The Role of Emotion Regulation Strategies and Delusion Proneness on Empathetic Tendencies in a Community Sample

Empathic tendencies (i.e., perspective taking and empathic concern) and emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal and suppression) are key factors in successful social relationships. Relationships can also be negatively impacted by mental health symptoms, including psychosis. While psychotic-like experiences are often detrimental to social functioning, it is unclear whether certain psychotic-like experiences, such as delusions, are negatively associated with empathetic tendencies after accounting for emotion regulation skills and comorbid dimensions of psychopathology. Linear models were employed to test these associations in an adult community sample (N = 128). Measures of interest included the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and the Peter’s Delusion Inventory. Results indicated that perspective taking was positively associated with reappraisal and negatively associated with delusional proneness, after controlling for age, sex, race, intelligence, as well as symptoms of anxiety and depression. Furthermore, a significant change in R2 supported the addition of delusion proneness in this model. Specificity analyses demonstrated perspective taking was also negatively associated with suppression, but this relationship did not remain after accounting for the effects of reappraisal and delusion proneness in the same model. Additional specificity analyses found no association between empathic concern and reappraisal or delusion proneness but replicated previous findings that empathic concern was negatively associated with suppression. Taken together, findings highlight that delusion proneness accounts for unique variance in interpersonal perspective taking, beyond that explained by demographics, intelligence, reappraisal skills, and internalizing psychopathology.