Empathy Exam 1

What are some facets of Empathy?

- Sympathy or compassion

- Behavioral Mimicry

- Behavioral (and Emotional) Contagion

- Cognitive Perspective Taking

Behavioral Mimicry

Unconscious imitation of others' behaviors

Ex 1: a child copying his father who is folding his hands behind his back

Ex 2: If watching a trapeze artist, as she leans, you may unconciously lean slightly as well

Behavioral (& Emotional) Contagion

Other people's behaviors/emotions are contagious

Ex 1: Yawning when others yawn

Ex 2: Feeling sad when others are sad

Cognitive Perspective Taking

develops during the school-age years and involves a child's ability to infer other people's thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and/or intentions and involves making judgements about the internal psychological states of another person

Ex: Piaget's Spatial Perspective Taking Task

Mirror Neurons

Neurons in the brain that are activated when one observes another individual engage in an action and when one performs a similar action. however, no solid evidence for this

Ex: If you're watching someone eat, the neurons that're activated in the eating person's head would activate in your head as well

Two types of limits to empathy?

Ability and Motivation

Ability Constraints

Hard or impossible to empathize with the "other," even if you wanted to. Can be empathic towards domesticated animals (like a dog) because their expressions can look similar to a humans expressions.

Ex: Can't really empathize with a starfish because we're so different from each other.

Motivation Constraints

There are cases where you could empathize with someone but you just don't want to.

Human beings can empathize even with people they don't like (such as Trump getting shot)

Parochial Empathy Framework

People are highly selective in terms of who they choose to be empathic towards

While empathy can be good (especially when it fosters prosocial behaviors towards others), it does not exist in a vacuum, and it is often affected by our pre-existing likes and dislikes

- Usually done unconsciously

Diagram:

--> Highly Empathic Observer has positive feelings for/supports an ingroup member, but a lack of support/negative feelings for an outgroup member.

--> There is competition/antagonism between the ingroup and outgroup members

Theories of Kin Selection

People are choosy when it comes to who they help. Everything else being equal, most choose to help those similar to us (belong in the same group)

Recipricol Altruism

Mutual beneficial relationship

Ex: "Cleaner Birds" --> it benefits crocodiles to let birds come in and eat the bugs out of their mouth as it cleans their teeth: mutually beneficial

What are the four motives for helping that are (indirectly or directly) selfish in nature?

1. Theories of Kin Selection

2. Recipricol Altruism

3. Social Reward perspective

4. Personal Distress Motive

Bystander Effect: Why wouldn't people help?

- Some people think others will help

- Wasn't paying attention

- In a rush, too much of a hassle

- Someone with higher authority will help

Kitty Genovese Case

An example of the bystander effect. A girl was walking home late and she got attacked. Even though a bunch of people in her building saw, nobody called the police or helped her

Latane and Darley Model

Research on bystander behavior in emergencies

- Not about morals, it's about how ppl process info

Potential Emergency --> notice it? (Yes) --> Emergency? (Yes) --> Do you take Responsibility? (Yes) --> Help!

- If you answer no to any of these questions, you end up not helping

Darley and Batson: The Good Samaritan Study

An example of the 1st part of Latane & Darley's model: Do you notice it?

People were put into three conditions and each were told they had to give a speech about the Good Samaritan.

First condition was told they were early, second- on time, third- late.

Then they put a man stripped of clothing in an alleyway that each priest had to pass and step over him to get to the meeting place.

The percentage of people offering help to the man decreased as they had less time.

Those that were early/on time were much more likely to help (63% helped) than those who had to moderately hurry (45%) and those who were running late (10%)

Lantane and Darley Study: The Smoke Filled Room

Example of the 2nd part of the model: Is it an Emergency?

The "Smoke Filled Room": Participants were sorted into two groups: alone and a group of three (The subject + two unresponsive confederates)

- The result was that 75% of the alone group noticed the group and said something whereas in the group of 3 group, only 10% said something

Latane and Darley Study: Seizure

They had a person seemingly suffer an epilitic seizure

Perceived # of other observers aside from person having seizure, who are privy to this potential emergency --> 0 (real subject thinks he/she is alone, 85%), 1 (real subject thinks there is one other observer, 62%), 4 (real subject thinks there are four other observers, 31%)

Average Delay: 52 s (0), 93 s (1), 166 s (4)

Anything absent from the Latane and Darley study?

Personality is a missing factor. This is due to the fact that people believe personality doesn't affect much, although we know today that this is wrong

Personality vs. Individual Difference

Consistency: Shown at home, work, public and private

--> if has a strong personality trait shown across all places

Stability: Age 30, 40, 50 ..., as you grow older, and the more you express these traits, stronger personality

Individual Difference Measures

- Assessments focusing on variability among individuals

- Is your questionnare measuring what you think it's measuring? --> issue of construct validity

- Do scores on your measure predict behavior? --> predictive validity

Big 5 Model

Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (OCEAN)

- Extrovert - Low activation of brain, use people/do things to bring it up

- Introverts - Overstimulated brain, use things to bring it down

Criticisms of Big 5 Theory (and Rebuttals)

- Surely, there must be more than 5? -> Yes but these are the most important ones!

- A little too broad?

- Incomplete list of previous attempts to measure individual differences in empathy --> there have been a lot of previous attempts before this one, and none of them were very good

- Measures for young children (5,6)? --> focused on behaviors, not responses to surveys (ex: perceptual role taking (Piaget's 3 mountains), Referential communication--> telling someone how to build a tower unseen)

Measurements Developed for Adults

- More reliant on questionnares

- Early efforts: Focused on accuracy

- One ex: Dymond (1949)

- After interacting with another person, Ss (essentially) asked to guess how the other person rated themselves (like Joe was asked how Mary would rate herself)

- Very popular in its day but has some major problems

- Based on a single behavioral interaction, and agreement does not equal accuracy!!

- Questionnaire measure of emotional empathy ---> doesn't predict behavior

- Up to mid-late 1970s, researchers haven't developed viable individual different measures of empathy for either adults or children

Mark Davis and the IRI (Interpersonal Reactivity Task)

- 28-question measure that measures people's tendency to experience empathy for others. The questions measure four variables: (Perspective taking, empathic concern, personal distress, and fantasy)

- Not perfect, but filled huge gap

- Captures multi-dimensions of empathy

- Clear in definition

- Easy to administer

- High in predictive validity

- Statistically reliable

Scale: 4 Distinct Subcomponents

- Empathic Concern --> I often have tender feelings for people less fortunate than me

- Perspective Taking --> I try to look at everyone's side of disagreement before coming to conclusion

- Personal Distress --> In emergency situations, I feel apprenhensive & ill at ease

- Fantasy --> After seeing a play or movie, I felt like I was one of the characters

NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory): 4 dimensions

Americans are getting more and more narcissistic

- Exploitative: I find it easy to manipulate people

- Authority/leadership: I like to have authority over ppl

- Superiority/Arrogant: I am an extraordinary person

- Self-Absorption: I like being center of attention

Longitudinal Studies

- Tracks the same group of people over time (ex: Group of sophmores take quiz every 5 years)

Advantages:

- When done well, can be useful

Caution:

- Very hard studies to do

- "Age Effects" difficult to disentangle from cultural effects

Cross Sectional Studies

Collects data from different groups of ps at the same time

- In spring of 2019, researcher X measures personality among 3 groups (20 year olds, 40 year olds, 60 year olds)

Advantages:

- Easier to run compared to longitudinal approaches

- Easy to run huge samples

Caution:

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

Time-Lag Studies

- Examines responses by different Ps of similar age at different points in time (e.g., find sophmores who completed survey (1990, 2000, 2010, etc.))

- Controls for age effects

Advantages:

- When done well, can be very compelling

Challenges:

- Groups need to be matched on different demographic variables

- 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?

Jean Twenge (Narcissism)

- People's level of narcissism have gone up

- What about empathy? Has it gone up? --> No, empathic concern has gone down, perspective taking has gone down (empathy has gone down, narcissism goes up)

Two Different Classification Approaches

Categorical Approach:

-> Images of emotions shown to people with no contact with western culture & they identified the images as the correct emotions

Dimensional Approach:

-> 2D model: high arousal, low arousal, unpleasant, pleasant

ex:

Fear + Anger + Contempt = high arousal, unpleasant

Happy: high arousal, pleasant

Sad: low arousal, unpleasant

Surprised: high arousal, could be either pleasant or unpleasant

The "Nature" Perspective

Emphasizes genetics. Emotions 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

Fehr and Gatcher (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

Boundary Conditions

- Anger towards "norm violators" likely when certain conditions are met

- Harmful actions performed in which actions...

- are intentional

- have forseeable consequences

- performed by someone of their own free will

- performed by someone of sound mind (so not really young children)

- Harmful actions may/may not directly involve another person (ex: someone wrecks your car)

- property rights were violated

- Random events not likely to make you angry

- Floods, Hurricans

- But a flood that could have been predicted but wasn't could make you angry

BIS (behavioral inhibition system)

the brain system that is sensitive to punishment and therefore inhibits behavior that might lead to danger or pain (Avoidance)

BAS (behavioral activation system)

Approach

sometimes called the "Go" system

Same as (BAS), this system produces and reinforces the motivation to seek rewards.

Desire for Justice (Motives)

Retributive and Restorative Justice

Retributive Justice

Lost something (like their daughter was killed), and they're unable to get it back --> the judge will be much harsher on the offendant (as the judge sympathizes with the victim)

- Response focused on offender's past behavior

- Crime is an individual act with individual responsibility

- 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

Restorative Justice

punishment designed to repair the damage done to the victim and community by an offender's criminal act (ex: offender took $100. Judge makes offender pay back the $100 as well as a $1000 for the act)

- 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 tomake reparation

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

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

Empathy Stereotypes (Liberals and Conservatives)

- Liberals believe that conservatives are less empathic

- Conservatives believe that liberals are excessively soft-hearted ("Bleeding heart liberal") and have a perceived excess of compassion

Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)

focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity

Individuals who score high in RWA adhere to traditional norms and submit to authority: however it does not align with "conservatives aren't empathic" when it comes to empathic concern, but it doesn align with the view when it comes to perspective taking

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability: more strongly related to empathy

People who score high in SDO (i wanna get far in life, i don't care about others) score low in empathic concern, and has no correlation with perspective taking: this aligns with the conservatives aren't empathic perspective

Self-Reported Political Ideology

Not related to empathic concern, but has a weak correlation with perspective taking

Differences between Liberals and Conservatives

Liberals:

- Express care towards relatively broad groups and not just their own narrow ingroup

Conservatives:

- Express care towards their own ingroup

- On average, are more "tribal" --> define their ingroup more narrowly (town, family, etc.)

Paul Bloom: Concept of Parochial Empathy

- This "selectivity" of empathy suggests that the dynamics of empathy can make empathy worse

- Empathy is limited, you can't be empathic towards everyone, even if we wanted to

- Thus, people focus on ingroups, which can be manipulated (ex: When 9/11 happened, Bush said to strike back! While it hurt the bad people, it mostly harmed innocent people)

- Empathy doesn't exist in a vacuum, and is guided by pre-existing worldviews

- This can lead to social division and further polarization

- Thinks we'd be better off being guided by principles of rational compassion instead

"Weaponization" of Empathy

- One way of triggering anger towards an outgroup is to tellstories (which may or may not be true) describing acts of violence, by outgroupers, towards fellow ingroupers.

- Single, salient victim (e.g. "girl trapped in the well") often triggersgreater sympathy than information about a much larger numberof victims (Spotlight effect)

Do you feel my pain? (Racial Group)

Caucausian and Asian Participants:

- Participants shown video depicting faces receiving either a painful (needle stimulation) or non-painful (Q-tip) stimulation

- Caucausians predicted to show greater neurologicalreactivity when the Caucausian was in pain (ingroup) as opposed to the Asians (outgroup) and vice versa

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

Reactions to Victims of Misfortune

- If a guy was lost in woods, would compassion change depending on whether he shared your political views?

- Given the conditions of either reading a person that shares your political views or doesn't, as well as different locations

- In experiment 1, the dependent variable: asked whether the hiker was most uncomfortable by hunger, cold, or thirst

- Participants more likely to say cold if similar political view in outside location

- Experiment 2: Ps given salty snack, either given no water or water, those who didn't get water most likley to say thirst for similar political views

Cognitive Egocentrism/ Theory of Mind (ToM)

The understanding that others have perspectives, beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own

- Middle school children usually have pretty good ToM skills (children under age 5 are much worse)

Measuring ToM in Developmental Psych

- Children 3 or younger struggle to see from other people's perspectives

- Forever making distinction between what ppl do and think

Sally-Anne (False Belief) Task

a psychological test, used in developmental psychology to measure a person's social cognitive ability to attribute false beliefs to others.

- Sally puts a block in a square basket and leaves. Anne comes and moves it to the round basket: Younger children with bad ToM believe Sally will think it's in the round basket, whereas older (5+) will understand Sally thinks it's still in the square basket

Emotional Contagion

- Reflexive

- Nothing to do with ToM

- Does not require understanding of other people's minds

- Ex: If 2 babies are together and one starts crying, the other one will too.

--> Not mutually exclusive with Attributive Empathy (it's possible to have emotional contagion empathy without the other and vice versa)

Attributive Empathy

- Requires understanding of other minds

- Can involve cognition and/or emotion

- E.g. "wow, I could definitely understand why that'd be upsetting"

- Stronger connection to ToM

- Understanding vantage points of others

- Has implications for affect: we feel "connected" to another person's emotion even though you're not feeling that emotion

--> Not mutually exclusive with emotional contagion (it's possible to have emotional contagion empathy without the other and vice versa)

- Possible to have both, neither, or one or the other

Clinical Psychology (Autism)

- People on the autism spectrum: Deficits in some, but not all facets of empathy (see a lot of strong deficit in Cognitive empathy)

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

Most common deficit seen in those on the autism spectrum

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

Clinical Psychology (Psychopathy)

- A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others,since age 15 year

- The individual is at 18 years old.

- The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during schizophrenia or bipolar disorder

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

Qualities of Psychopaths

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

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

- 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), they show relatively unimpaired abilities.

- If they are motivated to take someone's cognitive perspective, they can do it.

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

Psychopath (Emotions)

- For many, emotions (e.g., fear, sadness, guilt, shame) psychopaths show two kinds of emotional deficits

- They tend not to feel these emotions, themselves

- Show strong deficits in responding and noticing whether other people feel those emotions.

- For Anger and Pain, it's different

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

- Psychopaths are just as sensitive to pain as anyone else, when it is occurring to THEM.

- Insensitive to the pain of other people

Danny Povinelli (ToM in Primates)

- Had hungry primates reach out to familiar trainers in different situations (trainer was blindfolded, faced towards them, faced away from them, trainer covering face, etc.)

- In these situations there are correct and incorrect trainers to be going to for food. The only one the chimps performed above chance were when the trainer was simply facing towards or away from them

- Conclusion: Primates do not have ToM, but they do have skills that are useful in real life ("If the person's body is turned towards me, they can see me!"

ToM in Dogs

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

- All 4 groups (Indoor pet dogs, outdoor pet dogs, shelter dogs, and wolves) performed well when it came to back turned vs. not turned

- When it came to book in front of face vs. not, only indoor pet and outdoor pet dogs did well (Pet dogs tested indoors and outdoor passed the test due to the fact that they know these cues, they're aware you're not being attentive)

ToM in Dogs/Primates Summary

- All canines/primates 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