The Role of Emodiversity in Protecting Empathy Under Stress

Prior research has found that stress disrupts the capacity for empathy. However, this link between stress and empathy can be particularly problematic for professions that are both high in stress and also require empathy (e.g., physicians). Most psychological interventions for such populations have focused on reducing stress and negative emotion, or on increasing positive emotion. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that emphasizing emotional improvement and control (enhancing positive emotion and/or minimizing negative emotion) can paradoxically lead to poorer emotional well-being. Rather than emphasizing emotional improvement, the current research seeks to leverage recent developments in affective science to investigate whether cultivating greater emotional diversity, termed emodiversity, may promote a more balanced and flexible approach to coping with stress. Recent research suggests that emodiversity (the variety and relative abundance of emotions that people experience in daily life) appears to be beneficial for mental and physical health. Emodiversity is theorized to promote well-being by preventing specific emotions (e.g., stress, sadness) from dominating the emotional ecosystem. In the present research, we sought to explore whether emodiversity may similarly serve to buffer against empathy decline in the face of stress, by allowing individuals to empathize with others, despite co-occurring stress. In Studies 1a and 1b (N = 617 online participants), we found evidence suggesting that emodiversity protected against empathy decline under stress (Perceived Stress × Emodiversity Interactions, ps ≤ .003). That is, whereas perceived stress negatively impacted empathy for those who were low in emodiversity (ps < .001), people who were high in emodiversity were able to maintain high levels of empathy regardless of their stress levels (n.s.). In Study 2, we examined whether emodiversity played a protective role in protecting physician empathy in a sample of first-year emergency medicine residents at UCSF (N = 18). Whereas residents typically show empathy declines over the course of residency, we found that emodiversity protected residents against empathy decline over their first year, Emodiversity × Time interaction, p = .02. That is, residents who had low levels of emodiversity at the beginning of their residency (baseline) experienced decreases in empathy over the course of their first year in residency (p < .001), whereas residents who had high levels of emodiversity at baseline maintained high levels of empathy over time (n.s.). Findings from the present research could help researchers develop targeted interventions and therapies for cultivating empathy in individuals in high-stress professions (e.g., physicians, police), roles (e.g., caregiving), and environments (e.g., conflict negotiations).