Lecture 7: Empathy and Prosocial Behaviour Flashcards
1
Q
empathy (5)
A
- “Other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone else”
- Other-oriented → must be directed to/for someone else
- Emotional response → must be feeling something
- Elicited by someone else → can’t just randomly be having a feeling
- Congruent → you’re feeling the same thing as the other person (e.g. if someone’s sad you’re not angry)
2
Q
affective empathy (6)
A
Composed of four components:
-
personal distress: feeling upset because you saw someone else in a bad situation (not feeling bad for/because of the other person)
- The bare minimum on the road to empathy
- emotional contagion: Picking up on someone else’s feelings; feeling something because someone else does without really knowing why (e.g. someone else starts laughing and you do too)
- sympathy: Feeling bad for somebody else (not emotion matching, true empathy)
- emapthy
3
Q
cognitive empathy (3)
A
- theory of mind
- perspective taking: putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes
- A mental (not emotional) understanding of what’s going on in someone’s head
4
Q
How do we learn empathy? (2)
A
- Parenting: perspective taking + inductive reasoning
- Emotion regulation
5
Q
learning empathy: parenting (4)
A
- Parenting that teaches perspective-taking skills is associated with empathy in children
- Inductive reasoning → points out the consequences of actions on others; teaching that other people matter
- e.g. “How would you feel if your sister hit you?”
-
Protection domain parenting → helping kids when they’re upset/distressed through comforting + helping them dealing with emotions
- Doings this models empathic behavior + promotes emotion regulation
6
Q
learning empathy: emotion regulation (11)
A
- Children: emotion regulation facilitates empathy + prosocial behaviour
- Adults: depends on the type of emotion regulation
Why emotion regulation?
- Seeing other people makes you feel bad → need to regulate negative affect as a response to others’ distress
- If you can’t regulate your own emotions, you can’t help the other person
- Can do this by suppression your own emotions → help
- Or reevaluating the situation to determine whether this person actually needs help → alleviate distress by minimizing situation
- Seen more as a tool to help achieve whatever goal you have
- Also influenced by your motivation
- Motivated → suppress + help
- Not motivated → reevaluate + escape
7
Q
Why is empathy a good thing? (13)
A
- Perspective-taking → put yourself in the place of another and feel what they feel
- If you can understand how someone else feels → more likely to see them as people and understand them, feel like they deserve basic rights, etc.
- Curtail the ingroup vs. outgroup, me vs. you tendencies
- Motivation for prosocial behavior → more likely to do something when we feel it’s the right thing to do
- Emotion, by and large, is the thing that mobilizes us
- But not as robust as we might think → only low to moderate positive associations between empathy and prosocial behavior
- Mediating variable: how much you’ve internalized prosocial behavioural values
- Determines which route you’re going to take (help vs. escape)
- Empathy is only the fuel in the tank, not the steering wheel for the direction of your action
- Also depends on how you measure empathy
- Toddlers → telling them a story, ask how they feel
- Kids/adolescents → self-reports or simulated situations
- Having them report their feelings in the heat of the moment is the best way to measure empathy
8
Q
Hepach, Vaish, & Tomasello (2013) (9)
(hint: 2s, helping)
A
- Are kids (2 y/o) motivated by selfish reasons?
- Out-of-reach helping task → adult reacher drops something and pretends that it’s out of reach
- 2-year-old got to help, somebody else helped, nobody helped
- Compared to see if kids are helping to get credit for it or for the sake of the person being helped
- Measured galvanic responses
- 2 y/os just as happy to see the person helped when someone else helped and when they themselves helped
- Nobody helped → stress response not alleviated
- Concluded that kids will help just for the sake of helping
- Kids tend to help regardless of if their parent is in the room
9
Q
problems with empathy (8)
A
- Can we really put ourselves in someone else’s shoes?
- Difficult to feel empathy for people who are dissimilar from us
- Can we even do it in the first place? It’s very mentally taxing
- Empathy towards whom?
- Who should we feel empathy towards in unfortunate situations?
- If you’re a doctor that needs to triage, how much should you be empathizing?
- Is empathy really the best approach when making moral decisions?
- Public policy, medical treatment, anything that requires resources
10
Q
Hein et al. (2016) (5)
(hint: MRI)
A
- MRI study; empathy towards in-group and out-group members
- Participants saw in-group or out-group members receiving painful electric shocks and rated their empathic response
- Participants received shocks and were helped by either in-group or out-group (gave money to stop the shocks)
- Participants had greater empathy for out-group members after receiving help from them
- Demonstrates how empathy is in-group biased
11
Q
prosocial behaviour (3)
A
- Actions that benefit another
- Helping, sharing, donating (time and/or money), etc.
- Females tend to be naturally more prosocial than males
12
Q
debates about prosocial behaviour motivation (3)
A
- Does it have to be for welfare of the other?
- Can I do it for self-serving reasons?
- Can empathy be somewhere in the middle?
13
Q
prosocial behaviour and young children (5)
A
- Young children have a natural propensity for helping and sharing
- Infants (as young as 6 mos) preferred helpers to hinderers
- Sharing starts to be reciprocal around age 3 years
- Toddlers happier when giving treats vs. getting them, even at cost to themselves
- Toddlers (upwards of 6 mos) help spontaneously in a wide variety of situations
14
Q
benefits of prosocial behaviour (7)
A
- Associated with positive outcomes
- Prosocial spending → happiness
- Volunteering → happiness, self-esteem
- Sharing → better social relationships
- But depends on why you’re being prosocial
- Self-determination theory → need satisfaction
- Happier doing things when it’s autonomous, makes you feel competent
15
Q
prosocial spending (7)
A
- Spending money on others → gifts and/or charitable donations
- Depends on who the recipient is
- Friends + family → fulfills need for relatedness → happier
- Depends on the impact
- More specific cause → feels better about donating
- Depends on your mood
- Better mood + happier → more prosocial in general
