Israel ISF-DFG: The Transformation of Autobiographical Memories Through Empathic Interactions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Nikolai Axmacher
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561142812

Autobiographical memories (AMs) are complex multi-dimensional entities encompassing semantic, emotional, and sensory aspects and shape our identity and self-concept. Disturbances in AMs such as overgeneralization of negative affect, decontextualization, and fragmentation, are associated with various psychopathologies, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Reversely, recounting AMs, which are often painful, is central to psychotherapy. However, the question remains whether such interactions, involving memory sharing, alter the content of the memory, its overgeneralized nature, and/or its phenomenological factors such as its emotional intensity, coherence, or visual perspective. Moreover, while previous studies suggest that retrieving AMs can alter them, the role of social factors—particularly the empathy of an interaction partner during retrieval—remains less clear. Considering that empathy contributes to distress regulation, the current proposal aims to investigate, for the first time, the transformative impact of empathic interactions on AMs. We will investigate different facets of this phenomenon using three studies. Study 1 examines whether and how empathic interactions change AMs. We will use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in a hyperscanning setup to simultaneously examine dyads consisting of a "target," who shares aversive events, and an "empathizer," who actively listens, with alternating roles. We will assess changes in semantic content, specificity/generalization, and phenomenological properties of memories, and test whether they are predicted by levels of subjectively reported empathy and inter-brain synchrony. Study 2 examines the neural substrates involved in changes to autobiographical memory traces following empathic interactions, focusing on self-conscious memories. We will scan participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and following memory sharing to assess the activation of regions relevant to AMs (hippocampus, amygdala, and sensory cortices) and their connectivity to self-related areas e.g. in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We will use representational similarity analysis to assess the representation of individual memories such as their distinctiveness, or, alternatively, overgeneralization. Study 3 will focus on a preclinical model of PTSD, by investigating the impact of empathy on intrusive memories of trauma-analog episodes. We will expose participants to short trauma-analog movies and examine how empathic interactions change their recall, the number of intrusions, and the resulting emotional distress. We expect that following empathic interactions, memories will become more distinct (i.e., less generalized), more contextualized, more coherent, and less distressing, and that these effects depend on activity in amygdala, hippocampus, and mPFC. The proposed set of studies will be the first to uncover how empathy shapes human autobiographical memory.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Partner Organisation: The Israel Science Foundation
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Simone Shamay-Tsoori