Individual differences in (cognitive) empathy affect perspective adoption in comprehending null-subject sentences in Japanese

Abstract

This study explores the influences of affective empathy and cognitive empathy on readers’ perspective adoption when they are mentally simulating an action event. We used the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980) to measure each participant’s affective and cognitive empathy and a sentence-picture verification task, which leads participants to mentally simulate events by verifying the congruity between actions described in written sentences and actions depicted in picture stimuli. Forty-eight Japanese speakers read Japanese null-subject sentences and saw pictures depicting the actions described in the sentences from either an agent’s or an observer’s perspective. Crucially, the omitted subjects (second or third-person pronouns) of each critical sentence could be inferred from a preceding contextual sentence. The results suggest that, during the mental simulation of action events, individuals with relatively high cognitive empathy are more likely than those with relatively low cognitive empathy to adopt different perspectives based on available contextual information, while affective empathy does not appear to influence perspective adoption. We conclude that cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy, significantly contributes to the pragmatic skills language users need to utilize contextual information as a complement to linguistic information, particularly to interpret non-linguistically-expressed elements such as omitted subjects.