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Empathy, Emotion Recognition, and Paranoia in the General Population
Kendall Beals1, Sarah H Sperry2, Julia M Sheffield1
1Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, United States.
Frontiers in Psychology
|March 14, 2022
Summary
Imaginative perspective-taking, not global empathy or emotion recognition, was linked to paranoia in adults. These findings suggest specific cognitive traits, rather than broad social deficits, may underlie subclinical paranoia.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Social Cognition
- Clinical Psychology
Background:
- Paranoia is linked to social cognitive deficits in clinical and subclinical groups.
- Empathy is impaired in schizophrenia, but its link to subclinical paranoia is unclear.
- Emotion recognition deficits are present in paranoia and may mediate empathic processing relationships.
Purpose of the Study:
- Characterize the relationship between paranoia and empathy in a non-clinical sample.
- Investigate if emotion recognition indirectly affects the empathy-paranoia relationship.
- Examine the role of specific empathy facets (e.g., Fantasy, Empathic Concern).
Main Methods:
- Assessed paranoia (Peters Delusions Inventory-21), empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index), and emotion recognition (Penn Emotion Recognition Test) in 226 adults.
- Utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze interrelationships.
- Examined four empathy subscales: Personal Distress, Empathic Concern, Perspective Taking, and Fantasy.
Main Results:
- Higher Fantasy (imaginative perspective-taking) correlated with increased paranoia (p < 0.001).
- No significant associations were found between paranoia and other empathy subscales or overall emotion recognition.
- Higher Fantasy was linked to better fear recognition (p = 0.008), but indirect effects were non-significant.
Conclusions:
- Imaginative perspective-taking (Fantasy) may contribute to paranoia in the general population.
- Robust global relationships between empathy and paranoia, or emotion recognition as a mediator, were not supported.
- Empathy and emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia may be linked to broader pathology, not detectable in subclinical samples.
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