common reduced emotional and physiological response. The results suggest that studying empathy in real-life social settings reveals alternative perspectives on how people with these traits process the emotions of their peers.
Empathy acts as a social glue that encourages humans to connect and work together. This concept is generally divided into two main categories: cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately infer what another person is feeling from physical or verbal cues. Emotional empathy involves a more intuitive response, in which a person actually experiences the shadow of another individual’s emotional state.
Psychologists often refer to this mirroring of emotions as emotional sharing. Empathy can also go beyond the mind and manifest physically. During engaging interactions, two people may synchronize involuntary bodily functions such as heart rhythm and sweating.
According to a framework known as the perceptual-behavioral model of empathy, individuals understand the emotions of others by generating shared emotional states. This internal generation often occurs automatically, outside of a person’s conscious control. This model relies heavily on the concept of physiological synchrony to initiate emotional connections.
Previous studies have documented this physical synchrony between mother and infant and between therapist and patient. This physical mirroring is thought to support the sharing of emotional experiences and help individuals resonate with each other.
Even though empathy is an inherently social act, researchers often study it in isolated laboratories. Participants are often asked to fill out written questionnaires or view still photographs of their facial expressions. They may also watch pre-recorded videos to gauge emotional responses.
Matthias Burghardt, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Crime, Security and Law, highlighted this limitation. He realized that isolated experiments remove the defining features of empathy. True empathy relies on a dynamic exchange between two or more interacting individuals.
Burghardt and his research team at Victoria University of Wellington wanted to observe empathy as it unfolds in authentic conversations. They were particularly interested in individuals who displayed psychopathic traits. Psychopathy includes traits such as superficial charm, poor impulse control, risk-taking, and emotional detachment.
In previous laboratory experiments, people who scored high on psychopathic traits often showed deficits in various forms of empathy. But past experiments lacked real-world social context, leading the researchers to question whether those deficiencies would remain the same in natural conversation. Dynamic social environments provide body language, tone of voice, and conversation history that aid in emotion recognition.
To test these hypotheses, the research team recruited adult pairs from the general population of New Zealand. About half of the pairs were friends or lovers, and the other half were strangers who had never met. The researchers dressed participants in special vests and continuously recorded their physical reactions.
The vest tracked heart rate and skin conductance. Skin conductance measures microscopic changes in palm sweat gland activity and serves as a reliable indicator of physiological arousal. Once the device was attached, participants took a break to allow researchers to record baseline measurements.
The conversational pairs then sat together and discussed four specific topics. They were encouraged to talk about major positive events in their lives, major negative events in their lives, moments of deep regret, and times of great pride. Each conversation lasted 6 minutes, and participants were instructed to allow the discussion to develop as naturally as possible.
After the conversation ended, participants went into separate rooms and watched a video recording of the interaction. As they watched, they used a computer mouse to continuously rate their emotional intensity moment by moment during the interaction. They then watched the same video again and rated how strongly their partner was feeling in that moment.
As part of the study, participants completed a questionnaire to measure certain psychopathic tendencies. This assessment divided psychopathy into three categories: fearless control, self-centered impulsiveness, and ruthlessness. Fearless dominance shows social boldness and lack of fear. Egoistic impulsivity represents a disregard for the consequences of one’s actions, while callousness represents an indifference to the feelings of others.
This setup allowed researchers to measure both cognitive and affective empathy. They assessed cognitive empathy by comparing one person’s guess about their partner’s emotions to their partner’s actual self-reported emotions. They assessed emotional sharing by checking how well two individuals’ self-rated emotional intensity matched in real time.
We also entered physical data through a statistical model to account for time differences in physical reactions. In any conversation, it can take a while for one person’s body to catch up to the other person’s physical state.
The results showed that people who know each other better have better cognitive empathy. Friends and lovers were better at guessing the intensity of each other’s emotions than strangers. Still, the strangers demonstrated a basic, functional ability to read each other accurately.
The presence of psychopathic traits was not associated with a lack of this cognitive form of empathy. Participants who scored higher on these traits also had a similar ability to identify their partner’s emotional state. Researchers believe that the rich context of real conversations may provide enough clues to read people’s emotions, even if they have psychopathic tendencies.
Sharing emotions had different results. The researchers found that familiarity played no role in whether two individuals shared the same emotional intensity. People naturally reflect the emotional intensity of the person across from them, whether it’s a close friend or a stranger.
However, participants who scored higher on egocentric impulsivity had lower levels of emotional sharing. This particular psychopathic trait is characterized by a tendency toward recklessness and poor planning. In this study, it was associated with a decreased ability to automatically reflect one’s partner’s emotions.
Similar results were obtained from physiological data. Heart rate was not synchronized between speech pairs, but skin conductance was. Subtle fluctuations in sweat gland activity correlated with each other when participants talked, regardless of how well they knew each other.
Once again, another psychopathic trait was associated with this change in somatic mirroring. Participants who scored higher on callousness, a trait characterized by a general indifference to the well-being of others, had lower levels of physiological agreeableness. This result suggests that different psychopathic traits may correspond to different biological responses during empathic processes.
The researchers found several limitations in their experimental design. The statistical power of the sample size was relatively modest, and certain results were not statistically significant across all analytical models. These initial findings need to be replicated on a larger scale and with more diverse demographics to confirm the pattern.
The mix of diverse gender and same-sex pairs also introduced variables that could not be fully accounted for in the current dataset. It is difficult to analyze the dynamics of a conversation because some participants naturally dominate the discussion while others remain silent. Future research may attempt to track the duration of conversational utterances to adjust for this variation.
Future research should also analyze how different relationship types influence these dynamics over time. The research team recommends that future experiments continue to focus on naturalistic conversations. This approach provides a direct means of understanding how humans actually build social bridges.
The study, “Empathy, Physiological Synchrony, and Psychopathology: Preliminary Insights from a Naturalistic Dyadic Relationship,” was authored by Matthias Burghart, Roydon Goldsack, Areito Echevarria, and Hedwig Eyesenbarth.
