Trait Empathy Modulates Patterns of Personal and Social Emotions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused profound consequences on people’s personal and social feelings worldwide. However, little is known about whether individual differences in empathy, a prosocial trait, may affect the emotional feelings under such threat. To address this, we measured 345 Chinese participants’ personal emotions (e.g., active, nervous), social emotions (i.e., fearful and empathetic feelings about various social groups), and their empathy traits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the representational similarity analysis (RSA), we calculated the pattern similarity of personal emotions and found the similarity between the positive and negative emotions was less in the high vs. low empathy groups. In addition, people with high (vs. low) empathy traits were more likely to have fearful and sympathetic feelings about the disease-related people (i.e., depression patients, suspected COVID-19 patients, COVID-19 patients, flu patients, SARS patients, AIDS patients, schizophrenic patients) and showed more pattern dissimilarity in the two social feelings toward the disease-related people. These findings suggest a prominent role of trait empathy in modulating emotions across different domains, strengthening the polarization of personal emotions as well as enlarging social feelings toward a set of stigmatized groups when facing a pandemic threat.