Empathy

From New World Encyclopedia
Hugging someone who is hurt is a signal of empathy.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, by placing oneself (mentally) in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others (and others' emotions in particular).

While empathy is generally considered a positive trait, facilitating the formation of good relationships and bringing pleasure as one's understanding and experience of life is increased, it can also lead to problems. Too much empathy can lead to a loss of sense of self, flawed decision making, and emotional fatigue particularly among health care workers. A balance between empathetic understanding of others and awareness of one's own sense of self and values is needed for a healthy and fulfilling life.

Etymology

The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια empatheia, meaning "physical affection or passion"). That word derives from ἐν (en, "in, at") and πάθος (pathos, "passion" or "suffering").[1] Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term Einfühlung ("feeling into") to psychology in 1903,[2] and Edward B. Titchener translated Einfühlung into English as "empathy" in 1909.[3]

Definitions

Being there for another

Since its introduction into the English language, empathy has had a wide range of (sometimes conflicting) definitions among both researchers and laypeople.[4] Empathy definitions encompass a broad range of phenomena, including caring for other people and having a desire to help them; experiencing emotions that match another person's emotions; discerning what another person is thinking or feeling; and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.[5]

Related concepts

Compassion and sympathy are terms associated with empathy. A person feels compassion when they notice others are in need, and this feeling motivates that person to help. Like empathy, compassion has a wide range of definitions and purported facets (which overlap with some definitions of empathy).[6] Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need. Some include in sympathy an empathic concern for another person, and the wish to see them better off or happier.[7]

Empathy is also related to pity.[8][7] One feels pity towards others who might be in trouble or in need of help. This feeling is described as "feeling sorry" for someone.

Classification

There are two major types of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy.[9] Affective and cognitive empathy are independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another's perspective.

Affective empathy

Also called emotional empathy, affective empathy is the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.[10] Our ability to empathize emotionally is based on emotional contagion, being affected by another's emotional or arousal state.[11]

Affective empathy can be subdivided as follows:[10][12]

  • Empathic concern

Empathic concern is evidenced as sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.[10][13]

  • Personal distress

People often experience feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering.[10][13] However, there is no consensus regarding whether personal distress is a form of empathy or instead is something distinct from empathy.[8] There may be a developmental aspect to this subdivision. Infants respond to the distress of others by getting distressed themselves; only when they are two years old do they start to respond in other-oriented ways: trying to help, comfort, and share.

  • Affective mentalizing

People may use clues like body language, facial expressions, knowledge about the other's beliefs, situation, and context to understand more about their empathetic feelings.[2]

  • Empathic Anger

Empathic anger is an emotion, a form of empathic distress. It is felt in a situation where someone else is being hurt by another person or thing.[14] Empathic anger affects desires both to help and to punish.

  • Empathic Distress

Empathic distress is feeling the perceived pain of another person. This feeling can be transformed into empathic anger, feelings of injustice, or guilt. These emotions can be perceived as pro-social. However, views differ as to whether they serve as motives for moral behavior.[14][15]

Cognitive empathy

Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another's perspective or mental state.[16][10] Although measures of cognitive empathy include self-report questionnaires and behavioral measures, a 2019 meta-analysis found only a negligible association between self-report and behavioral measures, suggesting that people are generally not able to accurately assess their own cognitive empathy abilities.[17]

Cognitive empathy can be subdivided as follows:[10][12]

  • Perspective-taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt others' psychological perspectives.
  • Fantasy: the tendency to identify with fictional characters.<
  • Tactical (or strategic) empathy: the deliberate use of perspective-taking to achieve certain desired ends.
  • Emotion regulation: a damper on the emotional contagion process that allows you to empathize without being overwhelmed by the emotion you are empathizing with.[18]

The scientific community has not coalesced around a precise definition of these constructs, but there is consensus about this distinction.[19]

Measurement

Efforts to measure empathy go back to at least the mid-twentieth century, and researchers have approach it from a number of perspectives.

Behavioral measures normally involve raters assessing the presence or absence of certain behaviors, both verbal and non-verbal, in the subjects they are monitoring. Both verbal and non-verbal behaviors have been captured on video by experimenters. Other experimenters have required subjects to comment upon their own feelings and behaviors, or those of other people involved in the experiment, as indirect ways of signaling their level of empathic functioning.

Physiological responses tend to be captured by electronic equipment that has been physically connected to the subject's body. Researchers may then draw inferences about that person's empathic reactions from the electronic readings produced.

Subjects may be asked to read scenarios or watch video scenarios (either staged or authentic) and make written responses which are then assessed for their levels of empathy.

Picture or puppet-story indices for empathy have been adopted to enable even very young, pre-school subjects to respond without needing to read questions and write answers.

Self-report measures

Measures of empathy often require subjects to self-report upon their own ability or capacity for empathy, using Likert-style numerical responses to a printed questionnaire that may have been designed to reveal the affective, cognitive-affective, or largely cognitive substrates of empathic functioning. However, a 2019 meta analysis questions the validity of self-report measures of cognitive empathy, finding that such self-report measures have negligibly small correlations with corresponding behavioral measures.[17]

Such measures are also vulnerable to measuring not empathy but the difference between a person's felt empathy and their standards for how much empathy is appropriate. For example, students scored themselves as less empathetic after taking a class discussing empathy. After learning more about empathy, the students became more exacting in how they judged their own feelings and behavior, expected more from themselves, and so rated themselves more severely.[2]

The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is among the oldest published measurement tools still in frequent use (first published in 1983) that provides a multi-dimensional assessment of empathy. It comprises a self-report questionnaire of 28 items, divided into four seven-item scales covering the subdivisions of affective and cognitive empathy described above.[10][12] More recent self-report tools include The Empathy Quotient (EQ), which comprises a self-report questionnaire consisting of 60 items.[20] Another multi-dimensional scale is the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE, first published in 2011).[21]

The Empathic Experience Scale is a 30-item questionnaire that measures empathy from a phenomenological perspective on intersubjectivity, which provides a common basis for the perceptual experience (vicarious experience dimension) and a basic cognitive awareness (intuitive understanding dimension) of others' emotional states.[22]

It is difficult to make comparisons over time using such questionnaires because of how language changes. For example, one study using a single questionnaire to measure 13,737 college students between 1979 and 2009 found that empathy scores fell substantially over that time. A critic noted these results could be because the wording of the questionnaire had become anachronistically quaint (it used idioms no longer in common use, like "tender feelings," "ill at ease," "quite touched," or "go to pieces," that today's students might not identify with).[23]

Influence on helping behavior

Investigators into the social response to natural disasters researched the characteristics associated with individuals who help victims. Researchers found that cognitive empathy, rather than emotional empathy, predicted helping behavior towards victims.[24] Taking on the perspectives of others (cognitive empathy) may allow these helpers to better empathize with victims without as much discomfort, whereas sharing the emotions of the victims (emotional empathy) can cause emotional distress, helplessness, and victim-blaming, and may lead to avoidance rather than helping.[25]

Empathy-induced altruism may not always produce pro-social effects. For example, it could lead one to exert oneself on behalf of those for whom empathy is felt at the expense of other potential pro-social goals, thus inducing a type of bias. Researchers suggest that individuals are willing to act against the greater collective good or to violate their own moral principles of fairness and justice if doing so will benefit a person for whom empathy is felt.[26]

Therapeutic programs to foster altruistic impulses by encouraging perspective-taking and empathic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, especially in the long-term. Empathy-induced altruism can improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups, racial attitudes, and actions toward people with AIDS, the homeless, and convicts. Such resulting altruism also increases cooperation in competitive situations.[27]

Empathy is good at prompting prosocial behaviors that are informal, unplanned, and directed at someone who is immediately present, but is not as good at prompting more abstractly-considered, long-term prosocial behavior.[28]

Development

Ontogenetic development

By the age of two, children normally begin to exhibit fundamental behaviors of empathy by having an emotional response that corresponds with another person's emotional state.[29] Even earlier, at one year of age, infants have some rudiments of empathy; they understand that, as with their own actions, other people's actions have goals.[30] Toddlers sometimes comfort others or show concern for them. Although children as young as 18 months to two years are capable of showing some signs of empathy, including attempting to comfort a crying baby, most do not demonstrate a full theory of mind until around the age of four. Theory of mind involves the ability to understand that other people may have beliefs that are different from one's own, and is thought to involve the cognitive component of empathy.[16]

According to researchers at the University of Chicago who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), children between the ages of seven and twelve, when seeing others being injured, experience brain activity similar that which would occur if the child themself had been injured.[31] Their findings are consistent with previous fMRI studies of pain empathy with adults, and previous findings that vicarious experiencing, particularly of others' distress, is hardwired and present early in life. The research also found additional areas of the brain, associated with social and moral cognition, were activated when young people saw another person intentionally hurt by somebody, including regions involved in moral reasoning.[31]

Sex differences

It has been found that, on average, females score higher than males on measures of empathy, such as the Empathy Quotient (EQ)[32] However, other studies show no significant sex differences, and instead suggest that gender differences could be the result of motivational differences, such as upholding stereotypes.[32][33]

Environmental influences

Some researchers have theorized that environmental factors, such as parenting style and relationships, affect the development of empathy in children.

Learning by teaching helps to develop empathy. The method of having students teach other students has been present since antiquity, often due to lack of resources. In the early nineteenth century, the Monitorial System was developed in parallel by Scotsman Andrew Bell who had worked in Madras and Joseph Lancaster who worked in London; each attempted to educate masses of poor children with scant resources by having older children teach younger children what they had already learned.[34] When students transmit new content to their classmates, they have to reflect continuously on those classmates' mental processes. Thus, they develop cognitive empathy as they attempt to transmit their learning, and in many cases affective empathy is also developed as the students spend quality time together.

Genetics

The basic capacity to recognize emotions in others may be innate.[35]

Measures of empathy show evidence of being genetically influenced.[36] For example, a gene located near LRRN1 on chromosome 3 influences the human ability to read, understand, and respond to emotions in others.[37]

Neuroscientific basis of empathy

Contemporary neuroscience offers insights into the neural basis of the mind's ability to understand and process emotion. Empathy is a spontaneous sharing of affect, provoked by witnessing and sympathizing with another's emotional state. The empathic person mirrors or mimics the emotional response they would expect to feel if they were in the other person's place. Studies of mirror neurons attempt to measure the neural basis for human mind-reading and emotion-sharing abilities and thereby to explain the basis of the empathy reaction.[38] People who score high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems.[39]

fMRI has been employed to investigate the functional anatomy of empathy. Observing another person's emotional state activates parts of the neuronal network that are involved in processing that same state in oneself, whether it is disgust, touch, or pain.[13] As these emotional states are being observed, the brain is able activate a network of the brain that is involved in empathy.

Meta-analysis of fMRI studies of empathy confirms that different brain areas are activated during affective-perceptual empathy than during cognitive-evaluative empathy. Affective empathy is correlated with increased activity in the insula while cognitive empathy is correlated with activity in the mid cingulate cortex and adjacent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.[40] A study with patients who experienced different types of brain damage also confirmed this distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy. Specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy.[41]

Mirroring-behavior in motor neurons during empathy may help duplicate feelings. Such sympathetic action may afford access to sympathetic feelings and, perhaps, trigger emotions of kindness and forgiveness.[42][43]

Evolution across species

There is strong evidence that empathy is not exclusive to humans. Empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings, and that even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care.[44]

Empathy-like behaviors have been observed in primates, both in captivity and in the wild, and in particular in bonobos, perhaps the most empathic primate.[45] Bonobos seek out body contact with one another as a coping mechanism, and have been found to seek out more body contact after watching other bonobos in distress than after their individually experienced stressful event. [46]

Empathic-like behavior has been observed in chimpanzees in different aspects of their natural behaviors. For example, chimpanzees spontaneously contribute comforting behaviors to victims of aggressive behavior in both natural and unnatural settings. This behavior is also found in humans, particularly in human infants. Another similarity found between chimpanzees and humans is that empathic-like responding was disproportionately provided to kin. Although comforting towards non-family chimpanzees was also observed, as with humans, chimpanzees showed the majority of comfort and concern to close/loved ones.

Empathy between species

Humans can empathize with other species and vice versa.

For example, canines appear to share empathic-like responding towards human species. Researchers Custance and Mayer adapted an experimental protocol first used with human infants to investigate empathy in domestic dogs. Individual dogs were placed in an enclosure with their owner and a stranger. When the participants were talking and appeared content, the dog showed no behavioral changes; however when the participants were pretending to cry, the dogs oriented their behavior toward the person in distress whether it be the owner or stranger. The dogs approached the apparently distressed participants in a submissive fashion, by sniffing, licking, and nuzzling them rather than approaching in the usual form of excitement, tail wagging, or panting. Since the dogs did not direct their empathic-like responses only towards their owner, it was hypothesized that dogs generally seek out humans showing distressed behavior.[47]

Impairment

Empathy may be disrupted due to brain trauma such as stroke. In most cases, empathy is impaired if a lesion or stroke occurs on the right side of the brain. Damage to the frontal lobe, which is primarily responsible for emotional regulation, can profoundly impact a person's capacity to experience empathy. People with an acquired brain injury also show lower levels of empathy. More than half of those people with a traumatic brain injury self-report a deficit in their empathic capacity.[48]

A difference in distribution between affective and cognitive empathy has been observed in various conditions. Psychopathy and narcissism are associated with impairments in affective but not cognitive empathy, whereas bipolar disorder is associated with deficits in cognitive but not affective empathy. People with Borderline personality disorder may suffer from impairments in cognitive empathy as well as fluctuating affective empathy, although this topic is controversial.[19] Autism spectrum disorders are associated with various combinations, including deficits in cognitive empathy as well as deficits in both cognitive and affective empathy.[10][41] Schizophrenia, too, is associated with deficits in both types of empathy. However, even in people without conditions such as these, the balance between affective and cognitive empathy varies.[19]

Atypical empathic responses are associated with autism and particular personality disorders such as psychopathy, borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid personality disorders; schizophrenia; bipolar disorder;[19] and depersonalization.[49]

Benefits of empathy

The capacity to empathize is a revered trait in society.[10] Empathy is considered a motivating factor for unselfish, prosocial behavior, whereas a lack of empathy is related to antisocial behavior.[2]

Empathy can bring us pleasure:

by widening the scope of that which we experience... by providing us with more than one perspective of a situation, thereby multiplying our experience... and... by intensifying that experience.[23]

People can use empathy to borrow joy from the joy of children discovering things or playing make-believe, or to satisfy our curiosity about other people's lives.[15]

People who score more highly on empathy questionnaires also report having more positive relationships with other people. They report "greater life satisfaction, more positive affect, less negative affect, and less depressive symptoms than people who had lower empathy scores."[50] Empathy can be called the "fundamental people skill."[51] It not only facilitates relationship development, it also helps form the basis of morality, compassion, forgiveness, and caring for others. Higher levels of empathy have been found to be a hallmark of resilience.[52]

In educational contexts

A growing focus of investigation is how empathy manifests in education between teachers and learners.[53]

Carl Rogers pioneered research in effective psychotherapy and teaching which espoused that empathy coupled with unconditional positive regard or caring for students and authenticity or congruence were the most important traits for a therapist or teacher to have. Other research and meta-analyses corroborated the importance of these person-centered traits.[54]

In intercultural contexts

Research shows that people experience more difficulty empathizing with others who are different from them in characteristics such as status, culture, religion, language, skin color, gender, and age.[55]

Empathy can be increased towards other cultures through frequent positive experiences,[33] allowing a person to interpret experiences or perspectives from more than one worldview.[56]

Problems with empathy

The judgments that empathy provides about the emotional states of others are not necessarily accurate. One's emotional background may affect or distort how they perceive the emotions in others.[51]

People report finding it easier to take the perspective of another person in a situation when they have experienced a similar situation, and that they experience greater empathic understanding. However results on whether similar past experience makes the empathizer more accurate are mixed.[57]

Empathic inaccuracy

People can severely overestimate how much they understand others. When people empathize with another, they may oversimplify that other person in order to make them more legible.[23] It may improve empathic accuracy for the empathizer to explicitly ask the person empathized with for confirmation of the empathic hypothesis.[18] However, people may be reluctant to abandon their empathic hypotheses even when they are explicitly denied.[23]

Loss of self

The empathic person must temporarily dampen their own sense of self in order to empathize with the other, experiencing a weaker sense of their own self. Because we oversimplify people in order to make them legible enough to empathize with, the other seems to have a magnified and extra-cohesive sense of self, the empathic person may suffer from this and may "project onto others the self that they are lacking" and envy "that which they must give up in order to be able to feel empathy: a strong self."[23]

Bias

People are more able and willing to empathize with those most similar to themselves. In particular, empathy increases with similarities in culture and living conditions. Empathy is also more likely to occur between individuals whose interaction is more frequent.[33][29]

This bias can result in tribalism and violent responses in the name of helping people of the same "tribe" or social group. Improper use of empathy and social intelligence can lead to shortsighted actions and parochialism. Thus, empathy can encourage unethical behavior when it causes people to care more about people similar to themselves.[15]

Empathic distress fatigue

Excessive empathy can lead to "empathic distress fatigue," especially if it is associated with pathological altruism. The risks are fatigue, occupational burnout, guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression.[58] Health care workers and caregivers are particularly at risk.

Breithaupt emphasizes the importance of empathy suppression mechanisms in healthy empathy.[23] People who understand how empathic feelings evoke altruistic motivation may adopt strategies for suppressing or avoiding such feelings. People can better cognitively control their actions the more they understand how altruistic behavior emerges, whether it is from minimizing sadness or the arousal of mirror neurons.

In fiction

George Eliot wrote in her essay in 1856:

The greatest benefits we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.[59]

It has been suggested the concept of human rights developed how it did and when it did in part as a result of the influence of mid-eighteenth-century European novelists, particularly those whose use of the epistolatory novel form, written as a series of letters between the fictional characters, gave readers a more vivid sense that they were gaining access to the candid details of a real life: The epistolatory novel did not just reflect important cultural and social changes of the time. Novel reading actually helped create new kinds of feelings including a recognition of shared psychological experiences, and these feelings then translated into new cultural and social movements including human rights.[60]

The power of empathy has become a popular ability in fiction, specifically in that of superhero media. "Empaths" have the ability to sense/feel the emotions and bodily sensations of others and, in some cases, influence or control them. Although sometimes a specific power held by specific characters such as the Marvel Comics character Empath, the power has also been frequently linked to that of telepathy such as in the case of Jean Grey.

Notes

  1. empathy (n.) Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved December 6, 2023.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Elizabeth A. Segal, Karen E. Gerdes, Cynthia A. Lietz, M. Alex Wagaman, and Jennifer M. Geiger, Assessing Empathy (Columbia University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780231181914).
  3. Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (Legare Street Press, 2022 (original 1909), ISBN 1015885470).
  4. Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0300222685).
  5. Sara D. Hodges and Kristi J.K. Klein, Regulating the costs of empathy: the price of being human The Journal of Socio-Economics 30 (2001): 437– 452. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  6. Clara Strauss, Billie Lever Taylor, Jenny Gu, Willem Kuyken, Ruth Baer, Fergal Jones, and Kate Cavanagh, What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures Clinical Psychology Review 47 (July 2016):15-27. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  7. 7.0 7.1 Jean Decety and Williams Icles (eds.) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (MIT Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0262012973).
  8. 8.0 8.1 Amy Coplan, Will the real empathy please stand up? A case for a narrow conceptualization The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (September 2011):40–65. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  9. Babette Rothschild and Marjorie Rand, Help for the Helper: The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, ISBN 978-0393704228).
  10. 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 Kimberley Rogers, Isabel Dziobek, Jason Hassenstab, Oliver T. Wolf, and Antonio Convit, Who cares? Revisiting empathy in Asperger syndrome Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 37(4) (April 2007):709-715. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  11. Frans B.M. de Waal, Putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of empathy Annual Review of Psychology 59(1) (2008):279–300. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  12. 12.0 12.1 12.2 Mark H. Davis, Measuring individual differences in empathy: evidence for a multidimensional approach Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(1) (1983):113–126. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  13. 13.0 13.1 13.2 Chris Lamm, C. Daniel Batson, and Jean Decety, The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19(1) (2007):42–58. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  14. 14.0 14.1 Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Justic Motivation Motivation and Emotion 14(2) (1990):151–172. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  15. 15.0 15.1 15.2 Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Ecco, 2018, ISBN 978-0062339348).
  16. 16.0 16.1 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth About The Male And Female Brain (Basic Books, 2003, ISBN 978-0738208442).
  17. 17.0 17.1 Brett A. Murphy and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Are self-report cognitive empathy ratings valid proxies for cognitive empathy ability? Negligible meta-analytic relations with behavioral task performance Psychological Assessment 31(8) (August 2019):1062–1072. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  18. 18.0 18.1 Karla McLaren, The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (Sounds True, 2013, ISBN 978-1622030613).
  19. 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 Christine L. Cox, Lucina Q. Uddin, Adriana Di Martino, F. Xavier Castellanos, Michael P. Milham, and Clare Kelly, The balance between feeling and knowing: affective and cognitive empathy are reflected in the brain's intrinsic functional dynamics Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7(6) (2012):727–737. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  20. Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright, The empathy quotient: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 34(2) (April 2004):163–175. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  21. Renate L.E.P. Reniers, Rhiannon Corcoran, Richard Drake, Nick M. Shryane, and Birgit A. Völlm, The QCAE: a Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy Journal of Personality Assessment 93(1) (January 2011):84–95. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  22. Marco Innamorati, Sjoerd J.H. Ebisch, Vittorio Gallese, and Aristide Saggino, A bidimensional measure of empathy: Empathic Experience Scale PLOS ONE 14(4) (April 2019). Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  23. 23.0 23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5 Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1501721649).
  24. Zdravko Marjanovic, C. Ward Struthers, and Esther R. Greenglass, Who Helps Natural-Disaster Victims? Assessment of Trait and Situational Predictors Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 12(1) (August 8, 2011):245–267. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  25. Christopher J. Einolf, Is Cognitive Empathy More Important than Affective Empathy? A Response to 'Who Helps Natural-Disaster Victims?' Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 12(1) (March 13, 2012):268–271. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  26. C. Daniel Batson and and Tecia Moran, Empathy-induced altruism in a prisoner's dilemma European Journal of Social Psychology 29(7) (1999):909–924. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  27. C.R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0195187243).
  28. Christopher J Einolf, Empathic concern and prosocial behaviors: A test of experimental results using survey data Social Science Research 37(4) (2008):1267–1279.
  29. 29.0 29.1 Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development (Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0521580342).
  30. Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana (eds.), Handbook of Moral Development (Routledge, 2022, ISBN 978-0367497545).
  31. 31.0 31.1 Jean Decety, Kalina J Michalska, and Yuko Akitsuki, Who caused the pain? An fMRI investigation of empathy and intentionality in children Neuropsychologia 46(11) (September 2008):2607–2614. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  32. 32.0 32.1 Jennifer Katherine Bosson, Camille E. Buckner, and Joseph Alan Vandello, The Psychology of Sex and Gender (SAGE Publications, Inc, 2021, ISBN 978-1544393995).
  33. 33.0 33.1 33.2 William Ickes (ed.), Empathic Accuracy (The Guilford Press, 1997, ISBN 978-1572301610).
  34. Frank Pierrepont Graves, A Student's History of Education (Legare Street Press, 2023 (original 1915), ISBN 978-1020355608).
  35. James D. Baird and Laurie Nadel, Happiness Genes: Unlock the Positive Potential Hidden in Your DNA (Weiser, 2010, ISBN 978-1601631053).
  36. Mark H. Davis, Carol Luce, and Stephen J. Kraus , The heritability of characteristics associated with dispositional empathy Journal of Personality 62(3) (September 1994):369–391. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  37. V. Warrier et al., Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and cognition Molecular Psychiatry 23(6) (June 2018):1402–1409. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  38. Suzanne Keen, A Theory of Narrative Empathy Narrative 14(3) (October 2006):207–236. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  39. Valeria Gazzola, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, and Christian Keysers, Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans Current Biology 16(18) (September 2006):1824–1829. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  40. Yan Fan, Niall W. Duncan, Moritz de Greck, and Georg Northoff, Is there a core neural network in empathy? An fMRI based quantitative meta-analysis Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35(3) (January 2011):903-911. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  41. 41.0 41.1 Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, Judith Aharon-Peretz, and Daniella Perry, Two systems for empathy: a double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions Brain 132(Pt 3) (March 2009):617–627. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  42. Jason Marsh, Do mirror neurons give us empathy? Greater Good Magazine (March 29, 2012). Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  43. V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, ISBN 978-0393077827).
  44. Jean Decety, The neuroevolution of empathy Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1231(1) (August 2011):35–45. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  45. Jo Sandin, Bonobos: Encounters in Empathy (Zoological Society of Milwaukee & The Foundation for Wildlife Conservation, Inc., 2007, ISBN 978-0979415104).
  46. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (Souvenir Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0285638907).
  47. Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer, Empathic-like responding by domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to distress in humans: an exploratory study Animal Cognition 15(5) (September 2012):851–859. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  48. Arielle de Sousa, Skye McDonald, Jacqueline Rushby, Sophie Li, Aneta Dimoska, and Charlotte James, Why don't you feel how I feel? Insight into the absence of empathy after severe traumatic brain injury Neuropsychologia 48(12) (October 2010):3585–3595. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  49. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0316040938).
  50. Daniel Grühn, Kristine Rebucal, Manfred Diehl, Mark Lumley, and Gisela Labouvie-Vief, Empathy across the adult lifespan: Longitudinal and experience-sampling findings Emotion 8(6) (2008):753–765. Retrieved December 28, 2023.
  51. 51.0 51.1 Daniel Goleman, Emotional intelligence (Bantam Books, 2005, ISBN 978-0553383713).
  52. Bonnie Bernard, Resiliency: What We Have Learned (WestEd, 2004, ISBN 978-0914409182).
  53. Katie Dunworth and Grace Zhang (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Language Education: Australia and the Asia Pacific (Springer, 2014, ISBN 978-3319061849).
  54. Carl Rogers, Harold C. Lyon, and Reinhard Tausch, On Becoming an Effective Teacher (Routledge, 2013, ISBN 978-0415816984).
  55. Sharon Tettegah and Carolyn J. Anderson, Pre-service teachers' empathy and cognitions: Statistical analysis of text data by graphical models Contemporary Educational Psychology 32(1) (January 2007):48–82. Retrieved December 28, 2023.
  56. William H. Weeks, Paul B. Pedersen, and Richard W. Brislin (eds.), Manual of Structured Experiences for Cross-Cultural Learning (Intercultural Press, 1979, ISBN 978-0933662056).
  57. Sara D. Hodges, Kristi J. Kiel, Adam D. Kramer, Darya Veach, and B. Renee Villanueva, Giving birth to empathy: the effects of similar experience on empathic accuracy, empathic concern, and perceived empathy Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 36(3) (March 2010):398–409. Retrieved December 28, 2023.
  58. Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0199738571).
  59. Michelle Legro, Beauty, Aging, and the Expansion of Our Sympathies: What George Eliot Teaches Us About the Rewards of Middle Age The Marginalian. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  60. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, ISBN 978-0393331998).

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Baird, James D., and Laurie Nadel. Happiness Genes: Unlock the Positive Potential Hidden in Your DNA. Weiser, 2010. ISBN 978-1601631053
  • Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Essential Difference: The Truth About The Male And Female Brain. Basic Books, 2003. ISBN 978-0738208442
  • Bar-On, Reuven, and James D. A. Parker (eds.). The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence : Theory, Development, Assessment, and Application at Home, School and in the Workplace. Jossey-Bass, 2000. ISBN 978-0787949846
  • Bernard, Bonnie. Resiliency: What We Have Learned. WestEd, 2004. ISBN 978-0914409182
  • Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Ecco, 2018. ISBN 978-0062339348
  • Bosson, Jennifer Katherine, Camille E. Buckner, and Joseph Alan Vandello. The Psychology of Sex and Gender. SAGE Publications, Inc, 2021. ISBN 978-1544393995
  • Breithaupt, Fritz, Andrew B. B. Hamilton (trans.). The Dark Sides of Empathy. Cornell University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1501721649
  • de Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Souvenir Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0285638907
  • Decety, Jean, and Williams Icles (eds.). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. MIT Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0262012973
  • Dunworth, Katie, and Grace Zhang (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Language Education: Australia and the Asia Pacific. Springer, 2014. ISBN 978-3319061849
  • Goleman, Daniel. Emotional intelligence. Bantam Books, 2005. ISBN 978-0553383713
  • Graves, Frank Pierrepont. A Student's History of Education. Legare Street Press, 2023 (original 1915). ISBN 978-1020355608
  • Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development. Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0521580342
  • Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. ISBN 978-0393331998
  • Ickes, William (ed.). Empathic Accuracy. The Guilford Press, 1997. ISBN 978-1572301610
  • Killen, Melanie, and Judith G. Smetana (eds.). Handbook of Moral Development. Routledge, 2022. ISBN 978-0367497545
  • Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: A History. Yale University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0300222685
  • McLaren, Karla. The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill. Sounds True, 2013. ISBN 978-1622030613
  • Oakley, Barbara, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.). Pathological Altruism. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0199738571
  • Ramachandran, V.S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. ISBN 978-0393077827
  • Rogers, Carl, Harold C. Lyon, and Reinhard Tausch. On Becoming an Effective Teacher. Routledge, 2013. ISBN 978-0415816984
  • Rothschild, Babette, and Marjorie Rand. Help for the Helper: The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. ISBN 978-0393704228
  • Sandin, Jo. Bonobos: Encounters in Empathy. Zoological Society of Milwaukee & The Foundation for Wildlife Conservation, Inc., 2007. ISBN 978-0979415104
  • Segal, Elizabeth A., Karen E. Gerdes, Cynthia A. Lietz, M. Alex Wagaman, and Jennifer M. Geiger. Assessing Empathy. Columbia University Press, 2017. ISBN 9780231181914
  • Snyder, C.R., and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0195187243
  • Titchener, Edward Bradford. Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes. Legare Street Press, 2022 (original 1909). ISBN 1015885470
  • Weeks, William H., Paul B. Pedersen, and Richard W. Brislin (eds.). Manual of Structured Experiences for Cross-Cultural Learning. Intercultural Press, 1979. ISBN 978-0933662056

External links

All links retrieved December 28, 2023.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.