Emotional empathy is more heritable than cognitive empathy; is affected by environment shared by siblings; found no find evidence for age differences in empathy heritability

The genetic and environmental origins of emotional and cognitive empathy: Review and meta-analyses of twin studies. Lior Abramson et al. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, April 27 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.03.023

Highlights
• We meta-analyzed the twin literature of emotional and cognitive empathy.
• Emotional empathy is more heritable than cognitive empathy.
• Cognitive empathy as examined by tests is affected by environment shared by siblings.
• We did not find evidence for age differences in empathy heritability.
• We propose future directions to examine the processes behind genes-empathy relations.

Abstract: Empathy is considered a cornerstone of human social experience, and as such has been widely investigated from psychological and neuroscientific approaches. To better understand the factors influencing individual differences in empathy, we reviewed and meta-analyzed the behavioral genetic literature of emotional empathy- sharing others’ emotions (k=13), and cognitive empathy-understanding others’ emotions (k = 15), as manifested in twin studies. Results showed that emotional empathy is more heritable, 48.3% [41.3%-50.6%], than cognitive empathy, 26.9% [18.1%-35.8%]. Moreover, cognitive empathy as examined by performance tests was affected by the environment shared by family members, 11.9% [2.6%-21.0%], suggesting that emotional understanding is influenced, to some degree, by environmental factors that have similar effects on family members beyond their genetic relatedness. The effects of participants’ age and the method used to asses empathy on the etiology of empathy were also examined. These findings have implications for understanding how individual differences in empathy are formed. After discussing these implications, we suggest theoretical and methodological future research directions that could potentially elucidate the relations between genes, brain, and empathy.