Empathy Psych Exam 1

What’re the primary take home points of the course?

1. Empathy is not a single “thing”

2. There is no solid evidence for the existence of mirror neurons

3. There are two types of limits to your empathy: Ability and Motivation

4. There are reliable personality measures of empathy, but these measure different things

5. Empathy is not a “cure” or “antidote” to stereotyping and conflict

6. It’s not yet clear whether empathy is a uniquely human trait

What’re the main facet of empathy?

• Behavioral mimicry

• Einfühlung - instinctual force driving us toward inner imitation

• Behavioral (and Emotional) Contagion

• Cognitive perspective-taking

What are mirror neurons?

Watching the behavior of the other person doing an activity (for instance eating an orange) automatically activates relevant areas of the brain in YOU.

Explain the difference between ability and motivates as their ability to limit Empathy?

• Ability Constraints: We simply cannot access or understand another person's feelings due to cognitive or emotional limitations.

• Motivational Constraints: We may choose not to empathize due to lack of interest, personal biases, or emotional fatigue.

What does the parochial empathy framework state?

People are likely to find it easier, and will be more motivates, to be empathetic towards ingroup compared to outgroup members. However, people can occasion, be empathetic towards strangers or people different from self.

Although someone may be highly empathetic. their support and positive feelings are most likely to just toward the ingroup members.

What is the difference between Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smiths Philosophy

• Hobbes: People are selfish, and that’s bad.

• Smith: People are selfish, but that’s not necessarily bad.

  • Ayn Rand also supported the virtue of selfishness.

What is typically the difference in social psych between selfishness’ and empathy”

• Selfishness - Maximizing own outcomes

• Empathy- Other oriented.

What are the two ways in which evolutionary theory attempts to explain the existence of altruism?

• Theories of Kin selection

• Theories of Reciprocity

What is the theory of Kin selection?

People are often “choosy” in terms of who they’ll end up helping. Discounting other stuff, we’re more likely to assist people in the same group as us.

What is Reciprocal Altruism?

Natural selection may create psychological mechanism designed to deliver benefits even to non relatives, provided that such actions lead to reciprocal beneficial actions in the future.

What’re two additional factors that can explain apparent “self sacrifice” ?

• Social reward perspective

• Personal distress motive

Overall, what’re the four motives for helping that selfish in nature?

• Kin selection theory

• Reciprocal altruism

• Social reward perspective

• Personal distress motive

What is one common meaning of empathy (empathetic concern) coined by Davis (1996)

• Empathetic concern: A response which reflects concern with other persons misfortune. Consider this to be interchangeable with altruism

What is the bystander effect

• If there is a lot of people passing by a situation that seems to be an emergency, people will not do anything about it

• Kitty Genovese case

What does the Latane and Darley’s model demonstrate?

• Explains the bystander effect, suggesting that the reason for not helping is not due to a lack of moral standards.

• Stages:

  • Potential emergency happening

  • 1. Do you notice the event

  • 2. Do you interpret the event as an emergency

  • 3. DO you assume responsibility

  • 4. Know the appropriate form of assistance

  • 5. Implement the decision

  • Note: 4 and 5 don’t matter much

• Only if you complete these stages will you intervene; failure at any of these stages results in no intervention.

How did they test whether people noticed the event (1)

• Via the good Samaritan study

  • Seminary students who were in a higher hurry would be more likely to notice the event and help.

  • The more urgency we are put under the more likely we are to miss that an emergency situation is taking place. greater the urgency,

How did they test for whether the situation was interpreted as an emergency situation (2) ?

• The smoke filled room study

• When someone was in a room and the place started to smoke, people where a lot less likely to respond or take action in that situation if there was people nearby that where not responding.

• In this experiment, these people not responding where part of the experimental design, they where called confederates.

• If people around us aren’t dong anything this tell us that is is the correct response to the situation.

What did the “Seizure study “ by Latane and Darley Demonstrate

• Design: Subject was in a booth, whilst visually isolated from person in another booth. Partner who seems to be having a seizure.

• The more people that the person perceived was in the surrounding areas, the leas likely they where to help, and the greater delay there was in getting to them.

What does the drowning of a student at the U.Illinois student pool demonstrate ?

• That sometimes non-helping may involve a blend of all three factors at the same time.

What is something that is noticeably missing from the Latane and Darley approach?

Personality. They took a classic, power of the situation approach to altruism.

When can something be considered a personality trait?

Something can be considered a personality trait when….

• Consistency—For a quality to be considered a personality trait, the behaviors associated with it must be somewhat consistent across situations.

• Stability - Individuals with a trait are somewhat stable over time in behavior related to the trait.

What is Construct Validity? Predictive Validity?

• Construct validity- Is your questionnaire measuring what you think it’s measuring

• Predictive validity- Do the scores on your measure predict behavior. A good validity would predict what it is supposed to predict.

What’re the five traits discussed in the Big Five model?

• O: Openness - Imagination, feelings, action, ideas

• C: Conscientiousness - Competence, self discipline, thoughtfulness, goal driven

• E: Extraversion - sociability, assertivness, emotional expression

• A: Agreeableness - Cooperative, trustworthy, good natured

• N: Neuroticism - Tedency toward unstable emotions

High predictive validity, doesn’t mean no change, but they tend to remain constant over time.

What’re frequent criticisms of the Big Five theory?

Surely there are other personality traits beyond these five!

A frequent objection to the Big Five is that five dimensions cannot possibly capture all of the variation in human personality

In defense of C&M, they never claimed that these are the only five traits.

The names/descriptions of the five factors are overly broad

However: each of the big five traits do have subdimensions

How do you measure individual differences in empathy for kids?

• Focus on behaviors, not responses to surveys.

  • •Perceptual role taking (e.g. Piaget’s three mountains task)

    •Referential communication (Glucksberg et al., 1966)

    •E.g. telling another person how to build tower sight-unseen

What early methods were developed to measure individual differences in empathy for adults? Why weren’t they successful?

More reliant overall on questionnaires

1. Early efforts focused on accuracy. DYmond (1949) asked adults after an interaction with another person to guess how the other person rated themselves. The problem was that it was arguably an unusual question based on a single behavioral interaction, and agreement does not equal accuracy.

2. Another notable attept was the questionaire measure of emotion empathy (QMEE). More straightforward, and subscales where interestin but no well defined. such as:

   “Susceptibility to emotional contagion”

   “Tendency to be moved by others’ positive emotional experiences”

   “Sympathetic tendency”

Why was the Interpersonal Reactivity Task by Mark Davis so impactful?

Filled a huge gap in the individual difference literature for those wishing to use a measure that:

•Captures multi-dimensionality of empathy

•Clear in definitions

•Easy to administer

•High in Predictive validity

Statistically reliable

What’re the four distinct subcomponents of the Interpersonal reactivity task scale

• Empathetic Concern: I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.

• Perspective taking: I try to look at everyone’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.

• Personal distress: In emergency situations, I feel apprehensive and ill at ease

• Fantasy: After seeing a play or movie, I have felt like I was one of the characters.

What is the correlation between EC/PT and the big 5 traits?

EC and PT moderately correlate with each other and each show (more or less) the same relationship with the Big Five. Agreeableness strongest correlation for both.

PD (personal distress)= only one significant effect: strong negative correlation with neuroticism. Fantasy has only one sig effect: strong positive correlation with openness

What do recent developments beyond the David empathy scale show?

• Domain specific measures of self reported open-mindedness correlate pretty highly with the perspective taking index of the IRI, but allows flexibility to focus on content area of the questionnaire.

What’re the implications if Americans really are becoming more narcissistic than they used to be?

• Narc is negatively correlated with empathy .This would suggest, as a society, that we are becoming less empathic!!

• In order to properly be able to confirm this we must know how we could measure narcissism.

What’re the four dimensions of the NPI (Narcissism personality inventory) ?

Exploitative and authority/leadership is strongly negativley correlated with EC and PT.

• Exploitative: I find it easy to manipulate people

• Authority/Leadership: I like to have authority over people

• Superiority/Arrogance: I am an extraordinary person

• Self Absorption: I like to be the center of attention

Whayt’re three different measures/ study design you can use to see whether American really are becoming narcissistic (or less empathetic) than they used to be?

• Longitudinal studies

• Cross sectional studies

• Time lag studies

What is a longitudinal study? What’re the advantages and Disadvantages?

•Tracks the same group of people over time

•Advantages:

•When done well, can be useful 

•Cautions:

•These are very hard studies to do

•“Age effects” difficult to disentangle from cultural effects.

E.g. Measurement of group of college sophomores in 1945 and then measure that same group at 10-year intervals

 elaborate on age effects. For example, suppose that a study showed generally decreasing levels of empathy between 1990 and 2024 in a longitudinal study.  What is causing this effect?? Something about getting older?  Or, alternatively, something about American culture in 2024 that’s different from 1990???

What is a cross sectional study? What’re the advantages and Disadvantages?

•Collects data from different groups of ps at same time.

•E.g. In spring of 2019, researcher X measures personality among three groups:

•20 year olds

•40 year olds

•60 year olds

•Advantages:

•easier to run compared to longitudinal approaches

•easy to run huge samples

•Cautions:

•Perfectly confounds age with generational effects (e.g., people in each of these groups grew up in different eras)

What is a time lag study? What’re the advantages and Disadvantages?

•Examines responses by different Ps of similar age at different points in time

•E.g. Find sophomores who completed a given personality survey at different points in time (e.g., 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020)

•Advantages:

•When done well, can be very compelling.

•Challenges

•groups need to be matched on different demographic variables. Not always possible, although college sophomores a convenient approach.

•Interpretation of WHY you find changes can be difficult.

•E.g. what is it about 2020, exactly, that’s different from twenty years ago, in 2000?

“different points in time” refers to the time period in which data were collected.

Very compelling…unlike the other approaches, this controls for age effects, allowing you to look more carefully at cultural effects.

What was Twinge’s conclusion about whether we, as a culture, have become more narcissistic/less empathic? What’re critiques of this POV?

• Over time since 80’s on average, narcissism goes up

• Some disagreement, as to how large these effects on narcissism, a lot have to do with complex statistical matters.

Does empathy follow the same trend as narcissism?

• Yes they correlate/ follow the exact opposite trend

• Perspective taking (HUGE effect) and Perspective Taking (Large effect) has deceased over time.

What’re the two different classification approaches to empathy, emotion, and justice.

• Categorical approach

• Dimensional approach

What is the dimensional approach

• Example, Russell’s circumplex model of emotions.

  • Emotions can be arranged in roughly a circular order around perimeter of two dimensional space defined by two aces: Valence (pleasure-displeasure) and degree of arousal (high vs. low).

What’re the tree perspectives to explain where emotion comes from?

• The “Nature” perspective

  • Emphasizes genetics. Emotions often framed as “universal” properties within a given species.

• The “Nurture” perspective

  • Emphasizes “social construction” of emotion

  • Assumes different cultures have different emotional experiences

• Cognitive perspective

  • Emphasizes the role of goals/cognition in triggering different emotions

Explain the Stella and Keltner model for explaining the traditional goal- based model of emotion.

• Traditional role of anger in the figure is cast as having exclusively negative consequences, but this is not always the case.

Explain primary adaptive feelings : Anger

• Feeling: Anger

• Information: Justice violation

• Need: Restore justice; punishment of wrongdoers, reparations to victims.

• Goal: Approach: See that justice is done!

Note: Anger can obviously be a destructive, self-serving emotion when the person’s sense of “justice violation” is distorted and/or self-serving

Explain primary adaptive feelings : Fear

• Feeling: Fear

• Information: Danger

• Need: Safety

• Goal: Avoidance

What did Fehr and Gatcher (2002) say about evolutionary advantage of anger

• Motivates punitive action towards norm violators, as Darwin suggested

• But can also drive compassion towards those who have been harmed;

• Doesn’t imply that anger is always triggered by norm violators; see next slides for elaboration

What does boundary conditions state?

Anger towards “nom violators” is likely when certain boundary conditions are met

• Harmful actions performed by a person in which the actions

  • Are intentional

  • Have foreseeable consequences

  • Performed by someone of their own free will

  • Performed by someone of sound mind (and not a really young children)

• Harmful actions may or may not directly involve another person

  • E.g. you clearly will be angry if someone wrecks your car and it was their fault

  • You weren’t harmed, but your property rights were violated

• Random, unforeseeable events not likely to make you angry (at least in a conventional sense)

  • E.g., floods, hurricanes

    • But a flood that could have been predicted (e.g., by the national weather service), but wasn’t, could make you angry

What does Vitaglione and Barnett say about empathic anger as a predictor of helping and punishing desires?

Explain anger vs. Fear in the context of neuroscience

• Two important subsystems in the brain:

  • BIS (behavioral inhibition system)

    • avoidance

  • BAS (behavioral activation system)

    • Approach

• Anger is the only negative emotion that is part of the BAS system

Notes: Subjective feelings of fear, as with most other negative emotions, are associated with BIS activation. Subjective feelings of anger are associated with strong activation of the BAS system.

What’re the two related motives to justice ?

• Retributive

• Restorative Justice.

What is Retributive justice?

•Response focused on offender’s past behavior

•Crime is an individual act with individual responsibility

•Victims are (somewhat) peripheral to the process

•The offender is defined by deficits

•Focus on establishing blame or guilt, on the past (did he/she do it?)

•Imposition of pain to punish and deter/prevent

What is Restorative justice?

•Response focused on harmful consequences of offender’s behavior; emphasis is on the future

•Crime has both individual and social dimensions of responsibility

•Victims are central to the process of resolving a crime.

•The offender is defined by capacity to make reparation

•Focus on the problem solving, on liabilities/obligations, on the future (what should be done?)

•Restitution as a means of restoring both parties; goal of reconciliation/restoration

What is the helpers high?

Volunteering (or other pro-social acts) can trigger release of endorphins–the body’s natural painkillers–which are comparable to morphine.  This effect is coined a “helper’s high.”  NIH study: when people thought about giving money to a charity, this activated areas of the brain that tend to also be activated when people think about food and sex were activated.  

What’re two way to measure that is commonly used by social and personality psychologists?

• Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)

  • What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will take us back to our true path.

    It’s the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within

• Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

  • Some groups of people are just inferior to others

    An ideal society requires some groups to be on top and others to be on the bottom

Are conservatives less empathetic than others?

So out of the six relationships, two are consistent with the “conservatives aren’t empathic” perspective (red) but the other four (green) are not

What is one broadly defined, relevant difference between liberals and conservatives? 

•Liberals express care/concern towards relatively broad groups, and not just their own narrow ingroup.

•Conservatives tend to express care and concern towards their ingroup

•i.e., Conservatives are, on average, more “tribal”

What is Parochial Empathy ?

Empathy could be wonderful if it always facilitated our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others.

But there’s a problem: we may be more willing and/or able to do that with some people, more than others.

This “selectivity” is sometimes called “parochial empathy” and has led some authors, like Paul Bloom, to suggest that the dynamics of empathy can exacerbate prejudice (make it worse).

i.e. we get to pick and choose who we are empathetic towards

What does Bloom say about the concept of Parochial Empathy ?

• Empathy is a limited resource: we can’t be empathic towards everyone, even if we wanted to.

• Empathy doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  It’s guided by pre-existing world views.

• People thus (metaphorically) can dole out empathy in (somewhat) different directions, depending on, e.g., whether they are liberal or conservative.

• This can lead to social division and further polarization

He’s not advocating for selfish, ruthless behavior. On the contrary, he’s pleading for people to be more humane and caring.

He’s not against all types of empathy (despite what the book title might imply).

What he’s really saying is that certain aspects of empathy have some surprising “dark sides” that can have unintended negative consequences.

Some culprits:

Empathy is picky and choosy (in a bad way). 

We’re more likely to be empathic towards those who we think deserve our help

Ingroup-outgroup biases important here

How does Parochial Empathy play a part in domain of stereotyping and prejudice ?

What is the purpose of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex ?

becomes activated in the context of experiencing and/or perceiving pain (self and others)

What does “Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathetic Neural Responses” show? 

• A non painful and pain Caucasian and Chinese face shown to sometime.

• Each participant receives all four types of faces. 

• Ps show greater neurological Rxs to perceived pain of ingroup vs. outgroup members.

• Analyses are complex (see next slide)—don’t need to know details, beyond what’s stated directly above in bold

• Ps’  brains spontaneously reacted to the pain of others, but only if they shared the same ethnicity!

What did the hiking study demonstrate ?

• Design: Experimenter approached students who were sitting either indoors in the university library or outdoors at a bus stop near the library. The students were asked to participate in a study allegedly about reading comprehension. Winter weather in the Midwestern United States can be quite cold; during this study, ambient temperatures ranged from -14 to 30 F. Thus, we manipulated visceral experience by comparing a warm indoor condition with a cold outdoor condition (n = 60 for each condition). Also manipulated: similarity of the target to the self: Accomplished by presenting Ps with either a conservative or liberal target, and then matching with Ps’ own political leanings (measured afterwards).

• Basically it once again showed that only similar groups tended to say they where experiencing a painful emotion. IN this case, they where feeling cold when they where on the hike. 

What did the experimentally induced thirst study show?

• Added onto the previous study of the hikers, in this case the people where feeling either thirsty or quenched. 

• The same difference between similar and dissimilar hikers was shown

• More empathizing with the similar hiker. 

What is the preoperational stage?

In plain language: children in the pre-operational stage have trouble placing themselves in the shoes of others, i.e., seeing the world through someone else’s vantage point.

What does the theory of mind mean?

•Theory of mind, as a personal capability, is the understanding that others have perspectives, beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own.

Middle-school age children (older than 5 years old) usually have pretty good ToM skills

They understand what it means to “not be able to see me”; they can take the other person’s cognitive perspective.*

BUT: Children YOUNGER than 5 have a surprisingly difficult time with this sort of game. 

They aren’t very good at taking the perspective of the other.

How could you measure Theory of Mind abilities? 

• The child knows that some object has been moved or transposed from where it’s supposed to be.   Can s/he imagine the perspective of another person who isn’t in on the secret? What we mean by “false belief” will become clearer shortly

What is Emotional Contagion?

put two babies together, if one starts crying, the other will almost always start too!

Features of Emotion Contagion Empathy:

lReflexive

lDoes not require understanding of other minds.

lNothing to do with ToM!

l

What is attributive empathy?

• Found with other children and adults

• Requires understanding of other minds. Can involve cognition and/or emotion

• This kind has a stronger connection to ToM

  • lUnderstanding vantage points of others 

    lHas implications for affect: we feel “connected” to another person’s emotion even though you’re not feeling that emotion

How does attributive empathy and emotional contagion correlate, are they mutually exclusive? 

… Are not mutually exclusive!

lpossible to have neither (cognitively simple animals, e.g. mice)

lpossible to have both (neurotypical human adults)

lpossible to have Emotional Contagion Empathy WITHOUT Attributive Empathy (e.g. neuro- atypical humans)

lmay be possible to have Attributive Empathy WITHOUT Emotional Contagion Empathy (possibly, certain types of disorders, although this point is hotly contested)

What deficits of empathy may people on the autism spectrum experience?

• Cognitive empathy*

  • Problems “seeing the world” as another person might see it.  Central to ToM

    • Illustrated by all three videos shown earlier

    • adults on the spectrum have similar deficits seen in neurologically typical children ages 2-3.

• Motor empathy:

  • ability to recognize, “copy” or imitate motor responses of the other (2-3 yr old neurotypical children have this skill)

  • Less clear whether adults on the spectrum have this deficit.

• Emotional empathy

  • Ability to emotionally respond when presented with or told about, emotional experiences of others 

  • Can be measured in at least three ways (behavioral measures, self report, brain activity).

  • People on the spectrum sometimes, but not always, have deficits here.

What is the key point when it comes to Psychopaths and empathy?

• Psychopaths have impairments in some--but not all—skills related to empathy and perspective taking.

What’re some important qualities to look at in a psychopath ? 

• Impulsive antisocial (criminal) behavior, risk-taking, callous treatment of others. 

• Often described (by clinicians) as grandiose, egocentric, manipulative, forceful, and cold-hearted.

• As you might expect, psychopaths score extremely low in emotional empathy (e.g., caring about others in need)

• For cognitive facets of ToM (e.g., spatial perspective taking; role playing), psychopaths show relatively unimpaired abilities.

  • If they are motivated to take someone’s cognitive perspective, they can do it.

    • Note that this is a useful ability if you want to cheat/con someone!

• Psychopath’s abilities in motor empathy (e.g., imitation) are also relatively unimpaired.

• For many—although not all--emotions (e.g., fear, sadness, guilt, shame) psychopaths show two kinds of emotional deficits

• They tend not to feel these emotions, themselves

• They show strong deficits in responding to, and even noticing, whether other people feel those emotions.

What emotions CAN they feel? To what extent?

• Anger

  • Psychopaths often feel anger and are very good at detecting this emotion in other people.

  • Note how this might be useful if you were a psychopath!

• Pain

  • Psychopaths are just as sensitive to pain as anyone else, when it is occurring to THEM.However, they are disturbingly insensitive to the pain of other people

    • Note, again, how this might be useful if you were a psychopath.  

What did a “Representative study of emotional empathy deficits in psychopaths (Decety et al. 2013)” study find ?

•Ps classified as low (L), Medium (M), or high (H) evidence of Psychopathy

•All Ps placed in the MRI scanner

•All Ps instructed to adopt either a self-perspective or an other-perspective while viewing visual stimuli depicting right hands and right feet of individuals in painful and non-painful situations

•E.g. pinching one’s finger in a door

•Emotional empathy measured by amygdala activation

•medium and high psychopaths show lower than average brain activation when imagining the pain of others! 

Is Psychopathy treatable?

• There is some, but not a lot, of published research on this topic.

• Of the work that has been done, results are not encouraging, especially with adults

• One challenge:

  • incidence of psychopathy in the population is not large; hard to obtain large samples

  • Participants will often withdraw from studies

  • Assessments of progress not always reliable (e.g., higher incidence of lying).

What’re the two species that they have texted for ToM in non human species? What’re some important questions that where asked about both of these species? 

•Two lines of research we’ll discuss in this course:

•Empathy in primates (chimps, gorillas)

•Empathy in canines (domesticated dogs, along with other types of canines, wolves).

•In both cases, researchers were primarily interested in this question: do these species have the ability to understand and appreciate what the world looks like from another  human’s perspective? 

Danny Povinell ToM research in primates. Design and outcomes.

• Basic idea 1: Primates will extend and out to ask for food, would chimps do this if the experimenter couldn’t see the chimp? 

• Basic idea 2: Chimp equally familiar with both trainers, and the chimp has to be hungry

• Basic idea 3: One person will be facing the chimp, the other will be facing away

• Basic idea 4 several more controlled variations where added that blindfold, buckets, and covering of face or ears with hands

• The only correct set of trials in which the chimp performed above chance was the initial one with the trainer is either facing chimp or not with no other experimental modifications

• They did not perform above chance when the person was facing away but in one of the trials their face was looking back at the chimp. This disproved the forward facing hypothesis

• The second hypothesis for why chimps succeeded in the initial trial was he body facing forward hypothesis. In this condition, there was one person facing the chimp but their eyes where closed and in the other they where facing the wall, but their head was turned back and eyes open.

• Overall: “If the other’s body is oriented towards me, they can see me!”

What where key findings of theory of mind testing on canines

•All canines in sample know these rules:

•human turned toward me—approach

•human turned away from me: don’t approach

•Pet dogs have learned this rule:

•Human has face in book—don’t approach

•Rules that none of the canines know (or seem capable of learning) (because they have little or no experience with these)

•human facing me with camera in front of face

•human facing me with bucket over head

What was the experimental design for testing ToM on canines

Canines had to choose between an attentive (“seer”) vs. non-attentive human (“blind”) whose visual attention was blocked in one of four ways, such as having back turned vs. not turned: