Empathy Diagram

Post Reply New Topic

Empathy comes in two separate, but interconnected forms. They are emotional empathy, which is experiencing an emotion akin to one someone else is feeling, and cognitive empathy, deducing someone's emotional state from the situation they are in. Empathy is usually seen as trait or a specific skill, but it is better seen as a process, as laid out in the diagram. An empathy disorder is NOT the lack of empathy, but rather an abnormality in the process, which causes cognitive and/or emotional empathy to not function in the ideal manner. For example, sociopathy disconnects personal emotion from the situation (so the arrows with the asterisks* are basically gone), so emotional empathy is almost non-existent, but cognitive empathy is largely unaffected. Autism, meanwhile, usually has a large impact on cognitive empathy, but not nearly as much, if any, on emotional empathy. The arrows with asterisks* are typically unaffected, but any of the other arrows may be affected depending on the person. The arrows should not be taken as a strict presence or absence, and by improving the flow of any arrow empathy may be increased.

This is very interesting! Thanks!
Think I'll need to study it awhile before I ask questions.

Where does schizophrenia, schizoaffective, bipolar during mood cycle dips, head injury fit in your consideration of empathy? I don't expect you to know them, this is a question looking for an answer from you if you have one. If not, there is no need for an answer, but a reply would still be nice.

I don't understand your question. None of those disorders are known for being closely associated with empathy. What I can say is that schizoaffective and mania (I assume that's what you mean by "bipolar when the mood cycle dips", unless you're referring to depressive episodes, in which it's the same as depression) affect emotion, so the effect would probably be there, schizophrenia can effect so many different things, and head injury depends on where the injury took place.

People with schizophrenia have been shown to have consistent theory of mind deficits and cognitive and emotional empathy deficits, much less but significant during remission (p=0.8 during remission), schizoaffective often has the cognitive empathy intact but not the emotional.

They are not closely associated with empathy as there has been little attempt to dispute or cover up these traits, ironically leading to less people being aware of them. (Google the Streisand Effect). A decade ago people didn't make so much a deal of empathy in autism (which is only one symptom of autism) until dispute or attempts to distract from this one feature blew out of proportion. When an act of violence is commited by a schizophrenic, people say "mentally ill crazy guy" but with an autistic "no empathy, no empathy, no empathy, nothing else going on, just no empathy!".

To just add:
Bipolar is not a mere mood disorder, but has mood dysfunction as it's defining trait. There are negative symptoms and other one's they've found such as motor differences like in autism, schizophrenia also shows motor differences, like an opposite of autism, extreme stiffness and tightness than looseness. They aren't cured if you stabilize their mood, same with schizophrenia, taking anti-psychotics still leaves them with the other symptoms, and with bipolar some show theory of mind deficits even when stable.

With schizophrenia it's just because empathy is such a complex process and the condition has some many effects, it's really the same with autism. I think it's been shown much of the supposed affective empathy deficits with schizophrenia are actually just due to flat effect, the person does feel the emotions, but their ability to emote is impaired. There is actually a lot of overlap between the negative symptoms of autism and schizophrenia, stereotypies are often found in schizophrenia and catatonia is often found in autism. (Antipsychotics actually make motor problems in schizophrenia worse as a direct result of dopamine suppression) Schizoaffective is similar to schizophrenia, but the cognitive impairments are generally milder, which would explained why cognitive empathy is impaired less, and emotional empathy is probably just impaired because mood is out of whack in general, it has a lot of overlap with bipolar.

Bipolar is by definition a mood disorder. Whether or not it should be reclassified doesn't change how it already is classified. I'm guessing the reason for theory of mind deficits while stable is bipolar is due to a lack of learning (pretty sure that's also the same reason for autism) as it's been shown there is theory of mind deficits in populations which have limited social contact but are otherwise neurotypical, like deaf people.

The point is those conditions are not just mere hallucinating or mood swings, there are negative and motor symptoms possible as well, and they have neurodevelopmental origins too, often not kicking in till puberty, but scientists of have watched videos of people with schizophrenia or bipolar when they were young and they notice movement problems and irritability, some difficulties with attention and executive function.

I made my own thread on empathy, I would like you to take a look and critique it. It isn't so science based but philosophical.

Schizophrenia was never just hallucinations, and bipolar never had anything to do with mood swings. I'm getting the impression you've read a bunch of studies about the disorders without actually having any understanding of what the disorders are in the first place.