Can Video Engender Empathic Concern for Others? Testing a Positive Affect Arousing Intervention

Aaron Castelán Cargile

doi:10.1177/2158244016676297

Abstract

Empathy is widely recognized as the psychological foundation for prosocial behavior, yet very little is known about methods to increase affective empathy in students and trainees. The present research sought to assess the reliability and potential boundary conditions of one such intervention—a brief emotional video featuring a boy diagnosed with cancer. Study 1 found that the video succeeded in indirectly increasing empathic concern for an African American victim of police abuse among an ethnically diverse student sample in a classroom setting. Study 2 replicated the effect in an online environment among a population of near-racially homogeneous adults. The effect of this brief, convenient, positive-affect intervention is in line with other practice-based and negative-affect interventions.

Highlights

Over recent decades, psychological research has shifted from a narrow focus on the negative and dysfunctional (e.g., Castillo, 1997; Stueber, 2006; Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1988) to broader inquiries that regularly include the study of positive and prosocial phenomena (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver, 2010; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005)
This study replicated a small but significant indirect effect of the emotional video on empathic concern for a secondary other found in earlier research (Cargile, 2016)
Despite the uniformly small effect sizes of such interventions, the present research sought to assess the reliability and potential boundary conditions of one such intervention—a brief emotional video featuring a boy diagnosed with cancer

Summary

Introduction

Psychological research has shifted from a narrow focus on the negative and dysfunctional (e.g., Castillo, 1997; Stueber, 2006; Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1988) to broader inquiries that regularly include the study of positive and prosocial phenomena (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver, 2010; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005) Within this emerging domain of positive/ prosocial research, empathy has become a central and wellstudied construct. This research has typically focused on affective aspects of empathic responding (i.e., sharing the emotional experience of another; see Decety & Jackson, 2004), though a great deal of attention has been devoted to its cognitive characteristics as well (i.e., taking the perspective of another; e.g., Bakker, Shimazu, Demerouti, Shimada, & Kawakami, 2011; Schnell, Bluschke, Konradt, & Walter, 2011) When it comes to the affective aspects of empathy, modern psychology researchers typically distinguish between selforiented and other-oriented feelings Provided this conceptual centrality affective empathy’s ability to motivate prosocial behavior has been widely studied

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