Measure Of Sympathy Research Articles

Family History and Attitudes Toward Outgroups: Evidence from the Syrian Refugee Crisis

We examine how analogous thinking about family history affects outgroup bias. We provide evidence from Greece, a country that serves as an entry port to Europe for a large number of refugees and whose native population partly consists of descendants of ethnic Greeks who were forcibly relocated from Turkey in the early twentieth century. Combining historical and survey data with an experimental manipulation, we show that mentioning the parallels between past and present forced displacement leads to substantial increases in monetary donations and attitudinal measures of sympathy for refugees among respondents with forcibly displaced ancestors. This effect is also found among Greeks without a family history of forced migration, but only in places with a large historical concentration of Greek refugees from Turkey, where this historical experience is salient. Overall, our findings suggest that harnessing past experience can be an effective way of increasing empathy and reducing outgroup discrimination.

From Ireland to Iceland: Lord Dufferin’s Letters from High Latitudes (1857)

This essay revisits a celebrated travelogue by Lord Dufferin, a prominent Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Imperial administrator of the Victorian era. While his Letters from High Latitudes (1857) has become a classic of travel literature about Arctic regions, his descriptions of Iceland are here shown to be shot through with echoes of an earlier, lesser known account of famine-stricken Irish counties that Dufferin had co-authored at the time of the Great Hunger. In various passages, the resurgence of that Irish subtext breaks through the essentially comic surface of Dufferin’s travelogue, which then takes on Gothic overtones. Dufferin’s meditations on Icelandic history can also indirectly reveal a measure of sympathy for Irish nationalist grievances, thus adding nuance to dominant views of Dufferin as a pillar of British Imperial rule. Letters from High Latitudes can thus be profitably read as a form of travel literature that maps controversial national concerns onto an ostensibly exotic and therefore safer territory.

Psychometric Evidence of a Multidimensional Measure of Prosocial Behaviors for Spanish Adolescents

ABSTRACTPrior theories and scholars rarely distinguished between distinct forms of prosocial behaviors (i.e., actions intended to benefit others) and most scholars operationalize prosocial behaviors as a global construct. Furthermore, stringent tests of psychometric properties of prosocial behavior measures are rare, especially in countries other than the United States. The present study was designed to examine the structure and functions of a multidimensional measure of prosocial behaviors in youth from Spain. Six hundred and 66 adolescents (46% girls; M age = 15.33 years, SD = 0.47 years) from Valencia, Spain, completed the Prosocial Tendencies Measure-Revised (PTM-R), measures of sympathy, perspective taking, and a global measure of prosocial behavior. Results showed that the hypothesized 6-factor structure of the PTM-R had good fit, the best fit model as compared to alternative models, and that there were several unique patterns of relations between specific forms of prosocial behaviors and sympathy, perspective taking, and the global measure of prosocial behavior. Furthermore, although there were significant gender differences in some forms of prosocial behaviors, the structure of the PTM-R was equivalent across gender. Discussion focuses on the implications for theories and measurement of prosocial behaviors.

Empathic and Sympathetic Orientations Toward Patient Care: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Psychometrics

To develop instruments for measuring empathic and sympathetic orientations in patient care and to provide evidence in support of their psychometrics. Third-year medical students at Jefferson Medical College responded to four clinical vignettes in 2010. For each vignette, students indicated the extent of their agreement with an empathic response (conveying their understanding of patients' concerns) and with a sympathetic response (sharing patients' feelings). The authors calculated, based on students' responses to the clinical vignettes, two measures of empathic and sympathetic orientation. Students also completed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Of the 258 students in the class, 201 (78%) responded to all four vignettes and completed the JSE and IRI. The authors confirmed construct validity of the measures of empathic and sympathetic orientation through factor analysis. The empathic orientation was significantly associated with the measure of empathy (as measured by the JSE) but not with measures of sympathy (as measured by specific scales of the IRI). Conversely, sympathetic orientation was significantly associated with measures of sympathy. Thus, these results support the validity of the empathic and sympathetic orientation measures as assessed by four clinical vignettes. Coefficient alphas for the two measures were, respectively, 0.79 and 0.84. The validated measures of empathic and sympathetic orientation provide research opportunities to enhance the understanding of the contributions of empathy and sympathy to physicians' competence and patient outcomes.

Pasolini for the Future

Pasolini for the Future responds to a recent book by the French art critic Georges Didi-Huberman entitled Survival of the Fireflies [La survivance des lucioles] (2009) in which the critic, albeit with some measure of sympathy, accuses Pier Paolo Pasolini and, to a lesser extent, Giorgio Agamben of being too attached to the past and too apocalyptic with regard to the future. Disputing the soundness of Didi-Huberman's criticism, this essay discusses Pasolini's belief in change and transformation through a close reading of his late critical essays collected in the volumes Lutheran Letters [Lettere luterane] and Corsair Writings [Scritti corsari]. In these writings, the idea of the future as a radically different prospect from the present looms large. To understand this view of the future requires revisiting the issue of Pasolini's insistence on a cultural apocalypse. Through a reading of the scenario for Pasolini’s unproduced film project Porno-Teo-Kolossal and of his responses to the influential work of the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, it becomes possible to reframe this issue in order to question the ethical and political presuppositions behind the general tendency of commentators to assail Pasolini's supposedly apocalyptic tone of thought.

The Development of a Measure of Prosocial Behaviors for Late Adolescents

The correlates and structure of prosocial behaviors in late adolescents were examined using a newly constructed, multidimensional measure. In Study 1, 249 college students (145 women; M age = 19.9 years) were administered the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM) which assesses 6 types of prosocial behaviors: altruistic, compliant, emotional, dire, public, and anonymous. Measures of sympathy, perspective taking, personal distress, social desirability, global prosocial behaviors, social responsibility, ascription of responsibility, vocabulary skills, and prosocial moral reasoning were also completed. Test-retest reliability and further validity of the PTM were demonstrated in Study 2 with a sample of 40 college students (28 women; M age = 22.9 years). Results from both studies yielded evidence of adequate reliability and validity of the PTM and support the notion of differentiated forms of helping.

The relations of regulation and emotionality to children's situational empathy-related responding.

The relations of dispositional regulation (attentional control, ego control), ego resiliency, and emotionality (general emotional intensity and negative emotionality) to situational measures of sympathy and personal distress were examined. Situational sympathy and personal distress were assessed with facial, self-reported, and heart rate reactions to an empathy-inducing film. Teachers and parents completed measures of children's dispositional regulation and emotionality. In general, children who evidenced sympathy (e.g., facial sadness, mean heart rate decline, and self-reported sympathy) were rated higher in regulation and resiliency, although findings sometimes were obtained for only one sex. Children who evidenced personal distress (e.g., facial distress), as well as facial sadness, were rated relatively high in emotionality. Gaze aversion from the film was correlated with regulation and boys' resiliency, and was negatively related to negative emotionality.

A Short Background to the Shooting Incident in Langa Township, Uitenhage

The shooting of a number of people in Langa Township, Uitenhage on 21 March 1985 must be seen in the context of the sociopolitical crisis of South Africa, particularly its Eastern Cape, to be understood. The upheavals in the Eastern Cape started in about the beginning of 1984 when school boycotts began in the town of Cradock. The school boycotts spread to other centers in the Eastern Cape such as Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Port Alfred, Graaf Reinet, and Uitenhage; by the latter half of 1984 virtually the whole Eastern Cape was experiencing school boycotts. The unrest has been attributed to a number of factors such as inferior education for blacks, the increase in the price of foodstuffs and bus fares, and the arrest of community leaders. For the most part all these factors work in combination but it can be said that the most explosive is the issue of Bantu education. For many years since this system of education for blacks was introduced in the mid-1950s black people have expressed their utter abhorrence of it in several ways. Since 1976 black pupils and students themselves have actively joined in the battle. They have demonstrated their intense hatred of the system of education at various times and some have gone so far as to show that they are prepared to lay down their lives. In Uitenhage, in particular, these intense feelings of hatred on the part of the students were prevalent. The vehicle which the students have used for the struggle is a student organization known as the Congress of South African Students (Cosas) which has town and regional branches throughout the country. It was formed in 1978. To further its aims, the most important of which is transforming the state of black education in the country, it has sought the cooperation and understanding of the parents and the community in some of its programs. As will be shown from what follows, Uitenhage has been and still is a very good example of how this measure of sympathy and cooperation between students and their parents was achieved within a relatively short time.

Embattled Amateurs at Montford Park

as Falstaffs interim companion or as Hotspur's better. The treat was Pedro Silva's Falstaff. Silva, a charter member of the core company, had before this summer rarely given textured depth to his various-albeit minor-Shakespearean roles. But his Falstaff lived, not as a raucously overexaggerated clown, but as a good-humored, often serious knave whose thievery and cowardice were based upon principles that worked in thoughtful counterpoint to Hal's and Hotspur's visions of glory and honor. Falstaff did not, however, carry the production as he has so often and too easily. He received his share of laughter but not at the expense of sacrificing the play's politics. Indeed, what was sobering and moving about the performance was its delicate balance of intimate comedy and civil strife. Falstaff, Hal, and Hotspur alternately drew a measure of sympathy and understanding by addressing the audience while sitting or standing far downstage. In his catechism on honor, for example, Falstaff began upstage and concluded downstage, all the while propositioning the audience with rhetorical questions. Hal's soliloquies and Hotspur's rationale for the rightness of his cause were also directed squarely at an audience that found itself withholding political and moral judgment because of this balancing of persuasion. Consistent perhaps with the temper of the play, but somewhat disappointing, was the loss of the Hal-Francis episode and, in Hal's rehearsal scene, Falstaffs cushion and chair. Other cuts and