empathy

Question 1

three part model of empathy

Answer 1

cognitive empathy:
refers to how well one understands another’s experience
- empathic accuracy
- mentalizing
- perspective taking

affective empathy:
- emotion contagion
- emotion sharing
- personal distress

prosocial motivation
- empathic concern
- helping behaviour

Question 2

affective/emotional empathy

Answer 2

most innate, bottom up phenomena in the empathic experience

facilitated by automatic mimicry of others’ expressions and behaviours - both literal mimicry (faces, smile sounds) and neural resonance (brains mirror one another)

Question 3

emotion sharing/emotion contagion

Answer 3

closest to “feeling into” another person
- related to mimcry

Question 4

mimicry

Answer 4

humans are known to reflexively mimic each other and this effect is apparent throughout the lifespan

research has found that we unconsciously react to other people’s emotions with similar muscle movements

Question 5

auditory smiles

Answer 5

ps heard snippets of French phonemes pronounced by someone while smiling or not smiling

found that ps showed more zygomatic muscle (used in smile) activity following a smile phoneme and less corrugator muscle activity (frown muscles)

Question 6

simulation theory

Answer 6

we simulate other people’s observed emotional experiences by recreating similar mental processes

Question 7

neural resonance

Answer 7

we “parallel” others’ emotions, engaging overlapping neural systems to experience one’s own vs. others’ emotions

Question 8

cognitive empathy

Answer 8

skills around understanding others’ internal states

Question 9

sally ann task

Answer 9

tests whether ps(usually young young kids) are capable of mentalizing/perspective taking

ps shown a comic with sally and ann
- sally hides a marble in the basket
- ann moves marble in the box while sally is out
- when sally comes back - ps asked where do you think sally will look for marble

• box = no mentalizing - not taking sally’s perspective - no understanding of what sally knows and doesn’t
• basket -able to perspective take

Question 10

empathic accuracy

Answer 10

can a perceiver accurately identify a target’s affective state, or accurately track it over time?

huge range of measurements: vignettes, rmet, eat

Question 11

the empathic accuracy task

Answer 11

targets record videos of them talking abt good and bad experiences, and then provide self report of how they were feeling in the videos

subjects (perceivers) come in and rate affect of target while watching video

correlation of rating represents the perceivers empathic accuracy for the target in that video

Question 12

positive relationships outcomes of empathic accuracy

Answer 12

satisfaction, targets feeling understood, adjustment

Question 13

responsiveness

Answer 13

the degree to which one’s partner attends to and supports another’s needs and goals

components:
- caring about the support seeker’s well being
- understanding the support seeker’s core self
- validating of the support seeker’s perspective

Question 14

challenges to (and moderators of) accurate mentalizing

Answer 14

1. how well do you know the target - associated moderators: closeness, familiarity, and similarity
2. how well do you know yourself? - associated mental health moderators and emotion skill moderators, self perception biases
3. how well can you suppress your current mental state

Question 15

closeness, familiarity and similarity

Answer 15

we are hardwired to care more for kin/ingroup

social closeness influences how richly we can represent targets internal states

we have a harder time projecting with dissimilar others because we cannot apply self knowledge to other’s situation

social distance inflyences our desire to know the other

Question 16

mentalizing

Answer 16

understanding another’s mental state, measured with narrative, perspective taking tasks

Question 17

empathic concern or prosocial motivation

Answer 17

reactive emotions which seem to motivate/facilitate helping behaviours

-sympathy, compassion, concern

compared to personal distress, which tends to distract from helping behaviours

Question 18

self other merging

Answer 18

we project ourselves into others, and merge our representations of the “other” and the “self” often

means that we see ourselves as closer to the people we are empathizing with

Question 19

self concept clarity, self other merging, and empathy

Question 20

katie banks paradigm

Answer 20

what makes us help vs not?
High SCC = more empathic concern and less personal distress = more likely to help katie banks (donate money)

low SCC=more personal distress and less empathic concern = less likely to help

Question 21

hypothetical support task cognitive empathy

Answer 21

individual differences in emotion clarity facilitated accuracy, and accuracy facilitated support
- self knowledge of emotions allowed you to be more accurate about others’ emotions, which made you better at supporting them

Question 22

challenges in studies of cognitive empathy

Answer 22

• moderated by closeness, familiarity, and similarity of target
• influenced by self knowledge (like study)
• influenced by emotion regulation abilities

Question 23

prosocial motivation/empathic concern

Answer 23

empathy motivates and informs helping behaviours
- some theorists believe that the only reason we help is because we feel badly ourselves - helping to reduce our own distress

Question 24

why do people with low SCC have more personal distress in response to the katie banks paradigm

Answer 24

more personal distress because they psychologically merged more with katie and interpreted the personal distress as being relevant to their own situation; become overwhelmed and withdraw