Empathic Responses Research Articles

Challenging Empathic Deficit Models of Autism Through Responses to Serious Literature.

Dominant theoretical models of autism and resultant research enquiries have long centered upon an assumed autism-specific empathy deficit. Associated empirical research has largely relied upon cognitive tests that lack ecological validity and associate empathic skill with heuristic-based judgments from limited snapshots of social information. This artificial separation of thought and feeling fails to replicate the complexity of real-world empathy, and places socially tentative individuals at a relative disadvantage. The present study aimed to qualitatively explore how serious literary fiction, through its ability to simulate real-world empathic response, could therefore enable more ecologically valid insights into the comparative empathic experiences of autistic and non-autistic individuals. Eight autistic and seven non-autistic participants read Of Mice and Men for six days while completing a semi-structured reflective diary. On finishing the book, participants were asked to engage in three creative writing tasks that encouraged reflective thinking across the novel. Thematic and literary analysis of the diary reflections and writing tasks revealed three main themes (1) Distance from the Novel; (2) Mobility of Response; (3) Re-Creating Literature. Findings demonstrated the usefulness of serious literature as a research tool for comparing the empathic experiences of autistic and non-autistic individuals. Specifically, autistic individuals often showed enhanced socio-empathic understandings of the literature with no empathy deficits when compared to non-autistic participants.

Soundtrack to the social world: Emotional music enhances empathy, compassion, and prosocial decisions but not theory of mind.

Music is a human universal and has the ability to evoke powerful, genuine emotions. But does music influence our capacity to understand and feel with others? A growing body of evidence indicates that empathy (sharing another's feelings) and compassion (a feeling of concern toward others) are behaviorally and neutrally distinct, both from each other and from the social-cognitive process theory of mind (ToM; i.e., inferring others' mental states). Yet little is known as to whether and how these dissociable routes to feeling with and understanding others can be independently modulated. The goal of the current study was to investigate if emotional music has the potential to enhance social affect and/or social cognition. Using a naturalistic, video-based paradigm which disentangles empathy, compassion, and ToM, we demonstrate selective enhancement of social affect through music during the videos. Specifically, we found enhanced empathy and compassion when emotional, but not when neutral music was present during videos displaying emotionally negative narrations. No such enhancement was present for ToM performance. Similarly, prosocial decision making increased after emotionally negative videos with emotional music. These findings demonstrate how emotional music can enhance empathic responding, compassion and prosocial decisions as well as contribute to the growing evidence for separable processes within the social mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Adaptive Empathy: A Model for Learning Empathic Responses in Response to Feedback

Empathy is usually deployed in social interactions. Nevertheless, common measures and examinations of empathy study this construct in isolation from the person in distress. In this article we seek to extend the field of examination to include both empathizer and target to determine whether and how empathic responses are affected by feedback and learned through interaction. Building on computational approaches in feedback-based adaptations (e.g., no feedback, model-free and model-based learning), we propose a framework for understanding how empathic responses are learned on the basis of feedback. In this framework, adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to adapt one’s empathic responses, is a central aspect of empathic skills and can provide a new dimension to the evaluation and investigation of empathy. By extending existing neural models of empathy, we suggest that adaptive empathy may be mediated by interactions between the neural circuits associated with valuation, shared distress, observation-execution, and mentalizing. Finally, we propose that adaptive empathy should be considered a prominent facet of empathic capabilities with the potential to explain empathic behavior in health and psychopathology.

COVID‐19 threat and xenophobia: A moderated mediation model of empathic responding and negative emotions

AbstractThe threat of disease is associated with xenophobia, but limited research is available to shed light on the underlying processes that shape this relationship. Based on integrated threat theory and existing research, we tested a model in which the association between threat of disease and xenophobia is mediated by negative emotions, and how the process is moderated by empathic responding to others who are concerned about the disease threat. The research was conducted in China during the early phases of the COVID‐19 pandemic with the focus on Chinese unease about the people of Wuhan, the city where the pandemic began. A national sample of Chinese adults (N = 1697) completed a survey on their perceptions of risk due to COVID‐19, negative emotions experienced during the pandemic, empathic responses to others who were concerned about COVID‐19, and xenophobia expressed toward people from Wuhan. The results showed that negative emotions mediated the relationship between perceived COVID‐19 threat and xenophobia. However, contrary to expectation, empathic responding did not weaken the relation between perceived COVID‐19 threat and xenophobia; instead, it exacerbated the relationship. Specifically, empathic responding to help others in the context of concerns about COVID‐19 was related to greater xenophobia toward the out‐group (i.e., the people of Wuhan).

Mothers' Experiences of Husband’s Involvement in Maternal Fetal Attachment: A Qualitative Study

Background: The involvement of husbands during pregnancy within the Iranian culture is one of the challenging topics. In this context, efforts to encourage male involvement in the maternal health issues can strengthen family bonds and consequently improve the relationships between men and women in societies. Objectives: This qualitative study aimed to elucidate the involvement of husbands in maternal-fetal attachment (MFA). Methods: Using a qualitative approach and conventional content analysis, 11 pregnant women referring to the health care centers in Sari, Iran were interviewed from March 2020 to February 2021. The participants met the maximum diversity criteria in terms of age, level of education, occupation, and socioeconomic status. Deep and unstructured interviews were utilized to obtain the research data. All the interviews were then transcribed verbatim and analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method developed by Graneheim and Lundman in MAXQDA Software. Results: A total of 350 codes emerged from the data. We identified a main theme entitled ‘husband support’, which included four categories and 11 sub-categories. The main categories were: (1) empathic response, (2) emotional support, (3) continued support, and (4) attention to fetus. Conclusions: Interventions to enhance husband support could increase MFA. Planning to promote male participation in pregnancy process is essential to promote maternal and child health.

A multiturn complementary generative framework for conversational emotion recognition

Conversational emotion recognition (CER) is a significant task due to its application in human–computer interaction. Existing work treats CER as an utterance-level classification task without considering that empathic response also reflects contextual emotion understanding. Previous work has proven that accurate recognition of emotions in the dialogue history is helpful to generate high-fit responses. In this paper, we investigate whether this conclusion is a sufficient and necessary condition. Specifically, we define an auxiliary empathic multiturn dialogue generation (MDG) task to enhance emotion understanding. Correspondingly, we present a Sequence-to-Sequence oriented framework that combines CER and MDG in a multitask learning manner to verify the complementarity between the two tasks. First, we use alternate recurrent neural networks to encode the content of historical utterances and represent the states of multiparty emotions, which are used for emotion classification. Second, since most MDG methods ignore the emotional coherence of the dialogue context itself, we use affine transformation to fuse hidden states of content and emotions to initialize the decoder. Finally, at each step of generation, an attention mechanism is used to fuse information from the dialogue history to ensure emotional coherence. The CER results of our models outperform the state-of-the-art on three prevalent emotional dialogue data sets. Further analysis demonstrates the mutual promotion and empathy interpretability between MDG and CER. Furthermore, our framework is scalable for different coding strategies and multimodal fusion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore CER from the perspective of empathy through multitask learning with dialogue generation.

Skin Color and Attractiveness Modulate Empathy for Pain: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Although racial in-group bias in empathy for pain has been reported, empathic responses to others’ pain may be influenced by other characteristics besides race. To explore whether skin color and attractiveness modulate empathy for pain, we recorded 24 participants’ reactions to painful faces from racial in-group members with different skin color (fair, wheatish, or dark) and attractiveness (more or less attractive) using event-related potentials (ERPs). Results showed that, for more attractive painful faces, dark skin faces were judged as less painful and elicited smaller N2 amplitudes than fair- and wheatish-skinned faces. However, for less attractive faces, there were no significant differences among the three skin colors. Our findings suggest that empathy for pain toward racial in-group members may be influenced by skin color and attractiveness.

Understanding, Disruption and Recognition: The Road to “Expanded Empathy” in the Case of Angie

ABSTRACT This discussion of Joye Weiselbarth’s paper, Shame and Punishment: The Case of Angie, examines the concept of “expanded empathy”. This concept was introduced to address the difficulty of empathic understanding of a woman who had vastly different life experiences from Joye. I suggest that empathic responsiveness is needed to establish enough connection and trust for the analysis to survive the inevitable disruption that occurred when the disconnect between their worlds became painfully evident. Further, I suggest that it is necessary for the analyst to face both the limits of empathy as a foundation for understanding as well as the invisible demands that silence the recognition of traumatic racism in psychoanalytic practice.

Co-Animation in Troubles-Talk

ABSTRACT Through troubles-talk, participants disclose and negatively assess unfortunate past or habitual happenings and offenses, and these are often vividly staged in the here and now by temporarily “doing being” past Self or others, what we call animation. In this study, we show how by animating their own affective reactions toward the recounted experiences, tellers cast themselves as victims and their recipients as witnesses. More importantly, we demonstrate how animation is also a relevant practice for recipients, who in a contiguous position often offer a responsive co-animation of the same figure, validating and amplifying their teller’s affective displays, turning the experience into a common cause. This study contributes further to our understanding of empathic responses in troubles-talk in English by inscribing co-animation as a previously undescribed alternative at the response slot that allows recipients to temporarily position themselves “into the moment” as co-victims, co-experiencers, and co-sanctioners. Data are in English.

Is it painful? Playing violent video games affects brain responses to painful pictures: An event-related potential study.

Previous research showed mixed evidence on how violent video game exposure (VVGE) may affect empathy for pain in the brain. This study applied an event-related potential (ERPs) approach to improve understanding of how habitual and short-term violent game play may affect top-down and bottom-up empathy for pain brain responses. A total of 58 male participants with different levels of habitual VVGE performed a pain judgment task before and after 40 min of violent game play while their brain responses were recorded. Results showed that only late cognitive-evaluative ERP responses (P3, P625) were sensitive to the pictures’ painfulness, which were also affected by both habitual VVGE and short- term violent game play. As expected, participants with no habitual VVGE showed an ERP pain effect before game play: higher P3 and P625 amplitudes for painful versus nonpainful pictures. In contrast, a similar ERP pain effect was not observed in participants with high VVGE before game play, suggesting habitual desensitization. Short-term violent game play resulted in lower P3 and P625 amplitudes for painful pictures in the no VVGE group, indicating short-term desensitization. We discuss the observed VVGE desensitization effects in terms of top-down regulation of an empathetic response induced by painful stimuli. Though such adaptation could be beneficial in a violent game environment, possible long-term consequences associated with reduced empathic responsiveness in a social context should be further studied. In all, our findings contribute to the debate on the effects of VVGE on the brain by pro- viding first ERP evidence suggesting empathy for pain desensitization.

Is Sociodemographic Status Associated with Empathic Communication and Decision Quality in Diabetes Care?

ObjectiveTo assess the relationship between empathic communication, shared decision-making, and patient sociodemographic factors of income, education, and ethnicity in patients with diabetes.Research Design and MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study from five primary care practices in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, Canada, participating in a randomized controlled trial of a diabetes goal setting and shared decision-making plan. Participants included 30 patients with diabetes and 23 clinicians (physicians, nurses, dietitians, and pharmacists), with a sample size of 48 clinical encounters. Clinical encounter audiotapes were coded using the Empathic Communication Coding System (ECCS) and Decision Support Analysis Tool (DSAT-10).ResultsThe most frequent empathic responses among encounters were “acknowledgement with pursuit” (28.9%) and “confirmation” (30.0%). The most frequently assessed DSAT components were “stage” (86%) and knowledge of options (82.0%). ECCS varied by education (p=0.030) and ethnicity (p=0.03), but not income. Patients with only a college degree received more empathic communication than patients with bachelor’s degrees or more, and South Asian patients received less empathic communication than Asian patients. DSAT varied with ethnicity (p=0.07) but not education or income. White patients experienced more shared decision-making than those in the “other” category.ConclusionsWe identified a new relationship between ECCS, education and ethnicity, as well as DSAT and ethnicity. Limitations include sample size, heterogeneity of encounters, and predominant white ethnicity. These associations may be evidence of systemic biases in healthcare, with hidden roots in medical education.

Being Somebody Else: The Future of Narrative Storytelling

The authors discuss virtual reality (VR) in relation to its characterisation as the “ultimate empathy machine” that allows passive spectators of fictional or non-fictional narratives to become active agents of unfolding events. They concentrate on how the change in the form of the narrative through immersive VR impacts the audience, stressing the difference between the position of the spectator in an ongoing storyline and being a spectator engaged with elements of the story’s narrative. The possibility of acting on behalf of the Other can activate empathic responses, which in turn may lead to a more direct integration of the characters’ perspectives into the life experience of the VR user. The authors relate to several experiments and offer their conlusions

Adherence to Recommended Preventive Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Empathy and Perceived Health Threat.

BackgroundCoping via empathic responding may play a role in preventive behavior engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and unlike trait empathy, is a potentially alterable target for changing health behavior.PurposeOur goal was to examine the role of empathic responding in preventive behavior engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, independent of trait empathy and perceived threat of COVID-19.MethodsParticipants (N = 2,841) completed a baseline survey early in the pandemic, and a follow-up survey approximately 2 weeks later (M = 13.50 days, SD = 5.61). Preventive health behaviors, including physical distancing and hygiene practices, were assessed at both timepoints. Hierarchical linear regression examined the contributions of trait empathy, perceived threat of COVID-19, and empathic responding at baseline to preventive behaviors at follow-up.ResultsControlling for baseline levels of preventive behaviors and demographic covariates, trait empathy and threat of COVID-19 at baseline were each independently associated with preventive behaviors at follow-up. An interaction between perceived threat and empathic responding indicated that those perceiving high threat of COVID-19 at baseline tended to report engaging in preventive behaviors at follow-up regardless of their levels of empathic responding, whereas for those reporting low levels of perceived threat, higher levels of empathic responding were associated with higher engagement in preventive behavior.ConclusionsWhen perceived threat of COVID-19 was low, higher empathic responding was associated with increased engagement in preventive behaviors regardless of trait empathy, suggesting that empathic responding can serve as an actionable target for intervention to promote preventive behavior during the pandemic.

Oxytocin system gene methylation is associated with empathic responses towards children

Empathy is an essential component of sensitive caregiving behavior, which in turn is an important predictor of children’s healthy social-emotional development. The oxytocin (OXT) system plays a key role in promoting sensitive parenting and empathy. In this study, we investigated how OXT system gene methylation was associated with empathic processes in nulliparous women (M age = 23.60, SD =0.44)—measuring both physiological facial muscle responses and ratings of compassion and positive affect to affective images depicting children. Linear mixed effects analyses demonstrated that lower methylation levels in the OXT and OXTR genes were related to enhanced empathic responses. The effect of OXT system gene methylation on empathic processes was partly qualified by an interaction with individual variations in women’s care motivation. Our findings provide experimental evidence for an association between the methylation of OXT system genes and empathy.

Learning with the heart or with the mind: using virtual reality to bring historical experiences to life and arouse empathy

ABSTRACT Virtual reality (VR) technology can increase prosocial behaviour toward a target person or group by enhancing their empathic response for the subject, but such technology has not always improved learning outcomes. This interdisciplinary study compared the potential advantages of delivering the same learning material about daily life in an ancient Greek household via two modes of delivery: VR technology and classroom lecture. The VR group explored a Greek villa containing historical artefacts and virtual characters with whom they were able to interact through set dialogues. The dialogues illustrated social hierarchies, gender relations, the situation of slaves, cult practice, and religious beliefs. The classroom group received the same information in a classroom environment. Both randomly-assigned groups answered a multiple-choice quiz to evaluate the knowledge gained. They also responded to open-text questions designed to test the degree of empathy that was aroused. We found that classroom lecture delivery was significantly superior in terms of the acquisition of factual knowledge, consistent with cognitive learning theory. We identified this as learning with the mind. The immersive VR environment, however, imparted a level of empathic response to the lived experiences of people in ancient Greece; in that sense it allowed learning with the heart.

ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OFEMPATHY AS A PROFESSIONALLY SIGNIFICANT FEATURE OF A SOCIAL WORKER

The article characterizes empathy as a professionally significant feature of a social worker. The significance of empathy for social workers is substantiated due to the fact that social workers are forced to be in close and intense interaction with different people, in an emotionally tense atmosphere, which can cause significant damage to their health and professional activities. The main directions of scientific research of the phenomenon of empathy are outlined, the analysis of scientific sources allowed to come to the conclusion that empathy was most actively studied in the problematic field of psychology, ethics and philosophy. The main approaches to defining the essence of empathy are determined: epistemological, ethical and integrative. The main types and forms of empathy are indicated: short-term and long-term empathy, adequate and inadequate empathy, situational and dispositional empathy. It was found out that the formation of empathy is influenced by socio-demographic, psychological and external factors. Factors that significantly complicate the development of empathy include egocentrism, emotional coldness, instability of character, excessive self-control, and so on. It is noted that interpersonal interaction between a social worker and a client is a complex two-way process that requires empathic response not only from social workers, so empathy should be developed in clients and it is important to motivate them to communicate with the specialist. We see a promising direction of further research in the study of techniques of balanced interpersonal interaction, which, on the one hand, will promote sufficient expression of empathy on the part of the social worker, on the other hand, will help to resist his/her emotional exhaustion. The essential characteristics of the social workers’ empathy are defined: they are humanistic attitude to the client, the two-sided nature of the manifestation of empathy, the correlation of empathy with the psychological mechanism of identification and the combination of three components in empathy (cognitive, emotional, activity components).

The influence of social pain experience on empathic neural responses: the moderating role of gender.

Empathy for pain, the ability to share and understand the pain of others, plays an important role in the survival and development of individuals. Previous studies have found that social pain experience affects empathy for pain, but potential gender differences have not been considered. The stage of information processing during which gender is most likely to play a moderating role has yet to be clarified. In the current study, we set up two groups (social pain experience priming: social exclusion group; positive social interaction experience priming: social inclusion group) with a Cyberball game paradigm. We recorded the electrophysiological responses when participants were completing an empathy task. An early frontal P2 and N2 differentiation between painful stimuli and neutral stimuli was observed and females showed larger P2 amplitudes than males. At the P3 stage, in the social exclusion group, males showed similar parietal P3 amplitudes for painful and neutral stimuli, while females showed smaller P3 amplitudes for painful stimuli. At the central-parietal late positive potential (LPP) stage, females in the social inclusion group showed larger LPP amplitudes for painful stimuli than males. Our results suggest that gender plays a significant moderating role in how social pain experience affects empathy for pain during the late cognitive processing stage. Experiment 2 was designed to investigate the cognitive mechanism behind the results for the P3 component in females and the results partially confirmed our speculation. This study provides a neurophysiological basis for the dynamic gender differences in the effects of social pain experience on empathy for pain.

Virtuālā realitāte pret bulingu jauniešu vidū. Imersīvo mediju izteiksmes līdzekļi psihosociālajā izglītībā

Within the framework of the international project “Virtual Reality As a Tool for Countering Bullying Amongst Youth” – “VR not bullies” – the author, colleagues, and partners created a cycle of 6 workshops for bullying prevention where virtual reality (VR) videos are used as a tool. The aim of the project was to promote empathy for bullying victims, understand the causes of bullying, and demonstrate examples of positive behavior. As part of the “VR not bullies” project and in this article, the author has sought answers to questions about what technological and artistic means of expression to use to model empathic responses in viewers; analysis of literature and case studies (including self-produced material) have been applied. Short VR videos are a convenient technology to use when working with young people and working in groups. Although it is not a cheap method, it allows you to look at situations that would otherwise be unavailable for geographical, financial, or other reasons. Short VR videos are a fast and effective medium to promote emotional empathy and other perspectives, and their inherent interactivity stimulates young people’s interest and attention. However, more traditional methods, such as reading stories or role-plays with in-depth, long-term involvement, may be more effective in building competitive empathy and understanding.

Evaluations of empathizers depend on the target of empathy.

Psychological research on empathy typically focuses on understanding its effects on empathizers and empathic targets. Little is known, however, about the effects of empathy beyond its dyadic context. Taking an extradyadic perspective, we examined how third-party observers evaluate empathizers. Seven experiments documented that observers' evaluations of empathizers depend on the target of empathy. Empathizers (vs. nonempathizers) of a stressful experience were respected/liked more when the empathic target was positive (e.g., children's hospital worker), but not when the target was negative (e.g., White supremacist; Experiments 1 and 2). Empathizers were respected/liked more when responding to a positive target who disclosed a positive experience (i.e., a personal accomplishment), but less when responding to a negative target who disclosed a positive experience (Experiment 3). These effects were partly, but not solely, attributable to the positivity of empathic responses (Experiment 4). Expressing empathy (vs. condemnation) toward a negative target resulted in less respect/liking when the disclosed experience was linked to the source of target valence (i.e., stress from White supremacist job; Experiments 5 through 7), but more respect/liking when the experience was unrelated to the source of target valence (i.e., stress from cancer; Experiment 7). Overall, empathizers were viewed as warmer, but to a lesser extent when responding to a negative target. These findings highlight the importance of considering the extradyadic impact of empathy and suggest that although people are often encouraged to empathize with disliked others, they are not always favored for doing so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Immersive virtual reality simulated learning environment versus role-play for empathic clinical communication training.

IntroductionThe use of immersive virtual reality simulated learning environments (VR SLEs) for improving clinical communication can offer desirable qualities including repetition and determinism in a safe environment. The aim of this study was to establish whether the mode of delivery, VR SLE versus clinical role‐play, could have a measurable effect on clinical empathic communication skills for MRI scenarios.MethodsA split‐cohort study was performed with trainee practitioners (n = 70) and qualified practitioners (n = 9). Participants were randomly assigned to four groups: clinician VR (CVR), clinician role‐play (CRP), trainee VR (TVR), and trainee RP (TRP). Clinical communication skills were assessed using two methods: firstly, a self‐reported measure – the SE‐12 communication questionnaire and, secondly, a training and assessment tool developed by a panel of experts.ResultsParticipants in the VR trainee (TVR) and clinician (CVR) groups reported 11% (P < 0.05) and 7.2% (P < 0.05) improvements in communication confidence post training, whereas trainees assigned to the role‐play (TRP) intervention reported a 4.3% (P < 0.05) improvement. Empirical assessment of communication training scores assessing a participant’s ability to select empathic statements showed the TVR group performed 5% better on average than their role‐play counterparts (P < 0.05).ConclusionThe accuracy of participant's selection of appropriate empathic responses was shown to differ significantly following the training intervention designed to improve interactions with patients that present for an MRI scan. The results may demonstrate the capacity for immersion into an emotional narrative in a VR environment to increase the user’s susceptibility for recalling and selecting empathic terminology.