Affective empathy, feeling what others feel, is a powerful emotion that binds us to one another. Here we ask whether how we mentally represent the scene in which another suffers informs our emotions. For example, when we learn about someone suffering outside of the here and now, such as a refugee devastated by violence or famine, does a manipulation potentiating our ability to simulate the scene around the victim heighten our empathic response? Expanding recent advances in the memory literature, we investigate the link between activating our ability to imagine events—episodic simulation—and empathy for in-group and out-group members in a series of online and laboratory studies (N = 1010). Incidental manipulations of episodic simulation, unrelated in content and structure to the empathy judgment task, increased overall empathy for both in-group as well as out-group members. This relationship was mediated by participant-generated episodic detail of the victim’s surroundings.

感受他人的感受的情感移情是一种强大的情感，使我们彼此绑定。在这里，我们问我们在心理上如何代表另一个人遭受苦难的场景是否会影响我们的情绪。例如，当我们得知某人在此时此地之外遭受苦难时，例如被暴力或饥荒摧毁的难民，进行了某种操纵，从而增强了我们模拟场景的能力在受害者周围增强我们的移情反应？扩展内存文献的最新进展，我们研究了在一系列在线和实验室研究中（N = 1010）激活想象事件的能力（事件仿真）与对小组内成员和小组外成员的同理心之间的联系。偶然模拟的偶然性操作，在内容和结构上与移情判断任务无关，增加了小组内成员和小组外成员的整体同理心。这种关系是由参与者生成的受害者周围环境的情节细节所调解的。