ABC News: Trolls understand what hurts people but they simply don’t care. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwp6v8tzU
Cognitive empathy is the ability to recognise and understand other people’s emotions. But affective empathy is the ability to experience and internalise other people’s emotions.
Put simply, cognitive empathy is the ability to predict how another person will feel and affective empathy is sharing the emotional experience.
As expected, people who were more likely to troll had significantly lower levels of affective empathy.
Surprisingly, people with high levels of cognitive empathy and psychopathic traits were more likely to troll.
In other words, their high level of cognitive empathy indicates they are very good at understanding what hurts people, and their high level of psychopathy means they simply don’t care.