When Anxiety Dims Our Warmth but Not Our Insight

Anxiety’s Quiet Tax on Connection

We tend to treat empathy as a single skill—either you have it or you don’t. But empathy actually has two parts that work together: affective empathy, the capacity to feel with someone, and cognitive empathy, the ability to understand what someone else is thinking or experiencing. Many of us notice that when we’re anxious, we’re not at our best with others. The question is: which part of empathy gets hit, and how?

That’s exactly what the peer-reviewed The impact of anxiety on affective and cognitive empathy set out to test. In this research paper, 75 women completed either an anxiety-inducing task or a relaxation exercise before taking measures that assessed both feeling others’ emotions and understanding them. The study also measured each person’s typical levels of empathy and anxiety (what psychologists call trait empathy and trait anxiety), to separate natural tendencies from what happens in the moment—known as state anxiety.

Why this matters is practical. Anxiety is common at home, at work, and in care settings. If anxiety specifically disrupts how we emotionally connect, that could affect how parents respond to a child’s tears, how nurses interpret patients’ distress, or how managers handle tense team moments. The study offers a clear, focused answer: when anxiety spikes, our emotional resonance with others is the first thing to fade, while our understanding of their perspective stays relatively steady.

What Worry Shuts Down—and What It Leaves Intact

The results were striking. After anxiety was induced, participants’ affective empathy performance—their ability to accurately feel and respond to others’ emotions—dropped. This effect held even after controlling for how empathic people were “by nature.” In other words, state anxiety dampened emotional resonance regardless of someone’s typical empathy level. By contrast, cognitive empathy—the capacity to recognize or infer what someone else is thinking or feeling—did not significantly change under anxiety.

Everyday examples bring this to life. Picture a busy evening: your partner’s voice tightens when talking about their day. On an anxious day, you might still recognize that something went wrong (cognitive empathy intact), but you feel oddly numb or impatient instead of moved to comfort (affective empathy muted). Or consider a customer service agent under time pressure. She can logically grasp a caller’s frustration but struggles to feel compassion in the moment, leading her tone to sound clipped even though her words are appropriate.

The study also found that trait empathy dimensions were strongly linked—people who were naturally high on one type tended to be high on the other. Moreover, trait levels of affective empathy aligned with affective empathy performance, meaning people who generally felt with others tended to do better on tasks measuring it. Notably, neither trait anxiety nor trait empathy changed the impact of the anxiety induction on affective empathy. Regardless of how anxious or empathic participants were to begin with, anxiety in the moment reduced their capacity to emotionally resonate, while their ability to understand others’ perspectives stayed largely intact.

Inside the Split Between Knowing and Caring

Psychologically, this split makes sense. Anxiety narrows our attention toward potential threats and drains mental resources into self-monitoring—“Am I safe? Am I messing up?” That inward pull can blunt affective empathy, which relies on openness to others’ emotions and bodily cues. You may still identify a coworker’s disappointment (a cognitive judgment), but your heart doesn’t echo their feeling. Anxiety, in short, diverts the emotional bandwidth required to “feel with.”

Interestingly, the stability of cognitive empathy under anxiety suggests that perspective-taking may be more resilient, at least to moderate, short-lived anxiety. Perspective-taking draws on knowledge, rules of thumb, and learned social scripts—abilities that can stay functional even when our emotions are on edge. This fits with research showing that acute stress often disrupts emotion regulation first, while well-practiced cognitive processes hold longer, especially in familiar social contexts.

These findings dovetail with theories such as the “threat vigilance” model: when threat systems fire, our attention narrows to self-protection, leaving fewer resources for sharing another’s feelings. They also clarify mixed past results. Some studies found that anxiety reduces empathy broadly, while others saw little effect. This research paper helps reconcile that inconsistency by separating empathy into two parts. It’s not empathy in general that falters; it’s the emotional channel most of all.

Consider a manager during a crisis meeting. She accurately interprets a team member’s hesitation as worry about a deadline (cognitive empathy). But if she’s anxious, her tone may be brisk and unsympathetic, because she can’t fully “catch” their anxiety and respond with warmth (affective empathy). The behavior appears cold, but the underlying understanding is there. This nuance matters: if we misread such behavior as a total lack of empathy, we might overlook the simple intervention that helps—reducing anxiety before tackling emotionally charged conversations.

From Therapy Rooms to Team Meetings: Putting the Results to Work

These results offer practical guidance across settings that hinge on human connection.

In mental health care, therapists can sequence interventions so that anxiety-calming skills come before empathy training. Brief practices—60 seconds of paced breathing, grounding through the senses, or labeling the emotion (“I’m anxious”)—can restore enough capacity for affective empathy to re-engage. For clients who feel “numb” in relationships when anxious, normalizing this pattern (“Your understanding is fine; it’s the emotional resonance that’s offline”) reduces shame and points to targeted tools.

In healthcare, micro-breaks matter. A nurse moving from an alarming situation to a difficult family conversation can take a 90-second reset: slow exhale breathing, unclenching the jaw, briefly stepping to a quieter hallway. Hospitals and clinics can build such moments into workflow—quick debriefs, calm corners, or scripted pauses before sensitive talks—to safeguard empathic care without sacrificing efficiency.

In workplaces, managers should avoid high-stakes feedback while visibly anxious. A practical script helps: “I want to give this the care it deserves. Let’s meet in 10 minutes after I gather my notes.” Teams can adopt pre-meeting check-ins—one-minute updates on energy and stress levels—to flag when emotional resonance might be low. Customer-facing roles benefit from pairing logic-based protocols (what to say) with short anxiety-regulation tools (how to breathe and pace) so agents sound both accurate and humane.

At home, naming anxiety can prevent misattuned responses. Instead of powering through a tense conversation, try, “I’m more anxious than usual, and it’s hard to feel close right now. Can we take a walk and talk after?” Parents can use simple co-regulation: kneel to the child’s level, slow your own breathing, and match tone before trying to explain. These small steps reduce state anxiety and reopen the door to affective empathy, while cognitive empathy keeps guiding what to say.

A Simple Pause Can Restore Our Capacity to Care

The takeaway from The impact of anxiety on affective and cognitive empathy is refreshingly precise: in the moment, anxiety selectively dampens our ability to feel with others, while our ability to understand them remains relatively steady—at least in the women studied. That means we don’t need to overhaul who we are to connect better under stress; we often need a brief reset that quiets the body’s alarm.

This distinction empowers smarter choices. Delay the tough talk by five minutes, add a breathing cue before a patient consult, or start a team meeting with a short pause. If anxiety is the dimmer on warmth—not insight—then a small, well-timed pause can turn the light back up. What conversations in your day would improve if you first lowered anxiety by just one notch?

Data in this article is provided by PLOS.

Tagged Anxiety, Anxiety disorders, Cognition, Cognitive science, Emotions, Mental health and psychiatry, Neuropsychiatric disorders, Neuroscience, Neuroses, Psychological stress, Questionnaires, Relaxation (psychology), Research design, Social anxiety disorder, Survey research