Shyness, sociability, and empathy for others' physical pain

Empathy is a multifaceted construct containing both cognitive (e.g., perspective taking) and emotional (e.g., personal distress, empathic concern) components. We examined how individual differences in shyness and sociability were related to multiple aspects of empathic processing during the observation of others' physical pain. Participants (N = 294, M age = 18.67 years, SD = 0.92 years) completed an empathy task where they rated photographs of people in painful and non-painful conditions. We used latent change score models to examine ratings across conditions and found that shyness and sociability were each positively related to greater perspective taking and personal distress when viewing painful stimuli relative to the neutral stimuli, while only sociability was positively related to empathic concern when viewing painful stimuli relative to the neutral stimuli. These results illustrate that individual differences in social motivations may be uniquely related to other-oriented emotional reactions to the observation of others' pain.