Florina Uzefovsky

Change in empathic disequilibrium across childhood and associations with socioemotional difficulties - European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Empathy, a socioemotional capacity with emotional and cognitive components, develops from infancy onward. An imbalance between these components, termed empathic disequilibrium, is related to socioemot...

Excited to share our new study tracking how empathic disequilibrium develops in children aged 3–12!
With @fuzefovsky.bsky.social, Prof Rebecca Waller & Dr Nicholas Wagner, we found that both forms of empathic disequilibrium are common across development.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#Empathy

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Finally published! In a longitudinal study (N=250) we show that empathy development is a dynamic, bidirectional process. We found that children's cognitive empathy buffered maternal personal distress for mothers at high risk for maltreatment journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... @idoshal.bsky.social

Come work with me!

Why does this matter? Beyond understanding social difficulties, empathic disequilibrium could be a stable behavioral marker for schizophrenia—helping advance diagnosis, treatment, and stigma reduction.

This effect is highly consistent across studies, much more than empathy.

In a meta-analysis of 10 studies (N=1,080 participants), we found:

Emotional empathy dominance (feeling more than understanding) strongly predicts schizophrenia.

Empathic disequilibrium refers to the imbalance between emotional empathy (feeling others' emotions) and cognitive empathy (understanding others' emotions) and was previously related to autism, depression, and self-harm.

Schizophrenia is complex, but empathic disequilibrium may hold the key to understanding some of the related social challenges. Check out our newest paper, led by the stellar @idoshal.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/a/1kCvD55vZDgHD