Dark Empaths and Digital Control: Why Understanding a Partner May Not Prevent Abuse

Research suggests that this ability can exist alongside controlling behaviour, making the connection between empathy and relationship safety more complicated than it first appears.

Being able to understand a partner's feelings can seem like a reassuring sign in a relationship, especially when someone notices emotional changes and recognises what causes distress. Research suggests that this ability can exist alongside controlling behaviour, making the connection between empathy and relationship safety more complicated than it first appears.

The study, "Dark Empaths and Intimate Partner Violence: A Latent Profile Analysis of Dark Tetrad Traits and Empathy Dimensions in Face-to-Face and Cyber Violence Perpetration," published in Behavioral Sciences, examined how combinations of personality traits and empathy relate to abuse. Manuel Galán and colleagues found preliminary evidence linking a pattern they called "Dark Cognitive Empath" with elevated digital monitoring and control, without establishing that empathy itself causes harmful behaviour.

Understanding Someone's Feelings Does Not Guarantee Care

The researchers separated empathy into two dimensions that describe different parts of our emotional lives. Cognitive empathy involves understanding another person's feelings and perspective; affective empathy involves emotionally connecting with or sharing those feelings.

Someone might recognise exactly why a partner feels frightened or upset without experiencing a strong emotional response to that distress. This distinction helps explain how an ability usually associated with kindness could coexist with harmful behaviour.

The study examined four personality traits collectively known as the Dark Tetrad: narcissism, involving entitlement and a need for admiration; Machiavellianism, involving calculated manipulation; psychopathy, involving callousness and impulsivity; and everyday sadism, involving enjoyment of another person's suffering. These were measured as personality tendencies, not clinical diagnoses.

Across the sample, higher scores on all four traits were associated with lower affective empathy. Cognitive empathy had almost no relationship with dark-trait scores, suggesting that understanding other people's emotions can remain intact in people reporting stronger harmful tendencies.

Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism had more consistent links with abusive behaviour than narcissism. Emotional empathy was associated with less physical violence, with little connection to digital monitoring and control.

Four Personality Patterns Emerged From the Survey

The researchers surveyed 324 adults aged 18 to 87, with an average age of approximately 27. Women made up 70.4% of participants, and 82.1% lived in Spain. Recruitment began through the researchers' personal networks, using WhatsApp to share a survey link that participants could pass to their contacts.

Participants completed questionnaires about personality, empathy, and their own behaviour toward partners or former partners. The measures covered physical and psychological aggression, sexual violence, digital abuse, and negotiation during relationship conflict.

A statistical method called latent profile analysis grouped people according to combinations of traits and empathy scores, producing four patterns:

• Empathic Non-Dark: 56 people with high empathy and low dark-trait scores.

• Typical: 166 people with average empathy and average dark-trait scores.

• Dark Cognitive Empath: 14 people with elevated dark traits and high cognitive empathy, without a matching elevation in affective empathy.

• Dark Non-Empathic: 88 people with elevated dark traits and low empathy.

The "Dark Cognitive Empath" label describes a provisional pattern within this sample, and the researchers caution against treating it as an established personality type. Its 14 members represented approximately 4.3% of participants, making conclusions about this group especially uncertain.

Digital Control and Face-to-Face Abuse Showed Different Patterns

The Dark Cognitive Empath group had the highest estimated score for digital monitoring and control, a category covering behaviours such as tracking a partner's online activity or checking when they last connected to an application.

Its score was significantly higher than those of the Empathic Non-Dark and Typical groups. The difference from the Dark Non-Empathic group was not statistically significant, and that group reported more digital monitoring and control than both lower-dark-trait groups.

These findings do not establish that dark cognitive empaths are uniquely controlling online or more dangerous than everyone else. The small group size makes it difficult to judge differences precisely, and a non-significant result cannot establish that two groups are equivalent.

Face-to-face physical violence showed its clearest elevation in the Dark Non-Empathic group, which scored significantly higher than the Empathic Non-Dark and Typical groups. The Dark Cognitive Empath group showed no statistically significant differences from the other groups on physical violence.

Both groups with elevated dark traits had higher estimated psychological aggression scores. The detailed results showed that the Dark Cognitive Empath group differed significantly from the Empathic Non-Dark group; the Dark Non-Empathic group differed from both lower-dark-trait groups.

Negotiation scores did not differ significantly across the four profiles, suggesting that reported constructive conflict skills did not neatly separate the groups. Additional checks addressing unusually high scores and separately accounting for age, sex, and relationship status left the main pattern largely unchanged.

What the Findings Can Tell Us About Empathy and Abuse

Understanding a partner's vulnerabilities could make manipulation easier when emotional concern is low, and online communication may hide signs of distress that could discourage harmful behaviour. These are possible explanations; the study did not show that participants deliberately used empathy to manipulate partners or establish what caused the abuse.

The authors suggest that programmes teaching perspective-taking should consider emotional concern, responsibility for harm, excuses for abuse, and controlling behaviour. No programmes were tested, so the findings cannot show whether empathy training helps prevent abuse or increases manipulation.

The sample consisted mainly of women and people living in Spain, recruited through connected social networks, which limits how widely the findings apply. Participants may have underreported harmful behaviour, some personality measures had limited reliability, and the Dark Cognitive Empath group contained only 14 people. Measures of sexual violence and direct online aggression were too unreliable to draw meaningful conclusions.