Mar 31, 2022 09:00:00

Research results show that people with high empathy tend to be unfriendly due to stress

When you're feeling down, you may hit someone hard, but this tendency is more pronounced in people who often guess and empathize with others' feelings, and are more considerate of others than those who don't. Research results have been announced that it is easy to lose heart.

Altruism under stress: cortisol negatively predicts charitable giving and neural value representations depending on mentalizing capacity | Journal of Neuroscience

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2022/03/03/JNEUROSCI.1870-21.2022

Why Stress Makes the Most Empathetic People Less Kind | The Swaddle

https://theswaddle.com/why-stress-makes-the-most-empathetic-people-less-kind/

Stefan Schulreich and colleagues at the University of Hamburg conducted a series of experiments in which subjects were psychologically stressed and asked for donations before and after that. Schulreich et al. Observed the subject's brain activity using magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the neural mechanisms that function during this behavior.

As a result, subjects with very high empathy secreted more of the stress hormone '

cortisol ' when stressed than others, and in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in social decision making. The activity was affected. As a result, it was confirmed that people with high empathy had a large decrease in donations when they were stressed. On the other hand, there was no difference in donations before and after stress among those who did not sympathize with others.

Schulreich and colleagues say further research is needed to determine that cortisol did not significantly affect less empathetic subjects.