Differential neural activation to friends and strangers links interdependence to empathy

Two competing views implicate interdependence in empathy. One suggests that interdependence may generally enhance empathy (Woltin et al., British Journal of Social Psychology 50:553–562, 2011), whereas another suggests that interdependence enhances empathy for targets with whom one is in a relationship, at the cost of decreasing empathy for strangers (Markus and Kitayama, Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(4):420–430, 2010). Here, we show evidence in support of the latter account. We observed that trait-level interdependence positively correlated with trait-level empathic abilities in perspective-taking and empathic concern. However, using an empathy for social exclusion paradigm, we found that neural responses to a friend’s compared to a stranger’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion) differentially related to interdependence, perspective-taking and empathic concern. During the observation of a friend’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion), neural responses in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and to a lesser extent the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI), positively correlated with self-reported trait interdependence, perspective-taking, and empathic concern. In contrast, during the observation of a stranger’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion), neural responses in the MPFC, and to a lesser extent the dACC and AI, negatively correlated with self-reported trait interdependence, perspective-taking and empathic concern. These findings suggest that while trait interdependence may correspond with enhanced ability to empathize, as indicated by self-report measures, interdependent individuals may preferentially recruit this ability for close others relative to strangers.