Emotional and Cognitive Empathy as Predictors of the Levels and Changes in Well-being and Health

Previous research has been equivocal about whether empathy is associated with better or worse well-being and health. Much of this research used relatively small, cross-sectional samples to study a narrow range of well-being and health outcomes (often with a variety of different scales and types of empathy). The present study examined whether two distinct types of empathy—emotional empathy and cognitive empathy measured with the Basic Empathy Scale for Adults—were linked to average levels and trajectories of self-reported life satisfaction, mental health symptoms, physical health, and diagnoses of medical conditions across 9 years. Using a large, representative sample of Dutch participants (N = 3,974, Mage = 50 years, 53% female), growth-curve models revealed that emotional empathy was associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, higher levels of mental health symptoms and medical conditions, and lower levels of self-rated health. However, those higher in emotional empathy showed steeper declines in mental health symptoms over time (albeit they still reported more mental health symptoms overall). Many of these results replicated in two robustness tests, including a different measure of emotional empathy (based on the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy) and an independent sample of young adults. Understanding others’ emotions (i.e., cognitive empathy) was associated with reporting more medical conditions but was otherwise unrelated to the other well-being and health levels and trajectories. These findings provide impetus for further longitudinal research to clarify which specific types of empathy have a role in predicting well- being and health over time, and in what direction.