Empirical evidence for a three-level model of emotional contagion, empathy and emotional regulation

Background: Emotional contagion, empathy, and emotional regulation are hypothesized to be hierarchically organized functions. Aims: This study aimed to investigate associations between responses in tasks investigating these three functions using both neural representations and ratings. Methods: 86 healthy individuals performed tasks investigating emotional contagion, empathy for pain, and emotional regulation through cognitive reappraisal during functional magnetic resonance imaging.Results: Emotional contagion correlated positively to empathic responding in participants’ ratings. By contrast, rated emotional regulation success correlated negatively to both these measures. Models including brain imaging measures of emotion showed poor fit. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with a hierarchical model of emotional processing in terms of rated emotional contagion and empathy, and suggest that lower emotional regulation capacity is associated with an increased emotional responsiveness at lower (emotional contagion) and higher (empathy) processing levels.