# Feel what you read: Specific aspects of empathy modulate semantic retrieval processes and representational content of emotion-label, emotion-laden, and neutral abstract words

## TL;DR

This study explores how empathy traits influence how people process and understand emotional words, finding that fantasy enhances processing of emotion-related words.

## Contribution

The study identifies fantasy as a novel modulator of semantic processing of emotion-label words, linking individual empathy traits to neural responses.

## Key findings

- N400 amplitudes for emotion-label words decreased with higher fantasy scores.
- Participants with higher fantasy scores rated emotional words with stronger valence.
- Empathic concern was linked to richer emotional word representations but not to N400 modulation.

## Abstract

Building on evidence for experience-specific grounding of word meaning and interindividual differences therein, this study investigated how specific aspects of empathy modulate the processing and representation of abstract emotional words. We investigated single-trial N400 amplitudes as a measure of semantic retrieval in 78 healthy adults during a delayed lexical decision task with emotion-label, emotion-laden, and neutral abstract words. We further measured the participants’ levels of empathic concern, fantasy, personal distress, and perspective taking. Additionally, ratings on valence, arousal, and emotional experience quantified the words’ emotional representational content. While direct comparison yielded no evidence for N400 differences between word types, N400 amplitudes in response to emotion-label words decreased with increasing fantasy scores, with this modulation being stronger than for emotion-laden and neutral words. Additionally, participants with higher fantasy scores rated emotional words higher in absolute valence. The observed N400 reductions thus seem to reflect fantasy-driven processing facilitation graded by the words’ emotionality level. In contrast, we found no evidence for N400 modulations by empathic concern, personal distress, or perspective taking while affective ratings on all scales increased with increasing empathic concern scores. Our findings suggest that fantasy facilitates emotion-label word processing, and empathic concern enriches emotional word meaning representations, demonstrating interindividual differences in the experiential grounding of emotional abstract concepts.