The influence of emotional state on empathic accuracy

Empathic accuracy (EA) emphasizes the role of one's accurate inference and understanding of others' thoughts and feelings. It is closely related to our environmental adaptation and interpersonal skills in dynamic social interaction. Moreover, accurate empathy can be achieved through two paths: mentalizing and experience sharing, which is regulated by visual cues and linguistic cues, respectively. Although much is known about EA and we are always in a specific emotional state from time to time, it remains to be elucidated as to whether emotional state affects EA. To close this gap, we examined whether the negative and happy emotional state could affect the EA of sad stories, which forms a strong case in revealing the potential effect of emotional state on EA. Two groups of participants were evoked negative and positive emotion, respectively, by recalling corresponding emotional events and listening to emotion-evoking background music. Then they watched sad story videos with different input cues (visual-only, audio-only, and full, in different blocks). Participants had to report the story narrators’ real-time and overall emotions for each story, while their physiological signals were recorded. The accuracy of reported emotions and physiological synchrony were used as indicators of mentalizing and experience-sharing, respectively. We found that for Chinese participants, mentalizing mainly relies on linguistic cues, while both visual and auditory information can effectively lead to experience sharing. More importantly, emotional state did not significantly affect EA in neither input cues. Together, our study implies that emotional state did not affect EA.