Empathy on trial: A response to its critics

Despite being held in something approaching universal esteem for its capacity to promote prosocial behavior and inhibit antisocial behavior, empathy has recently become the recipient of strong criticism from some of today’s leading academics. Two of the more high-profile criticisms of empathy have come from philosopher Jesse Prinz and psychologist Paul Bloom, each of whom challenges the view that empathy has an overall beneficial influence on human behavior. In this essay, I discuss the basis of their criticisms as well as why I am not compelled by their arguments to believe that empathy does more harm than good. In the process of responding to empathy’s critics, I discuss the important role that empathy plays in our moral lives. I argue that, rather than employing rational considerations to minimize the role that empathy plays in our moral and political judgments, such considerations are put to better use by expanding empathy when conducive to the common good and suppressing it when it opposes the common good.     

Young infants can be perceived as shy,coy, bashful,embarrassed

Previous research has found that 2‐ to 4‐month‐old infants display a behavioural pattern similar to adult expressions of shyness and related emotions (coyness, bashfulness, embarrassment). In the present study, 6 video‐clips of this pattern and 10 of control patterns varying on a number of features and contexts were presented to 37 judges in a free‐labelling task and in a rating task. Two examples of the target pattern were perceived as expressing primarily shyness and related emotions, three were perceived as expressing primarily happiness with varying degrees of these emotions, and one as expressing several other emotions as well as shyness and related ones. Yet, judges perceived shyness and related emotions almost exclusively in the target pattern, across different contexts and judgement tasks. The three clips perceived as most ‘shy’ were also used in a between‐judges session to control for priming effects. Overall, results suggest that young infants can be perceived as shy, coy, bashful or embarrassed, in particular when their expressive behaviour resembles the relevant adult expressions. Implications for the early development of these emotions are considered. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.