When Empathy Gets Tough: Neural Responses to Overcoming the Self in a Novel Paradigm Predict Everyday Prosocial Behavior

Empathy is essential for social relationships and well-being, yet conventional studies often do not capture the self-regulatory demands inherent to everyday empathic responding in close relationships. We therefore developed a novel empathy paradigm (the CLOSE task) to mimic everyday demands to “overcome the self”, and used this paradigm to examine how the neural correlates of empathy relate to real-world prosocial behavior across 131 adults (from 71 romantic couples). The CLOSE task includes positive and negative social feedback directed at participants and their partners in separate and simultaneous conditions. When participants overcame self-directed feedback to empathize with their partner, they recruited regions critical for self-regulation (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) beyond those typically associated with affective and cognitive empathy. Brain activity in several hypothesized regions related to variation in trait empathy and everyday supportive behavior. This study highlights the real-world significance of transcending self-focused feelings to engage in empathy and prosocial behavior.