When Empathy Gets Tough: Neural Responses to Conflicting Self- and Partner-Directed Feedback in a Novel Paradigm

Despite the importance of empathy for healthy relationships and well-being, conventional studies often do not capture the self-regulatory demands inherent in understanding and experiencing another person’s mental states, especially when such states conflict with our own. In this paper, we introduce and empirically examine a novel empathy paradigm, which mimics everyday demands for regulating self-focused thoughts and feelings, to examine neural correlates of spontaneous empathy across 131 adults (from 71 romantic couples). When responding to partner-directed feedback in the presence of incongruent self-directed feedback, participants recruited frontoparietal regions (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and supramarginal gyrus) beyond regions typically found in empathy literature. Notably, activity in a number of prefrontal regions was associated with trait emotion regulation, suggesting that individual differences in emotion regulation play a key role in navigating incongruent self- and partner-directed social feedback. Moreover, higher activity in several regions including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) was related to greater everyday supportive behavior. When studied dyadically, couples who exhibited greater inter-partner similarity in the DMPFC activity reported higher relationship satisfaction, but only when their overall DMPFC activity was high. This study demonstrates that regulating self-focused feelings plays a crucial role in promoting empathy and prosocial behaviors in romantic relationships.