Is defined as a persons feeling of oneness with the emotional state of another person?

Empathy, Altruism, and Prosocial Behavior

Empathy is the next psychological construct that has an important role in social relations and can be also related to altruism. Both constructs can be classified into the domain of prosocial behavior denoting acting for the benefit of the others. Empathy, altruism, and prosocial behavior are crucial in interpersonal relations and have been often associated with evolutionary and genetic factors as well as personality (Figueredo, Woodley of Menie, & Jake Jacobs, 2016; Musek, 2010; Rushton, Bons, & Hur, 2008; Rushton & Irwing, 2011). Therefore, we can assume that they are also connected to the GFP. Darwin (1871) already emphasized prosocial and cooperative behavior as characteristic of human beings and altruism with empathy represents a distinctive feature of the K reproductive strategy demanding prolonged care for the offspring (Rushton, 1985).

Prosocial behavior is clearly related to personality dimension including the Big Five (for a review of the literature, see Habashi, Graziano, & Hoover, 2016; Mlčák, 2012). However, direct connections of the GFP to prosocial behavior were only scarcely investigated although we can make assumptions on the Big Five links to the prosocial traits. Besides, the relationship between empathy and personality is complex because some components of empathy include seizing the distress of other persons. Thus, a different direction of the relation is expected for nondistressing components of empathy as compared to distress-taking components. For example, neuroticism should correlate positively with distressing components of empathy and negatively with nondistressing components.

Indeed, the GFP might only modestly correlate with the empathy in general. In the MIDUS II American representative sample (N = 4963; Ryff et al., 2007), we can calculate the scores for the Big Five (measured by Midlife Development Inventory/MIDI/Personality Scales; Lachman & Weaver, 1997; Rossi, 2001), extract the scores for the GFP and correlate them with the scores of Sympathy Scale (Uchida & Kitayama, 2001), which is closed to the empathy by definition. Pearson correlation coefficient between the GFP and sympathy is significant but rather small (.19). Agreeableness is most related to empathy among the Big Five dimensions (r = .37). Empathy is also included in some personality inventories. Rushton and Irwing (2009) analyzed the data obtained on Comrey Personality Scales and reported substantial saturation of the empathy factor on the GFP (.36).

O’Connor et al. (2015) compared 2409 meditation practitioners to 450 nonmeditators on different psychological measures including the personality dimensions (Big Five and GFP, extracted from BFI: John et al., 1991), empathy (perspective taking, empathic concern, and personal distress, measured by Interpersonal Reactivity Index: Davis, 1983) and altruism (measured by Compassionate Altruism Scale; Berry, O’Connor, Rangan, & Stiver, 2012). The practitioners of contemplative meditation had higher GFP, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, emotional and cognitive empathy, and altruism, yet lower depression, neuroticism, and empathic distress. The GFP thus positively correlated with the components of empathy and altruism that do not involve distress and negatively with the distress-taking components.

Altruism is a construct close to empathy and it is certainly included into the personality, especially into the agreeableness dimension. Rushton et al. (2008) confirmed the link between the GFP and measures of altruism. The GFP accounted for 56% of the reliable variance in measures of altruism, personality, and temperament. In practically all analyses of higher-order structure of the Big Five, agreeableness (A) was considerably saturated on the GFP (see Fig. 1.4 and Table 3.3).

Empathy

Empathy is a response that recognizes the patient's feeling and does not criticize it. It is understanding,not an emotional state of sympathy. You try to put yourself in the shoes of the patient. The empathic response is saying, “I hear what you're saying.” The use of empathy can strengthen the doctor–patient relationship and allow the interview to flow smoothly. Studies have shown that high levels of empathy have been linked to better patient outcomes!2

Examples of empathy are the following:

“I'm sure your daughter's problem has given you much anxiety.”

“The death of someone so close to you is hard to take.”

“I guess this has been kind of a silent fear all your life.”

“You must have been very sad.”

“I know it's not easy for you. I'm delighted to see that you're trying to eat everything on your tray.”

“That's wonderful that you have stopped smoking.”

The last two examples illustrate an important point: it is critical to give credit to patients to encouragetheir role in their own improvement.

It is impossible, however, to put yourself in the shoes of the patient because of a difference in age, gender, life experiences, education, culture, religion, and other factors. An extremely empathic statement, which sounds counterintuitive, is “It's impossible for me to fully understand how you are feeling, but how can I help you? How can we work together to get past this difficult problem?”

Empathetic responses can also be nonverbal. An understanding nod is an empathetic response. In certain circumstances, placing a hand on the shoulder of an upset patient communicates support. The interviewer conveys that he or she understands and appreciates how the patient feels without actually showing any emotion.

Introduction

To start looking at empathy and technology, we begin by looking at the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of empathy. Next we consider the relationship between empathy and technology, and look at some existing models of empathy related to technology. We continue by considering the concept of the virtual agent as an empathetic companion and describe some examples of virtual companions in commercial and academic settings. To conclude, we look at the results of user studies focused on understanding our perception of virtual companions and describe what is required to develop an appropriate companion interaction strategy.

The chapter will give the reader grounding in the essential theory of empathy and its relationship with technology. It will also introduce state-of-the-art empathetic agents and describe how experimental methods such as the use of the Kelly grid and Semantic Differential can be used to discover how users feel about emergent technologies. The chapter will be of interest to application designers or developers working with interfaces that employ agents or have agent-like behavior, or anyone who wants to find out more about the developing relationship between empathy and technology.

Empathy-Related and Emotion-Related Skills Thought Processes Were Practiced in Tandem with Reasoning-Related and Other Skills

Empathy-related thought processes were identified as those skills and thought processes related to emotions and feelings, the taking of other’s perspectives, and prioritization of other’s feelings or perspectives, as based on the literature review (see Tables 3.1–3.3, 3.5, and 3.6). Reasoning-related skills and thought processes were identified as those skills and thought processes related to assessing choices, thinking through consequences, prioritizing goals, or weighing pros and cons, regardless of whether it involved emotions, empathy, or neither (see Tables 3.3–3.6). A negative relationship between the use of empathy and reasoning skills and thought processes to make ethical decisions was not suggested by this study. Rather, empathy and other types of skills were used in tandem to make decisions. The use of emotions and affects in ethical decision-making, which was not at the expense of reasoning, is echoed by researchers, such as Robinson (2004) and Hanoch (2002), who reunify the rational with the emotional, and see any separation as superficial. fMRI (functional MRI) studies suggest that there are distinct areas of the brain—ones related to emotion and ones related to cognition—that are activated differentially by various types of ethical scenarios, further complicating these findings (Borg, Hynes, van Horn, Grafton, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006).

Empathy for Relationship Building

The capacity for experiencing and expressing empathy may be the most important skill in relationships. Brooks and Goldstein (2001) cite parental modeling and teaching of empathy as a key ingredient in fostering strong parent–child relationships and bolstering resiliency, the capacity to rebound from stress. Regular expression of empathy can go a long way toward building and maintaining strong relationships and buffering children from stress. Many adults struggle to master this skill, and most parents do not actively demonstrate empathy to their youngsters. To be successful socially, however, youth must regularly employ empathy.

Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ)

The TEQ is a 16-item self-report measure used to assess trait empathy, which, in this instrument, is represented as an emotional process. As such, items in the TEQ, developed by Spreng, McKinnon, Mar, and Levine (2009), target emotional states, sympathetic physiological arousal, conspecific altruism, and empathic responding. Sample items include “Other people's misfortunes do not disturb me a great deal” (emotional states); “It upsets me to see someone being treated disrespectfully” (sympathetic physiological arousal); “I enjoy making other people feel better” (altruism); and “I get a strong urge to help when I see someone who is upset” (empathic responding). Using a five-point Likert scale, possible responses include 1 = “I never agree”; 2 = “I rarely agree”; 3 = “I sometimes agree”; 4 = “I often agree”; and 5 = “I always agree.” Although there is no benchmark defining an empathic individual, high scores generally account for high empathy. The scale demonstrated high internal consistency (α = 0.82).

5.1.7 Empathy

Empathy refers to the tendency to understand or to actually feel the experiences of others. It is not easily measured in precise terms, although several questionnaire scales have been developed and used (R Hogan 1969; Chlopan et al. 1985; Jolliffe & Farrington 2007).

Several researchers who work in this area have made a distinction between cognitive empathy (i.e., the knowing or recognition aspect of empathy) and affective empathy (i.e., the actual emotional feeling aspects of empathy, sometimes called moral emotions). In addition to empathy, a few of the studies to be reviewed here pertain to altruism, the tendency to have great concern for the welfare of others. These particular studies are specifically identified as such.

Sufficient numbers of studies on empathy have been reported that Table 5.1.7 is presented in two parts, one for official measures of offending and the other for all other measures. Table 5.1.7a shows that most of the findings indicate that there is an inverse correlation between empathy and official crime and delinquency.

Table 5.1.7a. Empathy and Official Offending Behavior.

Table 5.1.7b summarizes the evidence concerning the relationship between empathy and unofficial measures of offending. One can see that the vast majority of studies indicate that offenders are less prone to be empathetic than persons in general.

Table 5.1.7b. Empathy and Unofficial Offending Behavior.

One meta-analysis indicated that cognitive empathy is associated with offending more than affective empathy, although both forms become non-significant after statistically controlling for intelligence and parental social status (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2004). A couple of recent empirical studies, however, have concluded that affective empathy was better than cognitive empathy at differentiating self-reported offenders from non-offenders (Jolliffe & Farrington 2007; M Schaffer et al. 2009:595).

Empathy

Empathy can be defined as a complex capacity requiring to share and understand other individuals’ cognitive or affective perspectives and to propose a verbal or behavioral answer adapted to the emotions, feelings, or thoughts they expressed (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Green et al., 2015). As such, empathy relies on both ToM and experience sharing abilities, which elicit the activation of brain regions involved in the behavior of the person we are looking at, and include motor resonance (i.e. the activation of the motor system emerging from the simple observation of another person performing an action) and affect sharing (i.e. the activation of the affective brain system emerging from the observation of another person expressing an emotional state) (Green et al., 2015). The work by Martinotti, Nicola, Di Tedeschi, Cundari, and Janiri (2009) used the Empathy Quotient (EQ), a self-reported questionnaire, and revealed that patients with SAUD had a significantly lower level of empathy than healthy controls. Recent evidence suggests that these empathy deficits could be due to decreased cortical thickness in cerebral regions that have been linked to empathy (notably frontal regions, insula, and precuneus) (Schmidt et al., 2017). The heterogeneity in the ways empathy is conceived probably limits our understanding of deficits in patients (e.g., Thoma, Friedmann, & Suchan, 2013; Thoma, Winter, et al., 2013). However, a separate assessment of affective and cognitive empathy, which was performed by Maurage, Grynberg, Noël, Joassin, Philippot, et al. (2011) by analyzing subscales’ scores of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the EQ questionnaires, revealed that patients were specifically impaired for affective empathy, and thus that they had difficulties to detect and feel others’ emotional states but remained able to efficiently share and understand others’ non-emotional mental states (e.g. intentions; thoughts). Interestingly, this impairment was not associated with anxiety or depression levels but was significantly correlated with alexithymia and difficulties in interpersonal relationships. More recently, Grynberg, Maurage, and Nandrino (2017) used the Condensed and Revised Multifaceted Empathy Test (Edele, Dziobek, & Keller, 2013) in which participants are told to select one label among four to describe the affective state associated with the presented picture (40 photographs of people, 20 in a positive affective state and 20 in a negative one) and to rate on a Likert-type scale how much they are likely to share the affective state of the person in the picture. While patients did not differ from controls regarding affective sharing, they were significantly impaired in affective labeling, suggesting that empathy impairments could be mostly related to difficulties in understanding affective states. Again, these results were not significantly correlated with anxiety or depression. As a whole, in line with the results related to studies investigating ToM, it appears that difficulties in empathy among patients with SAUD mostly concern its affective subcomponent, are not related to the frequent comorbidities and may impact the quality of social interactions.

Empathy and Prosocial Behavior

Empathy is an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another's emotional state and is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel. Empathy thus allows one to feel what the other is feeling. Sympathy is related to but distinct from empathy: It is an affective response that also stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another's emotional state but does not match the other's state, consisting instead of feelings of sorrow or concern for the other (Eisenberg et al., 1991; Jordan et al., 2016). Empathy and especially sympathy lead to prosocial behaviors such as helping and away from antisocial behaviors such as aggression. Thus, to better understand how humans experience and share others' emotions as well as the motivations behind human prosocial behavior, it is important to understand the development of these emotional responses.

The origins of empathic responding lie in emotional contagion, or the tendency to automatically mimic others' emotional expressions facially, vocally, and behaviorally, and to oneself experience traces of the same emotions (Hatfield et al., 1994). However, most researchers agree that true empathy additionally involves self-other differentiation, or the recognition that one is distinct from others and that others' inner states may differ from one's own. This ability to differentiate self from others allows one to focus on others' emotional experiences and to identify the source of one's empathic response as the other rather than oneself. Such differentiation is critical to maintain the ‘other-oriented’ nature of empathy. The cognitive ability to take others' perspectives and imagine how others feel also contributes to empathic processes by providing information about the other's situation and emotions. These emotional and cognitive processes together create a powerful and flexible mechanism for apprehending another's emotional state and, when necessary, acting prosocially to relieve the other's negative state (Hoffman, 2000).