Abstract
Empathy is an ability to understand intentions of others. However, little is known about the relationship between empathy and face memory. The current study investigated this issue. During encoding, participants were presented with pairs of other's face and sentence describing hypothetical action, and rated empathic feelings for others performing the actions. After the incidental encoding, participants recognized faces learned previously, and judged subjective impressions for the faces. In addition, a personality trait of empathy was evaluated. Results showed that faces to be highly empathized were remembered better than those to be low empathized, and that participants with a trait of high empathy showed higher scores in memory and subjective familiarity for faces than those with low empathy. These findings suggest that memory for others to be empathized could be enhanced by personal familiarity, and that the enhancement could be effective in individuals with a trait of high empathy.
