The effect of mood and personality on cognitive and affective empathy

This study investigates the influence of mood and personality variables on empathy. One hundred and twenty undergraduate introductory psychology students were placed in one of three mood conditions: anxious, affectionate, and neutral. In addition, they responded to the NEO, a personality questionnaire measuring Extraversion and Neuroticism. Subjects indicated their empathic reactions to videotapes of distressed people before and after the mood induction specific to their group. Empathy was measured in three ways. First, subjects completed the Relationship Inventory (RI), indicating their cognitive and emotional reactions to the distressed person on videotape. Second, subjects responded to the Mood Adjective Checklist (MACL) indicating their feelings after viewing the distress videotape. Finally, subjects completed a second form of the MACL, predicting the feelings of the distressed person. This study investigates whether negative mood arousal (anxiety) and neurotic personality style are associated with lower empathy scores than either neutral or positive mood arousal (affection) and extraversion. The results indicate that negative emotional arousal and possibly positive mood as well are associated with lower empathy scores, while the neutral mood condition is linked to higher empathy scores. While the personality variables alone have little power to predict empathy, the personality X mood interaction terms did reach significance. Specifically, an extraverted style combined with the affectionate mood condition has a stronger negative correlation with empathy then either of these predictors alone. The anxiety X neuroticism interaction term was also negatively correlated with the empathy scores. These results have implications for the influence of mood and perhaps other non-personality variables on empathic responses. In this study, the mood condition appears to be a stronger predictor of empathy than the personality scores, with personality in the interaction terms enhancing the predictive power of mood. The effect of the manipulations on empathy appears to be negative, suggesting the importance of helping professionals approaching their clients with a low level of arousal