17- Empathy Flashcards
1- What is empathy? What is the three part model of empathy?
“EINFUHLUNG”
– IN-FEELING OR FEELING INTO
DEFINITIONS OF EMPATHY
* An affective response more appropriate to someone else’s situation than to
one’s own (Hoffman, 1987)
* The drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion (Baron-Cohen, 2002)
3 part model:
COGNITIVE EMPATHY
Empathic accuracy
Mentalizing
Perspective taking
AFFECTIVE EMPATHY
Emotion contagion
Emotion Sharing
Personal Distress
PROSOCIAL
MOTIVATION
Empathic concern
Helping behavior
all interconnected
2- Affective/emotional empathy
AFFECTIVE/EMOTIONAL
EMPATHY
EMOTION SHARING/EMOTION CONTAGION
- Closest to ”feeling into” another person
- How?
- Mimicry: Reflexive,
Apparent throughout the lifespan (ex: yawning when someone else does, babies copying facial expressions)
-PRIMITIVE EMOTION CONTAGION
1. both neutral
2. A smiles
3. makes B smile
4. which makes A smile more
-AUDITORY SMILES
* Arias, Belin, & Acouturier, 2018
* Heard snippets of French
phonemes pronounced by
someone while smiling or not
smiling
* Zygomatic muscles = smiling
* Corrugator muscles = frowning
Results:
only micro movements of zygomatic muscles when hearing someone smile, no corrugator muscles when hearing anger sadness or irony
-EXPERIENCE SHARING PROCESSES
Simulation theory: simulate other’s observed emotional experiences by recreating similar mental processes
Neural resonance: we “parallel” others’ emotions, engaging overlapping
neural systems to experience one’s own vs. others’ emotions
SUMMARY – AFFECTIVE EMPATHY
* Automatic, reflexive process where target’s emotions “spread to” or are
“mirrored by” a perceiver
* Perceiver simulates target’s emotional experience -> neural resonance ->
emotion contagion
3- Cognitive empathy or mentalizing
Humans deliberately attempt to
* Reason about (other’s) mental states
* Attribute mental states to others
- E.g., “John went (must have gone) into the
kitchen because he’s hungry”
Task stimuli based on narratives
* “If X believes Y, how will he/she behave in
situation Z?”
Sally-Ann task
Sally puts marble in basket, then leaves. Ann moves marble into box. When Sally comes back, where will she look first? Children often think “box”, because they know it’s there. But most adults can guess what Sally would think, since she doesn’t know the marble was moved.
EMPATHIC ACCURACY
* Can a “perceiver” accurately
identify a “target’s” affective
state, or accurately track it
over time
* Huge range of measurements:
* Vignettes
* RMET
* EAT
-ex: guessing emotions just by looking at the eyes
-empathic accuracy task: target of empathy talks about/views idk positive and negative events, and then rate affect (emotion) over time. Then perceiver rates what they think the other person felt at different moments in time. Then time-series correlation
??? i think
DOES ACCURACY MATTER?
* Empathic accuracy has been associated with a variety of positive relationship
outcomes, across the various forms of measurement
- Satisfaction
- Targets feeling understood
- Adjustment
EMOTION CLARITY, ACCURACY, AND SOCIAL
SUPPORT (GREGORY, ANDERSON, & GABLE, 2020)
* N=167 adults in romantic relationships
* Measured emotional clarity – understanding of the nature and path of one’s
own emotions (TMMS Clarity Subscale)
* Manipulation:
* Vignettes: Frustration, guilt, worry, and sadness
* Emotion accuracy scale – Frustration & anger, guilt & shame, worry & fear, sad &
depressed, and hurt, jealousy, boredom, & disgust
RESPONSIVENESS TO SELF
* Responsiveness - the degree to which one partner “attends to and supports
another’s needs and goals” (Reis & Gable, 2015)
* Components of responsiveness:
- Caring about the support seeker’s well being
- Understanding of the support seeker’s core self
- Validating of the support seeker’s perspective
VIGNETTE EXAMPLE - FRUSTRATION
“The personnel office at work keeps misplacing my forms for health insurance! I
have to fill this all out again and turn it in tomorrow. They were really sorry and I
know I’ll definitely get covered, but the forms won’t be processed until after the
holidays because of their mistakes. I can’t believe they were so incompetent and
there is nothing I can do about it.”
High:
“I understand why this situation is frustrating for you, especially since you made sure you got the application form to them in a timely manner. How about I help fill out the application so you can get it back to them tomorrow. Mistakes happen but at least this is something that we can address and it’s not the end of the world.”
Low:
“Well that is the way it goes sometimes. You just have to move on.”
“Next time just keep important papers on or near your desk. That is how I keep up with my papers.”
Results:
Clarity to accuracy= 0.40
Accuracy to responsiveness= 0.30
Clarity to responsiveness= 0.13
CHALLENGES TO (AND MODERATORS OF)
ACCURATE MENTALIZING
(Mitchell, 2008)
1. How well do you know the target?
1. Associated moderators: closeness, familiarity, and
similarity
CLOSENESS, FAMILIARITY
& SIMILARITY
* “Hardwired” to care more for kin/in-group
* Social closeness influence how richly we can represent target’s internal states
(Preston & De Wall)
* We have harder time projecting with dissimilar others b/c we cannot apply self-knowledge to other’s situation (Mitchell)
* Social distance influences our desire to know the other (Zaki)
* Strangers are stressful…
2. How well do you know yourself?
1. Associated mental health moderators and emotion
skill moderators
2. Self-perception biases
3. How well can you suppress your current
mental state?
SUMMARY - COGNITIVE EMPATHY
* Cognitive empathy = skills around understanding others’ internal states
* Mentalizing = understanding another’s mental state, measured with narrative, perspective taking tasks
* Mentalizing important for learning
* Empathic accuracy = decoding what another person is feeling, measured by presenting verbal, non-verbal, or contextual information about a target & assessing response accuracy
* Empathic accuracy important for relationship outcomes
4- Prosocial motivation or empathetic concern
EMPATHETIC CONCERN
* Reactive emotions which seem to motivate/facilitate
helping behaviours (Batson, 1987)
* Sympathy
* Compassion
* Concern
* Sometimes grouped into emotional empathy – but otheroriented
CAN HUMANS BE ALTRUISTIC?
* Is it still self-oriented to feel empathic concern?
* We project ourselves into others, and merge our representations of the “other” and the
“self” often – think about past lectures
* If I help someone who I have merged with, is it altruistic?
* Cialdini et al., 1997 demonstrated that when you control for self-other merging, empathic
concern did not predict helping
WHAT IS SELF-OTHER MERGING?
how distinguishable/merging your self is from others
* And when is it helpful?
* What influences our vulnerability to merging with others?
* Self-concept clarity?
SELF-CONCEPT CLARITY, SELF-OTHER MERGING,
AND EMPATHY (KROL & BARTZ, 2021)
See graph! Can’t put into words!
KATIE BANKS PARADIGM
* “Radio broadcast” about Katie Banks
* Includes a plea for help from “Katie”
* Participants rate their empathic response & self-other merging
* Empathic Concern = compassionate, sympathetic, moved, warm, softhearted, tender (Batson, 1987)
* Personal Distress = worried, alarmed, grieved, troubled, distressed,
perturbed, upset, disturbed (Batson, 1987)
* Immersion of Other in the Self Scale (Myers & Hodges, 2012)
* Given a small bonus payment, can choose how much to donate
Participants engaged in the Katie Banks Paradigm
They also completed individual difference measures:
* Self-Concept Clarity Scale (Campbell et al., 1996)
* Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965)
See results in graphs (can’t put into words…)
SUMMARY - PROSOCIAL MOTIVATION
* Empathy can motivate us to help others in distress
* This isn’t necessarily altruistic – it’s to make ourselves feel better
* Clear boundaries between the “self” and the “other” are important for mature empathic responding
5- How do they all relate? The big picture of empathy
Affective empathy to cognitive empathy:
* Provides information
- You’re feeling what they
are feeling
Cognitive empathy to affective empathy:
* Informs a more accurate
simulation
- Share the correct
emotion
Cognitive empathy to prosocial motivation:
* What am I helping with?
- More effective
support/help
Affective empathy to prosocial motivation:
* Why should I help?
- Make myself feel
better
Example of Taylor and Jason watching movie Bambie
Taylor’s mother died recently, and seeing the death in the movie is making her cry
If Jason has high cognitive empathy, but low affective empathy
* How will he identify her emotions?
* Why would he help?
Knows why she is upset, but doesn’t feel her emotions or doesn’t care
If he has high affective empathy, low cognitive empathy
* Could become overwhelmed with PD
- Withdraw instead of helping her
* Could misread the emotion she’s expressing
* Support/soothing could be ineffective (miss the mark)
cares, but maybe about the wrong thing
- Cognitive empathy likely informs affective empathy (simulation)
- Affective empathy likely informs cognitive empathy (mirroring other’s emotions
could make you more accurate) - Both are likely important for concern
- You need to care (affective)
- You need to know what you are caring about (cognitive)
6- Empathy summary
EMPATHY SUMMARY
* Empathy is a complex, multifaceted, psychological
construct
* Involves 1) experience sharing, 2) mentalizing/empathic
accuracy, and 3) prosocial behavior
* Likely that 1 and 2 are fairly distinct but both contribute to
ultimate behaviors
* Future work needed to investigate the interactions
between these two processes
* Self-other overlap and distinction also important
* Empathy can be costly but nonetheless we seem
hardwired to “have an emotional stake in the other’s
welfare” (de Waal, 2008)
