Epidemiology Department, National Institute of Cardiology "Ignacio Chávez", Ciudad de México, Mexico.
Department of Psychology, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK.
Scand J Psychol. 2022 Dec;63(6):594-600. doi: 10.1111/sjop.12847. Epub 2022 Jun 14.
Interpersonal emotion regulation (ER) refers to the different processes aimed at changing the emotional states of others. Some authors have speculated about the pivotal role of empathy for interpersonal ER to happen. However, the very limited empirical evidence suggests that only cognitive empathy as opposed to affective empathy may be a necessary antecedent. As previous research only considered interpersonal affect improvement and showed mixed evidence for the regulation strategies, we aimed to address this gap in the current research. To that aim, 374 adults (M = 30.3 years, 249 female) reported their tendency to engage in cognitive (perspective-taking) and affective empathy (empathic concern and personal distress) as well as their tendency to improve and worsen others' mood, and to use different regulation strategies (situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change, and modulation of the emotional response) to change others' feelings. Results of the regression analyses showed that while affect improvement was not significantly predicted by any of the empathy variables, affect worsening was positively predicted by personal distress. Concerning the regulation strategies, while cognitive change and situation modification were positively predicted by personal distress, attention deployment was positively predicted by perspective-taking. Overall, the obtained results highlight the need to further investigate the link between empathy and ER and to carefully consider the methods selected for that purpose.
人际情绪调节（ER）是指旨在改变他人情绪状态的不同过程。一些作者推测同理心在人际 ER 中起着关键作用。然而，有限的经验证据表明，只有认知同理心而不是情感同理心可能是必要的前提。由于之前的研究只考虑了人际情感的改善，并且对调节策略的证据不一，我们旨在解决当前研究中的这一差距。为此，374 名成年人（M=30.3 岁，249 名女性）报告了他们参与认知（换位思考）和情感同理心（同理心关注和个人痛苦）的倾向，以及改善和恶化他人情绪的倾向，以及使用不同的调节策略（情境修改、注意力部署、认知改变和情绪反应调节）来改变他人的感受。回归分析的结果表明，虽然情感改善不受任何同理心变量的显著预测，但情感恶化受到个人痛苦的积极预测。关于调节策略，虽然认知改变和情境修改受到个人痛苦的积极预测，但注意力部署受到换位思考的积极预测。总的来说，研究结果强调需要进一步调查同理心和 ER 之间的联系，并仔细考虑为此目的选择的方法。
