¿We empathize all the same way? It is of course not. However, the differentiation we make people on how we view life and how we treat others, being more rational or more emotional, it goes even further than this simple assessment. A team of scientists from Monash University (Australia) has discovered that the brain of rational people is physically different from the more emotional people.
"People who have high levels of emotional empathy are often those who feel quite scared when they see a scary movie, or start to mourn during a sad scene. By contrast, those with high cognitive empathy are more rational, for example, when a psychologist advises a patient, "says Robert Eres, study leader.
The changes caused empathy in our brain, divided into affective (the ability of the individual to adequately respond to the emotional state of another person) and cognitive (the ability to understand or feel what you are thinking the other person) were the target of this research. To do this, the scientists counted 176 participants who measured voxel-based morphometry with the amount of gray matter had in certain parts of the brain.
The results revealed that people with emotional empathy showed more gray matter density in the insula, located in the center of the brain; on the other hand, people with cognitive empathy had more gray matter in the cingulate gyrus, an area located in the middle area of the brain that fulfills key roles in brain activity in the limbic system.
According to the researchers, this "provide validation that empathy is a construction of multiple components, suggesting that affective and cognitive empathy are represented differently in brain morphometry".