Building Narratives Through Empathy: The Role of Empathy Mechanisms and Associative Thinking in Creative Writing

Abstract

Empathy emerges as a pivotal skill in creative writing, yet previous studies lack an understanding of empathy's multidimensionality and specific impact of its facets on the capacity to generate narrative stories. This cross-sectional study delved into the various cognitive and affective empathy facets—that is, perspective-taking, online simulation, emotion contagion, proximal responsivity, and peripheral responsivity—and their contributions to creative writing. Further, it examined the mediating effects of associative thinking—conceptualized as a common empathy-creativity resource—on the relationship between empathy facets and creative writing. Two-hundred twenty participants (university students) completed performance-based tasks and self-report measures of creative writing, associative thinking, and empathy. A latent mediation model implemented in Structural Equation Modeling indicated two effects of empathy facets on creative writing, with perspective-taking emerging as a positive predictor. Additionally, peripheral responsivity (i.e., affect sharing in indirect contexts) exhibited an indirect positive influence on creative writing, mediated by associative thinking. In summary, associative thinking appears to be an important ingredient in both empathy and creative writing, while cognitive empathy, specifically intuitive perspective-taking, contributes significantly to creative writing skills. Future studies should further explore these connections and their causalities, possibly using experimental or longitudinal approaches.