The impact of mental fatigue on empathy for negative and positive emotions

This is an experimental psychology study; the objective is to observe the impact of mental fatigue on empathy. Empathy can be defined as the capacity to share the feelings of others (Singer & Lamm., 2009). The empathic response can be either positive (e.g., the other person is feeling joy) or negative (e.g., the other person is feeling sadness). According to Cameron et al. (2019), empathy may have a cognitive cost, which causes empathy to be perceived as aversive and less effective. This phenomenon leads to empathy avoidance in a cognitively demanding context. However, no information was found whether there would be a significant difference within this phenomenon depending on the valence of the stimulus requiring empathy. It is also unclear if the diminution of cognitive resources in a context of cognitive fatigue will produce a decrease of the empathic processes. Borràgan and colleagues (2016) developed a task to produce cognitive fatigue by varying the cognitive load of the task. This task was developed based on the Time-Based Ressource-sharing model which stipulate that cognitive load can be adjusted with variations in time constraints (Barrouillet et al., 2009). The Tloadback task allows to generate two conditions, a high cognitive fatigue induced condition with shorter time to answer and a low cognitive fatigue induced condition with longer time to answer (Borràgan et al., 2016, 2017). Varying the level of cognitive fatigue induced using the same task allow us to measure the effect of cognitive fatigue on empathy. By inducing cognitive fatigue, the current study aims to investigate whether cognitive fatigue affects the processing of negative and positive empathic responses, and if it does so similarly. References: Barrouillet, P., Gavens, N., Vergauwe, E., Gaillard, V., & Camos, V. (2009). Working memory span development: A time-based resource-sharing model account. Developmental Psychology, 45(2), 477‑490. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014615 Borragán, G., Slama, H., Destrebecqz, A., & Peigneux, P. (2016). Cognitive Fatigue Facilitates Procedural Sequence Learning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00086 Borragán, G., Slama, H., Bartolomei, M., & Peigneux, P. (2017). Cognitive fatigue: A time-based ressource-sharing account. Cortex, 89, 71-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.01.023 Cameron, C. D., Hutcherson, C. A., Ferguson, A. M., Scheffer, J. A., Hadjiandreou, E., & Inzlicht, M. (2019). Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(6), 962–976. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000595 Singer, T., & Lamm, C. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156(1), 81‑96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04418.x