New research suggests that there are physical differences in the brains of emotional people and those who think more rationally, psychcentral.com reported.
Researchers at Monash University in Australia found correlations between grey matter density and cognitive and affective empathy.
"People who are high on affective empathy are often those who get quite fearful when watching a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene. Those who have high cognitive empathy are those who are more rational, for example a clinical psychologist counselling a client," Robert Eres, who led the study, said in a statement.
For the study, researchers recruited 176 people and examined the "extent to which grey matter density ... predicted their scores on tests that rated their levels for cognitive empathy compared to affective -- or emotional -- empathy."
They found that people who tend to respond emotionally had greater grey matter density in the insula, which is located in the middle of the brain. Those who think more rationally "had greater density in the midcingulate cortex -- an area above the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain," psychcentral.com reported.
"Taken together, these results provide validation for empathy being a multi-component construct, suggesting that affective and cognitive empathy are differentially represented in brain morphometry as well as providing convergent evidence for empathy being represented by different neural and structural correlates," researchers said in the study.
Researchers said their findings raise further questions about whether people could increase their empathy through training, or whether people can lose their capacity for empathy if they don't use it enough.
"Every day people use empathy with, and without, their knowledge to navigate the social world," Mr. Eres said. "We use it for communication, to build relationships, and consolidate our understanding of others."
The findings are detailed in the journal NeuroImage.
