Affective empathy (AE) is distinguished clinically and neurally from cognitive empathy (CE). While AE is selectively disrupted in psychopathy, autism is associated with deficits in CE. Despite such dissociations, AE and CE together contribute to normal human empathic experience. A dimensional measure of individual differences in AE 'relative to' CE captures this interaction and may reveal brain-behavior relationships beyond those detectable with AE and CE separately. Using resting-state fMRI and measures of empathy in healthy adults, we show that relative empathic ability (REA) is reflected in the brain's intrinsic functional dynamics. Dominance of AE was associated with stronger functional connectivity among social-emotional regions (ventral anterior insula, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, perigenual anterior cingulate). Dominance of CE was related to stronger connectivity among areas implicated in interoception, autonomic monitoring and social-cognitive processing (brainstem, superior temporal sulcus, ventral anterior insula). These patterns were distinct from those observed with AE and CE separately. Finally, REA and the strength of several functional connections were associated with symptoms of psychopathology. These findings suggest that REA provides a dimensional index of empathic function and pathological tendencies in healthy adults, which are reflected in the intrinsic functional dynamics of neural systems associated with social and emotional cognition.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 86. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 May 2026.
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Outputs from Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience
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Outputs of similar age from Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience
#2
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Altmetric has tracked 34,363,559 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,979 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 27.8. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its peers.
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