Empathic mediation of helping: A two-stage model.

Proposes a 2-stage model of empathic mediation of helping behavior, which holds that taking the perspective of a person in need increases empathic emotion; this in turn increases helping. Ss in 2 experiments learned of another person's need from taped radio broadcasts and were subsequently given an opportunity to offer help to that person. The experiments used different strategies for manipulating empathic emotional response to the other's plight. In Exp I, using 44 male and female undergraduates, the empathic emotion of some Ss was experimentally reduced by a misattribution of arousal technique; in Exp II, using 33 female undergraduates, the empathic emotion of some Ss was experimentally increased by a false feedback of arousal technique. Results of each experiment support the proposed model. Ss who experienced the most empathic emotion also offered the most help. Results of Exp I indicate that perspective taking did not directly affect helping; it affected helping only through its effect on empathic emotion. Motivational implications are discussed. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information function of empathic emotion: Learning that we value the other's welfare.

Empathic feelings arise when a person values another's welfare and perceives the other to be in need. As a result, level of empathic response can be used to infer how much one values the welfare of a person in need. Four experiments were conducted to test these ideas. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that a similarity manipulation led to increased valuing of a similar person's welfare and, in turn, to increased empathy when this person was in need. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that direct manipulations of empathy (perspective-taking instructions, or false physiological arousal feedback) led to increased empathy and, in turn, to increased valuing of the welfare of the person in need. Once induced, this valuing was a relatively stable disposition; it remained even after empathy had declined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Specificity of empathy-induced helping: Evidence for altruistic motivation.

This experiment investigated altruistic vs. egoistic interpretations of the effect of empathic concern on helping. The empathy–altruism hypothesis posits that empathic concern arouses an altruistic motivation to relieve the distress of another person; the negative state relief interpretation proposes that the effect of empathic concern is mediated by sadness, which produces an egoistic motivation to reduce one's own unpleasant state. 96 male and 96 female Ss first listened with an imagine or observe set to another person's problem and then were given an opportunity to help that person with the same problem or with a different problem. Consistent with the empathy–altruism hypothesis, imagine-set Ss helped more often than did observe-set Ss for the same problem but not for a different one. In addition, only empathic concern associated with the specific problem related to helping. Although sadness was related to helping, it did not account for the effect of empathic concern. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Helping skills training for undergraduates: Outcomes and prediction of outcomes.

The authors examined outcomes and predictors of outcomes for 85 undergraduates in 3 helping skills classes. After training, trainees used more exploration skills in helping sessions with classmates (as assessed by perceptions of helpees and helpers/trainees as well as behavioral counts of skills), were perceived by helpees as more empathic, talked less in sessions, conducted better sessions (from helpee and helper/trainee perspectives), and reported higher self-efficacy for using helping skills. In addition, trainees' confidence increased while learning exploration skills, dropped while learning insight skills, and then increased again while learning action skills. The authors were not able to predict outcome from the variables used (grade-point average, empathic concern and perspective taking, perfectionism). Suggestions for training and future research on training are included. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reinterpreting the empathy–altruism relationship: When one into one equals oneness.

Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathy–altruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self–other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness—a measure of perceived self-other overlap—was considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy–altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social evaluation and the empathy–altruism hypothesis.

Tested the claim of R. L. Archer et al (see record 1982-05783-001) that empathy leads to increased helping only under socially evaluative circumstances. In Exp I, 22 female undergraduates were led to believe that no one (including the person in need) would ever know if they declined to help. In this situation, which was designed to be devoid of the potential for negative social evaluation for not helping, there was still a positive relationship between self-reported empathic emotion and offering help. In Exp II, empathy (low vs high) and social evaluation (low vs high) were manipulated with 32 Ss. Once again there was a positive relationship between empathy and offering help when the potential for social evaluation was low as well as high. Results of both studies suggest that the motivation to help evoked by empathy is not egoistic motivation to avoid negative social evaluation. Instead, the observed pattern was what would be expected if empathy evokes altruistic motivation to reduce the victim's need. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Family roots of empathy-related characteristics: The role of perceived maternal and paternal need support in adolescence.

Theories on empathy development have stressed the role of socialization in general and the role of parental support in particular. This 3-wave longitudinal study of middle adolescents (N = 678) aimed to contribute to the extant research on the socialization of empathy (a) by examining the relative contribution of perceived maternal and paternal need supportive parenting on over-time changes in adolescents' emotional and cognitive aspects of empathy (i.e., empathic concern and perspective taking, respectively) and (b) by considering the possibility of reciprocal relations between perceived parenting and adolescent empathy. Whereas paternal need support consistently predicted over-time changes in perspective taking in both sons and daughters, perceived maternal need support predicted changes in empathic concern among daughters only. In addition, although less consistently so, empathy dimensions also predicted over-time changes in perceived parenting. Results are discussed in terms of the nature of empathy and in the light of domain-specific effects of each parent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Altruism reconsidered: The effect of denying feedback on a victim's status to empathic witnesses.

Th empathy–altruism hypothesis interprets the empathy–helping link as evidence of true altruism. The negative state relief model interprets the same relation as an artifact of egoistic sadness-reduction. Neither view expresses the possibility that empathic concern reflects a general sensitivity to the emotional state of the victim and a specific sensitivity to vicarious joy at the resolution of the victim's needs. It is proposed that the prospect of empathic joy, conveyed by feedback (FB) from the help recipient, is essential to the special tendency of empathic witnesses to help. In neither of the alternative models does goal attainment depend on FB. Results of an experimental contrast were consistent with the empathic joy hypothesis and inconsistent with the alternatives. Empathically aroused witnesses offered help reliably to a person in distress only when they expected FB on the result; when denied FB, empathic witnesses were no more likely to help than their nonempathic counterparts. In contrast, nonempathic witnesses were unaffected by the availability of FB in deciding whether to help. Implications of an empathic joy-based motive are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Agreeableness, empathy, and helping: A person × situation perspective.

This research program explored links among prosocial motives, empathy, and helping behavior. Preliminary work found significant relations among components of self-reported empathy and personality (N = 223). In Study 1, the authors examined the generality of prosocial behavior across situations and group memberships of victims (N = 622). In Study 2, empathic focus and the victim's outgroup status were experimentally manipulated (N = 87). Study 3 (N = 245) replicated and extended Study 2 by collecting measures of prosocial emotions before helping. In Study 4 (N = 244), empathic focus and cost of helping as predictors of helping behavior were experimentally manipulated. Overall, prosocial motivation is linked to (a) Agreeableness as a dimension of personality, (b) proximal prosocial cognition and motives, and (c) helping behavior across a range of situations and victims. In persons low in prosocial motivation, when costs of helping are high, efforts to induce empathy situationally can undermine prosocial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"All in a Day's Work": How Follower Individual Differences and Justice Perceptions Predict OCB Role Definitions and Behavior.

The authors draw on theories of social exchange and prosocial behavior to explain how employee perceptions of procedural justice and individual differences in reciprocation wariness, empathic concern, and perspective taking function jointly as determinants of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) role definitions and behavior. As hypothesized, empirical findings from a field study show both direct and interactive effects of procedural justice perceptions and individual differences on OCB role definition. In turn, OCB role definitions not only predict OCB directly but also moderate the effects of procedural justice perceptions on OCB. The authors explore the implications of these findings for practice as well as research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Critical self-reflection and self-perceived altruism: When self-reward fails.

Social learning theory has produced a three-step model of prosocial development: In the young child, prosocial behavior is elicited by material rewards; in the older child, it is elicited also by social rewards; and in the morally mature adult, it is elicited by self-rewards based on an internalized perception of oneself as a kind, caring, altruistic individual. Self-perception theory has complicated this social learning model by demonstrating that once the third step is reached, the continued presence of material and social rewards may undermine intrinsic prosocial motivation based on self-rewards, producing moral regression. We propose a further complication. Critical self-reflection—the desire to know thyself—may introduce a self-deprecating attributional bias that can undermine self-perceived altruism, even following helping for which one receives only intrinsic self-rewards. Two experiments are reported in which we manipulated critical self-reflection on one's reasons for helping. Results indicated that self-reflection undermined self-perceived altruism, especially when the salience of the self-rewards for helping was high. Experiment 2 also provided evidence that, as predicted, this self-reflection effect was most apparent for individuals who valued self-knowledge more highly than concern for others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Back (or forward?) to the future: The role of perscpective in temporal language comprehension.

Linguists have noted that 2 distinct movement perspectives are implicit in English temporal expressions: a 1st in which events are stationary relative to a moving observer (the moving-ego perspective) and a 2nd in which events move relative to a stationary observer (the moving-time perspective). Two experiments are reported that investigated the role of these perspectives in temporal language comprehension. Experiment 1 used a paradigm in which the comprehension of a target temporal sentence could potentially be facilitated or disrupted by the perspective implied by prior context. In Experiment 2, prior context was manipulated in a similar fashion in an effort to influence participants' interpretations of ostensibly ambiguous temporal statements. The results of both experiments suggest that people do use perspective information when they encounter moving-ego and moving-time temporal sentences in discourse. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias.

Five experiments investigated the hypothesis that perspective taking—actively contemplating others' psychological experiences—attenuates automatic expressions of racial bias. Across the first 3 experiments, participants who adopted the perspective of a Black target in an initial context subsequently exhibited more positive automatic interracial evaluations, with changes in automatic evaluations mediating the effect of perspective taking on more deliberate interracial evaluations. Furthermore, unlike other bias-reduction strategies, the interracial positivity resulting from perspective taking was accompanied by increased salience of racial inequalities (Experiment 3). Perspective taking also produced stronger approach-oriented action tendencies toward Blacks (but not Whites; Experiment 4). A final experiment revealed that face-to-face interactions with perspective takers were rated more positively by Black interaction partners than were interactions with nonperspective takers—a relationship that was mediated by perspective takers' increased approach-oriented nonverbal behaviors (as rated by objective, third-party observers). These findings indicate that perspective taking can combat automatic expressions of racial biases without simultaneously decreasing sensitivity to ongoing racial disparities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Empathy-based helping: Is it selflessly or selfishly motivated?

A substantial body of evidence collected by Batson and his associates has advanced the idea that pure (i.e., selfless) altruism occurs under conditions of empathy for a needy other. An egoistic alternative account of this evidence was proposed and tested in our work. We hypothesized that an observer's heightened empathy for a sufferer brings with it increased personal sadness in the observer and that it is the egoistic desire to relieve the sadness, rather than the selfless desire to relieve the sufferer, that motivates helping. Two experiments contrasted predictions from the selfless and egoistic alternatives in the paradigm typically used by Batson and his associates. In the first, an empathic orientation to a victim increased personal sadness, as expected. Furthermore, when sadness and empathic emotion were separated experimentally, helping was predicted by the levels of sadness subjects were experiencing but not by their empathy scores. In the second experiment, enhanced sadness was again associated with empathy for a victim. However, subjects who were led to perceive that their moods could not be altered through helping (because of the temporary action of a "mood-fixing" placebo drug) were not helpful, despite high levels of empathic emotion. The results were interpreted as providing support for an egoistically based interpretation of helping under conditions of high empathy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Empathic embarrassment: Situational and personal determinants of reactions to the embarrassment of another.

Two experiments investigated the reactions of observers to actors' embarrassments. The first study manipulated the nature of the prior interaction between actor and observer (cooperative, competitive, or independent) and the observational set of the observer (empathic or nonempathic). The observers' self-reports and measures of their skin potentials indicated that an empathic set and any prior interaction generally increased their responsiveness to the actors' plight. Moreover, independent, empathic observers reported reactions that appear to be empathic embarrassment, embarrassment felt with another even though one's own social identity is not threatened. The second study showed that empathic embarrassment is strongest in subjects of high embarrassability who are chronically susceptible to embarrassment. The results portray social embarrassment as a robust, pervasive phenomenon that nevertheless affects some people more than others. The possible origins of empathic embarrassment and the joint influences of perception, interaction, and personality on the experience of empathic embarrassment are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The meaning and impact of empathic relationships in hospice nursing

This naturalistic field study was designed to explore the patient's perspective of the nature, meaning, and impact of empathic relationships with hospice nurses. The findings are part of a larger study, focused on the meaning and impact of empathic relationships that develop between hospice nurses and their patients. Data were generated through in-depth interviews with 14 terminally ill adults receiving home-based hospice care. According to the hospice patient, an empathic relationship developed through a process of reciprocal sharing and revealing of personhood within a context of caring and acceptance. The experience of an empathic relationship meant being acknowledged as an individual, a person of value. The outcome of the empathic relationships between hospice nurses and their patients was the improvement and maintenance of patients' physical and emotional well-being. Understanding the patient's perspective is critical for effective nursing interventions and meaningful outcomes. Future research needs to explore empathic relationships between the nurse and family caregivers in various settings.     

Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation?

Tested the hypothesis that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help. 44 female college students watched another female undergraduate receive electric shocks and were then given a chance to help her by taking the remaining shocks themselves. In each of 2 experiments, Ss' empathic emotion (low vs high) and their ease of escape from continuing to watch the victim suffer if they did not help (easy vs difficult) were manipulated in a 2?×?2 design. It was reasoned that if empathy led to altruistic motivation, Ss feeling a high degree of empathy for the victim should be as ready to help when escape without helping was easy as when it was difficult. But if empathy led to egoistic motivation, Ss feeling empathy should be more ready to help when escape was difficult than when it was easy. Results followed the former pattern when empathy was high and the latter pattern when empathy was low, supporting the hypothesis that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Empathy and the collective good: Caring for one of the others in a social dilemma.

We predicted that feeling empathy for another member of the collective in a social dilemma would create an altruistic desire to allocate resources to that person as an individual, reducing collective good. To test this prediction, 2 studies were run. In each, participants faced a dilemma in which they could choose to benefit themselves, the group, or other group members as individuals. In Study 1, empathy for another group member was manipulated; in Study 2, naturally occurring empathic response was determined by self-report. In both studies, participants who experienced high empathy allocated more resources to the target of empathy, reducing the overall collective good. These results suggest the importance of considering self-interest, collective interest, and other-interest (altruism) as three distinct motives, each of which may operate in social dilemmas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-focused attention and helping behavior.

Conducted 4 experiments that examined the role of self-directed attention in prosocial behavior. In the 1st 2 experiments, in which only focus of attention was varied, self-awareness had a debilitating impact on prosocial behavior. In subsequent research, conditions were created under which self-focus enhanced prosocial behavior. Two such conditions are identified, both of which concern whether the potential helper is likely to focus on helping-relevant values at the moment the opportunity to help arises: (a) The situation must clearly set off an orientation toward acting on a value of helping; that is, the cue to help must be legitimate as well as salient. (b) The person who is called upon to act prosocially must not come into the helping situation with a personal preoccupation that would be inimical to thinking about helping. The research is discussed in terms of its relevance to the early thinking of the symbolic interactionist school, and it is oriented around the theory of self-awareness. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)