ArticlePersonality & social psychology bulletin2026
How Individual Differences in Empathy Predict Moments of Empathy in Everyday Life.
Article in Personality & social psychology bulletin, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- The impact of power on implicit attitudes toward violence: empathy as a mediator and moderator.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- A fNIRS hyperscanning study on enhancing intimacy through emotional self-disclosure from the discloser-responder perspective.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Brief empathy interventions online can decrease but not increase empathic tendencies.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Empathy expectations: Trait empathy exacerbates apologetic offenders' negative reactions to non-forgiveness.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Do trait empathy measures predict how people experience empathy in daily life? Despite considerable research on empathy, we know surprisingly little about how trait measures relate to real-world empathic experiences. In this preregistered analysis of 7,343 experience sampling surveys from a near-representative sample of 246 U.S. adults, we map the connections between validated trait empathy measures and state experiences of empathy. Each component of state empathy-including emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion-was significantly predicted by theoretically relevant trait measures. However, trait empathy explained limited variance in daily experiences overall, ranging from just 3% for emotion sharing to 15% for perceived empathic efficacy. Adding emotional valence as a predictor improved model fit and variance explained for most state experiences, highlighting the crucial role of context. Our findings validate trait empathy measures while revealing their limitations in predicting real-world experiences.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.