真实急病情境下共情对大学生慈善捐助的影响:有调节的中介效应

基于真实急病情境,采用道德强度、道德认同、共情和慈善捐助问卷对462名大学生进行调查,探讨了共情影响大学生慈善捐助的内在机制。结果显示:(1)女生在真实急病情境下比男生更容易对主人公的不幸事件产生共情反应;大学生真实急病情境下的共情反应随年级关系的疏远而逐渐降低;(2)共情在道德强度与慈善捐助的关系中具有部分中介作用,即道德强度通过共情对慈善捐助产生间接影响;(3)道德认同对共情的中介作用具有调节效应,具体而言,相对于低道德认同的个体,高道德认同的个体表现出更多的慈善捐助,并且共情对道德强度和慈善捐助的中介效应也显著增强。研究结论对于理解慈善捐助的内在机制具有理论价值,对于慈善捐助的教育和干预具有现实启示意义。     

动物和人类的利他本性:共情的进化

共情指个体感知或想象其他个体的情感,并部分体验到其他个体感受的心理过程.利他指以增加其他个体的福利为最终目标的动机.共情起源于动物的亲代养育行为,其神经基础来源于古老的情感系统.共情从动物低水平的情绪感染逐渐进化到同情关注以及观点采择共情.另外,共情具有良好的环境适应性.未来可以进一步研究动物与人类的共情和利他行为的异同,加大研究动物的高级共情能力和利他行为以及深入研究共情受社会因素的调节机制.     

I might ease your pain,but only if you’re sad: The impact of the empathized emotion in the empathy-helping association

Ample research demonstrated that empathizing with someone in need promotes helping that person. Two studies examined whether this effect of empathy on helping behavior holds across different emotional reactions expressed by a target in need. Results of Study 1 indicate that perspective taking with a sad needy target increased empathic concern which, in turn, fostered helping the individual. This relation was not found for participants taking the perspective of angry or disgusted needy targets. Study 2 provides further support for the underlying mechanism of the results of Study 1. Perspective taking with a sad needy target increased empathizers’ empathic concern because perception of target neediness was increased. Again, this pattern was not found for perspective taking with an angry needy target. The findings correspond to theorizing on the role of emotions in person perception. Hence, the current research provides insights regarding the boundary conditions of the empathy-helping association.     

Altruism or psychological escape: Why does empathy promote prosocial behavior?

Why does empathy promote prosocial behavior? Previous research suggests that empathically aroused individuals help those in need, even when physical escape from the need situation is easy, and this evidence has been used to support the claim that empathy evokes an altruistic motive. However, existing research has not addressed the possibility that empathically aroused participants help because ease of physical escape fails to provide adequate psychological escape from awareness of the victim's suffering and the aversive empathic arousal such awareness produces. The two experiments reported here examined this issue by directly manipulating empathic arousal and the perceived ease of psychological escape among potential helpers. In both experiments, higher rates of helping were observed among empathically aroused participants, even under conditions of easy psychological escape. The findings of both experiments suggest that empathy evokes an altruistic motive to reduce the victim's suffering rather than an egoistic aversive‐arousal reduction motive. In addition, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that concern for psychological escape from the suffering of others may constitute an important independent prosocial motive in need of future study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived Government Actions and Attitudes Toward the Needy

Potential negative effects of welfare agencies on attitudes toward the needy were examined in the context of a communications study. After listening to a bogus newscast describing one of four levels of government involvement and one of two levels of need, 120 undergraduate women indicated their perceptions of the degree of need and their perceptions of the extent of citizens’ responsibility for helping to meet this need. Results showed that government failure to provide proposed assistance resulted in Ss perceiving the need to be less severe. Ss’ perceptions of citizens’ responsibility were lowered when the government either withdrew existing support or failed to provide proposed aid. Government involvement, existing or withdrawn, attenuated the effect of the manipulation of need.     

When Empathy Matters: The Role of Sex and Empathy in Close Friendships

Based on prior theory and research (Ciarrochi & Heaven, 2009; Eagly & Wood, 1999), we hypothesized that the link between empathy and friendship would be moderated by sex: Girls will nominate empathic boys as friends, whereas boys will not tend to nominate empathic girls. We collected measures of empathy, friendship social support, and close friendship nominations in grade 10 across 1,970 students in 16 schools (M_age = 15.70, SD = .44; males = 993, females = 977). Multilevel models revealed that boys high in cognitive empathy attracted an average of 1.8 more girl friendship nominations than did their low empathy counterparts, whereas empathic girls did not attract a greater number of opposite‐sex friends. In addition, the more friendship nominations a boy received from either boys or girls, the more they felt supported by their friends; the number of friendship nominations received by girls, in contrast, had no effect on their felt support by friends. Regardless of the quantity of friendship nominations, empathy was linked to more supportive friendships for both males and females. These results inform a contextual understanding of the role of empathy in selecting and maintaining friendships.     

移情对亲社会行为决策的两种功能

移情对亲社会行为决策具有动机功能和信息功能。霍夫曼认为,移情忧伤不仅能够作为亲社会道德动机促进亲社会行为的产生,而且能够激活观察者的道德原则,进而引发亲社会行为。巴特森强调移情不仅能够增强解除他人困境的动机,而且带有重视他人福利和想使他人困境得到解除的程度的信息。移情的动机功能依赖于诱发移情的情境,而信息功能具有稳定的倾向性,比动机功能更持久,两种功能共同作用使移情在亲社会行为决策中具有更强的适应性。移情功能理论对道德教育具有启示作用。     

An additional antecedent of empathic concern: valuing the welfare of the person in need

Two experiments examined the role of valuing the welfare of a person in need as an antecedent of empathic concern. Specifically, these experiments explored the relation of such valuing to a well-known antecedent--perspective taking. In Experiment 1, both perspective taking and valuing were manipulated, and each independently increased empathic concern, which, in turn, increased helping behavior. In Experiment 2, only valuing was manipulated. Manipulated valuing increased measured perspective taking and, in part as a result, increased empathic concern, which, in turn, increased helping. Valuing appears to be an important, largely overlooked, situational antecedent of feeling empathy for a person in need.     

Acceptability of racial microaggressions among Asian American college students: internalized model minority myth,individualism, and social conscience as correlates

ABSTRACT

How much someone finds a racial microaggression to be acceptable can vary. We focus on the acceptability of racial microaggressions among Asian American college students, in relation to cultural and religious variables. We predicted that internalized model minority stereotype and individualism will be associated with being more accepting of microaggressions. We predicted that social conscience, or the belief that the church should be active in social justice, will be associated with being less accepting of microaggressions. Results based on 102 Asian American students indicated that vertical individualism predicts greater acceptance of microaggressions, and results based on 77 Christian individuals out of the 102 participants indicated that social conscience predicts less acceptance of microaggressions. Excessive individualism may lead one to ignore the impact of racism and have a greater tolerance for microaggressions, whereas social conscience may support participation in social justice efforts, which may lead to a greater awareness of microaggressions.     

The effects of dispositional empathy on emotional reactions and helping: A multidimensional approach

Recent research indicates that an affective state termed empathic emotion, and characterized by feelings of sympathy and compassion for another, is associated with altruistic responding. That is, persons experiencing high levels of empathic emotion offer help to another even when escape from the situation is easy. Persons experiencing high levels of another emotional state—personal distress—help much less when escape from the situation is easy. A study was conducted to test two related hypotheses. The first was that individual differences in empathy can influence empathic emotion and personal distress, above and beyond the influence of situational factors. The second hypothesis was that this effect of individual differences is due to variation in emotional and not cognitive empathy. The results provide support for both hypotheses. Regarding hypothesis 1, a significantly greater proportion of the variance in emotional reactions was accounted for when individual difference factors were included as predictors. Hypothesis 2 was also supported: It was found that a dispositional measure of emotional empathy was clearly related, and a dispositional measure of cognitive empathy was clearly unrelated, to these emotional reactions. The results provide support for a multidimensional view of empathy.     

Locating Religion in the Context of Charitable Food Assistance: An Ethnographic Study of Food Banks in a Finnish City

This article explores how, for whom, and to what extent religion is part of the reality that people enter into as they seek food assistance from a religious organization. Drawing from an ethnographic study of food assistance places in a Finnish city and applying Lefebvre’s spatial triad as a theoretical approach, the article describes the role of religion in the perceived, conceived, and lived space of charitable food provision in a secular Nordic welfare state. The findings show how the role of religion in the context of food assistance is subject to particular contexts and that this role is socially produced in the practices of the food banks, in the goals of the food providers, and in the lived experiences of the food recipients. The findings suggest that charitable food assistance is a social space where divergent readings of space as either religious or secular are potentially contested. The study provides a novel approach to understanding food assistance with its interconnections with religion and poses further questions for policy development, for religious organizations engaged in charitable food provision, and for future research.     

Relationship Between Mother,Father, and Peer Attachment and Empathy With Moral Authority

We explored the relationship between mother, father, and peer attachment security, empathy, and moral authority in order to clarify certain problems of previous empirical research on such relationships. A sample of 202 Persian-speaking undergraduate students completed questionnaires pertaining to these constructs. The results revealed that mother and father attachment were significantly correlated with family, society welfare, and equality sources of moral authority, whereas peer attachment security was related only to society welfare and equality sources of moral authority. Out of the empathy subscales, only empathic concern was associated with moral authority sources. Empathic concern was also related to mother, father, and peer attachment, whereas perspective taking was correlated with mother and peer attachment. The combination of empathic concern and mother, father, and peer attachment predicted significant amount of variance of “principle source of moral authority” (including society welfare and equality sources). Findings support existence of a strong relationship between attachment security and the content of moral thought of adolescents, and findings redress an empirical imbalance in research literature on the relation of attachment and morality.     

Forgiveness, Empathy and Gender—A Malaysian Perspective

Recent theorising has suggested that in non-Western collectivist contexts, the need for social harmony may play a greater role than empathy in motivating forgiveness, and that women may be more impacted than men by this cultural value. In this study, a sample of 233 Malaysian undergraduate students, 100 males and 133 females, recruited from four English-mediated universities completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory-12 (TRIM-12) to assess dimensions of empathy and forgiveness. Women exhibited greater empathic concern than men, but not greater perspective-taking. Men were less forgiving in terms of revenge-seeking behaviour, but men and women did not differ in avoidance of transgressors. The relationships between empathic concern and both facets of forgiveness were similar for men and women, as was the relationship between empathic concern and avoidance. However, the relationship between perspective-taking and avoidance was stronger among men than women. We found little support for the prediction that in this collectivist cultural context, perspective-taking would play a greater role than empathic concern in forgiveness. Further research is recommended to explore empathy and forgiveness in non-Western populations, with a need to take into account cultural factors.     

感恩与大学生助人行为:共情反应的中介作用及其性别差异

本研究采用感恩特质问卷、共情反应问卷和助人行为独裁者游戏对629名大学生进行了施测,以探讨大学生感恩影响助人行为的内在机制,并考察共情反应的中介作用及其性别差异。结果发现：（1）女生感恩、共情反应和助人行为均显著高于男生;（2）共情反应在大学生感恩和助人行为之间的关系中具有部分中介作用;（3）共情反应的中介作用在男生和女生样本中均达到显著水平,相对于男生,女生共情反应对感恩与助人行为的中介效应显著增强。研究结论对于高校大学生的感恩教育和道德教育与干预具有参考价值。     

Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis

Three experiments tested whether empathy evokes egoistic motivation to share vicariously in the victim's joy at improvement (the empathic-joy hypothesis) instead of altruistic motivation to increase the victim's welfare (the empathy-altruism hypothesis). In Experiment 1, Ss induced to feel either low or high empathy for a young woman in need were given a chance to help her. Some believed that if they helped they would receive feedback about her improvement; others did not. In Experiments 2 and 3, Ss induced to feel either low or high empathy were given a choice of getting update information about a needy person's condition. Before choosing, they were told the likelihood of the person's condition having improved--and of their experiencing empathic joy--was 20%, was 50%, or was 80%. Results of none of the experiments patterned as predicted by the empathic-joy hypothesis; instead, results of each were consistent with the empathy-altruism hypothesis.     

More than fantasy: Prosocial daydreams relate to prosocial dispositions and behaviour

The current studies examined the relationship between the penchant to daydream about helping others and prosocial traits and behaviour. We reasoned that fantasising about prosocial acts should be positively associated with a more prosocial disposition and real behaviour. Across both studies, the findings suggest that people who exhibit prosocial characteristics (e.g., empathic concern, fantasy/fictional empathy, moral reasoning) are more likely to fantasise about prosocial behaviour, and these characteristics are reliably associated with increased helping behaviours. From Study 1, the correlational results showed that people higher in agreeableness exhibited a stronger tendency to engage in prosocial fantasising, and empathy, in part, mediated the relationship. The experimental results from Study 2 conceptually support those from Study 1; when prompted to fantasise about prosocial behaviour, those higher in agreeableness and openness to experience engaged in more helping behaviour, whereas in a control condition, no helping differences emerged. Finding that empathic concern was most consistently related to daydreaming is consistent with the theory in that people are more intrinsically motivated to promote other's welfare at a personal cost when they feel empathy. Engaging in prosocial fantasising may increase empathy, which in turn, may enhance one's prosocial disposition and increase one's helping behaviour.     

Social evaluation and the empathy-altruism hypothesis

Archer, Diaz-Loving, Gollwitzer, Davis, and Foushee (1981) suggested that feeling empathy for a person in need may lead to increased helping because the empathic individual wants to avoid negative social evaluation. As support for this suggestion, they claimed that empathy leads to increased helping only under socially evaluative circumstances. We conducted two studies to test this claim. In Study 1 subjects were led to believe that no one--including the person in need--would ever know if they declined to help. In this situation, which was designed to be totally devoid of the potential for negative social evaluation for not helping, there was still a positive relationship between self-reported empathic emotion and offering help. In Study 2 empathy (low versus high) and social evaluation (low versus high) were manipulated in a 2 X 2 design. Once again there was a positive relationship between empathy and offering help when the potential for social evaluation was low as well as high. Results of both studies, then, suggest that the motivation to help evoked by empathy is not egoistic motivation to avoid negative social evaluation. Instead, the observed pattern was what would be expected if empathy evokes altruistic motivation to reduce the victim's need.     

Disturbances of spontaneous empathic processing relate with the severity of the negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia: A behavioural pilot-study using virtual reality technology

Behavioural and neuroimaging data have recently pointed out that empathy (feeling into someone else) is associated with mental imagery and transformation related to one’s and other’s visuo-spatial perspectives. Impairments of both empathic and visuo-spatial abilities have been observed in patients with schizophrenia. Especially, it has been suggested that schizophrenics are altered in spontaneously simulating another individual’s first-person experience. However, there is so far only little evidence regarding the relationship between deficits in empathy and disturbances in spontaneous heterocentered coding in schizophrenia. In the present pilot-study, we tested with schizophrenic patients our behavioural paradigm that enables to measure from the bodily postures and movements whether individuals in ecologically more valid conditions are interacting with another individual by using egocentered – as in sympathy (feeling with someone else) – or heterocentered – as in empathy – visuo-spatial mechanisms. For that, ten patients and ten controls, standing and moving, interacted with a virtual tightrope walker, displayed life-sized, standing and moving as well. We show that patients with higher negative symptoms had, in most cases, deficits in spontaneously using heterocentered visuo-spatial mechanisms and employed preferentially an egocentered referencing to interact with the avatar. In contrast, preserved spontaneous heterocentered visuo-spatial strategies were not linked to a prevailing negative or positive symptomatology. Our data suggest that the severity of the negative symptoms in schizophrenia relates with disturbances of spontaneous (“on-line”) empathic processing in association with lower scoring self-reported trait cognitive empathy.     

Asymmetric frontal brain activity and parental rejection predict altruistic behavior: Moderation of oxytocin effects

Asymmetric frontal brain activity has been widely implicated in reactions to emotional stimuli and is thought to reflect individual differences in approach–withdrawal motivation. Here, we investigate whether asymmetric frontal activity, as a measure of approach–withdrawal motivation, also predicts charitable donations after a charity’s (emotion-eliciting) promotional video showing a child in need is viewed, in a sample of 47 young adult women. In addition, we explore possibilities for mediation and moderation, by asymmetric frontal activity, of the effects of intranasally administered oxytocin and parental love withdrawal on charitable donations. Greater relative left frontal activity was related to larger donations. In addition, we found evidence of moderation: Low levels of parental love withdrawal predicted larger donations in the oxytocin condition for participants showing greater relative right frontal activity. We suggest that when approach motivation is high (reflected in greater relative left frontal activity), individuals are generally inclined to take action upon seeing someone in need and, thus, to donate money to actively help out. Only when approach motivation is low (reflected in less relative left/greater relative right activity) do empathic concerns affected by oxytocin and experiences of love withdrawal play an important part in deciding about donations.     

Empathy: A factor in antisocial behavior

Empathy has been accepted as a crucial factor in the development of prosocial thought and behavior. This study attempted to clarify the role of empathy in the development of antisocial and aggressive delinquent behavior. The subjects were 331 delinquents and 64 nondelinquent controls ages 12 to 18. The delinquents were found to be significantly delayed or arrested in the development of empathy. The nondelinquent group exhibited a significant age-related increase in empathy during the adolescent period, whereas the delinquent group did not. Of three delinquent subgroups utilized, the neurotics were least empathic, the psychopathics next, and the subculturals the most empathic; the groups differed significantly from each other. Aggressive delinquents were significantly lower in empathy level than nonaggressive delinquents, though differentiation by type of aggression (person or property) was not significant.This research was based on the author's doctoral dissertation. The author wishes to express his appreciation to Dr. Henry R. Angelino, Dr. Charles Wenar, and Dr. John Gibbs of the Ohio State University for their support and guidance.