Emotional and rational empathy, how do they manifest in our brains?

One of the most powerful tools that we as human beings use to understand the multiple social changes we have gone through in recent years is empathy. Empathizing gives us a totally incredible cognitive capacity when we know how to use it appropriately for the benefit of everyone.

Empathizing is that act through which a person identifies and understands the feelings of another person., taking into account the specific circumstances of the other person, and acts accordingly. Empathy is possible thanks to the great power that our mind has to separate our feelings from those of others and even use a different way of reasoning depending on the “sentimental place” in which it is placed.

This allows us to adapt to the environment, understanding the environment as fundamentally our environment and the people around us. Empathy allows someone to feel close to another person’s pain or suffering but also to their joy or happiness. But, Do we all empathize equally?

Empathy generates changes in our brain

There are many of us who still ask ourselves the question of “Do we all empathize in the same way and intensity?” The answer is no: studies tell us that People differ in terms of our level of empathy. Furthermore, we can say that somehow not all of us follow the same paths to empathize. There are people who have a great relationship with their emotional world and in some ways it is more natural for them to do so.

Others do not have this “gift”, or at least they do not have it as developed. Therefore, they generate their empathy through experience and even their own sentimental “logic and coherence.” Thus, according to research from Monash University (Australia), it has been discovered that The brains of rational or logical people are physically different from those of more emotional people.

The head of the research team Robert Eres states that “lPeople who have high levels of affective empathy are often the ones who feel quite afraid when watching a horror movie, or start crying during a sad scene. On the contrary, those who have high cognitive empathy are more rational.”

The objective of this research was focused on empathy generates changes in our body, based on our brain and distinguishing two types:

Affective empathy is the ability of a person to respond appropriately to the emotional state of another. Cognitive empathy consists of the ability to understand and feel what the other person is developing or thinking.

Affective empathy and cognitive empathy

The study was carried out with 176 participants who measured, with voxel-based morphometry, the amount of gray matter they had in certain regions of the brain. The result of the scientific work has been published by the journal NeuroImage in which the results reveal that People with affective empathy have a greater density of gray matter in the insula brain regionlocated in the central part of our brain.

On the other hand, People with high cognitive empathy had more gray matter in the cingulate gyrus, which we find in the middle area of ​​the brain and allows us to carry out the basic brain functions of our limbic system.

According to the researchers, this work “provides validation that empathy is a multicomponent construct, so affective and cognitive empathy are differentially represented in brain morphometry”. With this data we can understand the physical complexity that exists in each of the brains, thus being able to answer the big question of “Emotional and rational people, how are their brains different?”

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