Empathetic People Have Physical Differences in Their Brains, Study Finds

New research has opened up questions that it may be possible to lose your empathetic ability over time or that it could even possibly be increased through training. These questions were raised because scientists have recently discovered they can physically see people’s empathetic ability on brain scans. This research has added a great deal of information to the neuroscience field relating to emotion and has opened up questions with regards to two areas of empathy in particular: affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Compared to people who have a logical reaction to people’s emotions, empathetic people, or those with a strong emotional reaction to others, are found to have denser grey matter in specific areas of the brain.

Researchers at Monash University ^[1] hypothesised that through looking at images of the brain, they would be able to predict where individuals scored on the affective/cognitive empathy scale based on their neurological structures. A co-author of the study, Robert Eres, explained ^[2] that “people who are high on affective empathy are often those who get quite fearful when watching a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene. Those who have a high cognitive empathy are those who are more rational, for example, a clinical psychologist counselling a client.”