Although there is a substantial body of research on inter-human empathy and inter-animal empathy, there is a dearth of research comparing humans’ empathic reactions to humans and animals. To address this issue, three experiments were conducted in which participants read a scenario about a human or animal abuse victim in need of medical attention, and indicated the degree of empathy they felt on an emotional response scale. In Experiment 1, women felt significantly more empathy for animals than humans, whereas men tended to express more empathy for humans than for animals. In Experiment 2, adult women expressed the same degree of empathy for a child as for a puppy. Similarly, in Experiment 3, adult men and women expressed the same degree of empathy for a baby as for a puppy. Overall, results indicated that people feel at least as much empathy for animals as for humans. We suggest that an animal target elicits a great deal of empathy partly because it is perceived as not being responsible for having caused the need situation. Future research will show whether empathy felt for animals translates to prosocial behavior toward them as well.
ABSTRACT: Humane education programs designed to increase children’s empathy for animals are becoming more common. A quasi-experiment tested the effectiveness of one such program by comparing 80 children who had completed the program with a control group of 57 children who had not. The children read a story involving an injured dog and rated the degree of empathic concern they felt for him. The results showed that girls tended to express more empathy for a dog than did boys, but this difference was not significant for children who underwent an animal empathy training program. This suggests that humane education programs can reduce sex differences by increasing boys’ empathy.
Although it is frequently argued that empathy is increased by similar experiences, this idea has rarely been tested. This study investigated the relationship between empathy and prior similar experience. Participants read four different stories and rated the degree of empathy they felt. They also reported the extent to which they had prior similar experience of the events in the stories. We found that these self-reports of prior similar experience increased empathy for the persons in the stories. Similar experience may be an important situational antecedent for feeling empathy for another person. Pointing out similarities among experiences may be a fruitful means of training empathy.
Two studies tested associations among self-efficacy and prosocial behavior. In Study 1 wemeasured academic self-efficacy, emotional self-efficacy and self-reported prosocial behavior.The study showed that academic but not emotional self-efficacy was positively correlated withprosocial behavior. Study 1 included only self-oriented emotions, and the absence of empathicemotions may explain the lack of association between emotional self-efficacy and prosocialbehavior. In Study 2 we included empathic as well as self-oriented emotions, because previousresearch (C. D. Batson, 1991) has shown that empathic emotions generate altruistic helping. Asexpected, empathic self-efficacy had a positive association with prosocial behavior. Empathicself-efficacy appears to be an important, largely overlooked antecedent to prosocial behavior.
Research has shown that feeling empathy sometimes leads to compassion fatigue and sometimes to compassion satisfaction. In three studies, participants recalled an instance when they felt empathy in order to assess the role time perspective plays in how empathizers perceive the consequences of empathy. Study 1 revealed that college students perceive empathy as having more negative consequences in the short term, but more positive consequences in the long term. Study 2 showed that service industry professionals perceive the consequences of feeling empathy for customers who felt bad as less negative, and the consequences of feeling empathy for people who felt good as less positive, in the long as opposed to the short term. Because Studies 1 and 2 confounded time perspective with event specificity a third study was conducted in which event specificity was held constant across time perspectives. The same pattern of results emerged. The results of these studies indicate that perceptions of the effects of feeling empathy, whether positive or negative, become less extreme over time. These findings shed light on the relation between empathy and compassion fatigue and satisfaction by suggesting that situations that initially are experienced as stressful can over time make the empathizer stronger.
In light of previous attribution research, the authors investigated whether individuals make different causal inferences about their own, as opposed to other people's, constrained interpersonal behavior. Fifty-seven male and 59 female introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to act either friendly or unfriendly as they interacted with a same-sex confederate whose behavior was also contained. Participants assessed their own, and the confederates', behavior during the interaction and general dispositions. Consistent with previous research on the correspondence bias or fundamental attribution error, and the actor-observer bias, dispositional influences played a more prominent role in participants' attributions concerning the confederates' behavior than their own. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed, as are the implications of these findings on interpersonal relations.
To explore how people experience grief and what factors are perceived as facilitating successful grief work, a survey was distributed to people who had completed a grief recovery course. The results showed that emotions, cognitions, physical expressions, and behaviors all characterize grief, but that emotions are the most central component. The course brought relief and was regarded most favorably by those having at least 1 year between the grief trigger event and participation in the course. Writing a letter in whichcourse participants express their feelings to the loss object was perceived as the most successful aspect of the course. The letter might help with grief recovery by bringing aspects that have not been dealt with into conscious awareness.
Although a number of theoretical frameworks have been developed in previous empathy research, the extent to which these frameworks consider cultural and ethnic aspects is limited. This literature study reviews the most influential frameworks of general and ethnocultural empathy. The core components of ethnocultural empathy are identified as well as factors facilitating empathy for persons from other cultures. Most notably, the realization that people in other cultures have similar worries and goals should facilitate ethnocultural empathy, in both informal and professional contexts. This analysis can provide useful insights and tools for practitioners working with patients and clients from cultures other than their own. © 2011 Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology.