Environmental impassivity: Blunted emotionality undermines concern for the environment.

The average American believes in climate change, worries about it, and supports related policy, but there are still considerable differences-across individuals and with political ideology-that limit the ability to foster change. Researchers and practitioners often increase concern and action for others through feelings of empathy, which also increases pro-environmentalism. However, some people appear less emotionally impacted by environmental destruction-particularly more ideologically conservative and less pro-environmental individuals. To determine why some people appear to be impassive to environmental destruction, we conducted 3 online studies to measure beliefs and emotional processes in political liberals versus conservatives. Across 3 studies, we replicated the link between impassivity and conservatism, and found that more impassive people acknowledge our negative impact on the environment but are less concerned about it and more confident in an eventual solution. Impassivity, however, is not specific to the environment. People who are more impassive about the environment also respond less emotionally to positive and negative images that are unrelated to the environment, including human suffering and hedonic reward. They also report reduced trait empathy, perspective taking, and daily emotional expression and experience. Impassivity is not linked to differences in trait personal distress, anxiety, psychopathy (apart from low empathy), or trouble appreciating consequences. Impassivity is not associated with deficits in processing others' facial emotion during early perceptual decoding but is associated with the later suppression of emotion. Everyone will not respond to emotional appeals to help a distressed environment. Other strategies are recommended to reach a broad audience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding empathy and its disorders through a focus on the neural mechanism.

Empathy is a complex, multi-dimensional process. As such, it can be impaired at multiple stages, producing disorders of empathy with separable underlying causes. Studies often divide empathy into emotional and cognitive components to simplify the large space of empathic processes. This practice can be helpful, but also causes people to misunderstand their interdependence at the level of the mechanism and how they correspond to surveys and tasks. As a result, inferences made from experimental results are often incorrect and cannot be integrated across studies. We explain how emotional and cognitive empathy overlap through the proximate mechanism and clarify their operationalization in common surveys and tasks. A systematic review of three clinical disorders is used to highlight this issue and reinterpret and unite results according to the proximate framework--Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Aligning constructs through the proximate mechanism allows us to understand both empathy and its disorders.