empathy Flashcards
three part model of empathy
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
affective/emotional empathy
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)
emotion sharing/emotion contagion
closest to “feeling into” another person
- related to mimcry
mimicry
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
auditory smiles
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)
simulation theory
we simulate other people’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
cognitive empathy
skills around understanding others’ internal states
sally ann task
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
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
the empathic accuracy task
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
positive relationships outcomes of empathic accuracy
satisfaction, targets feeling understood, adjustment
responsiveness
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
challenges to (and moderators of) accurate mentalizing
- how well do you know the target - associated moderators: closeness, familiarity, and similarity
- how well do you know yourself? - associated mental health moderators and emotion skill moderators, self perception biases
- how well can you suppress your current mental state
closeness, familiarity and similarity
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
mentalizing
understanding another’s mental state, measured with narrative, perspective taking tasks
empathic concern or prosocial motivation
reactive emotions which seem to motivate/facilitate helping behaviours
-sympathy, compassion, concern
compared to personal distress, which tends to distract from helping behaviours
self other merging
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
self concept clarity, self other merging, and empathy
katie banks paradigm
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
hypothetical support task cognitive empathy
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
challenges in studies of cognitive empathy
- moderated by closeness, familiarity, and similarity of target
- influenced by self knowledge (like study)
- influenced by emotion regulation abilities
prosocial motivation/empathic concern
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
why do people with low SCC have more personal distress in response to the katie banks paradigm
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
