(Weisz+ 2020-9)

Strategic Regulation of Empathy

AUTHORS

Erika Weisz

Mina Cikara

Abstract

Empathy is an integral part of socio-emotional well-being, yet recent research has highlighted some of its downsides. Here we examine literature that establishes when, how much, and what aspects of empathy promote specific outcomes. After reviewing a theoretical framework which characterizes empathy as a suite of separable components, we examine evidence showing how dissociations of these components affect important socio-emotional outcomes and describe emerging evidence suggesting that these components can be independently and deliberately modulated. Finally, we advocate for a new approach to a multi-component view of empathy which accounts for the interrelations among components. This perspective advances scientific conceptualization of empathy and offers suggestions for tailoring empathy to help people realize their social, emotional, and occupational goals.

Strategic Regulation of Empathy

Erika Weisz & Mina Cikara

Benefits

has a chart with benefits of empathy

Given its fundamental role in social functioning, it is no surprise that empathy is associated with adaptive outcomes such as

• • increased emotional well-being [2],

  • greater social connectedness [3,4],

  • and better health [5].

  • Empathy also facilitates helping behavior, cooperation, and altruism [6,7].

  • relationship satisfaction

  • Helping behavior. Decades of research demonstrate an association between empathy and helping behavior [31,32]

  • Empathy facilitates cooperation and coordinated action between parties [33,34]

  • and predicts costly helping, even between strangers [7,35]

• Relationship Quality.

  • Recent findings suggest that empathy components track important relationship outcomes across the lifespan. Children of parents who score higher on measures of global empathy have better emotion regulation skills than children of parents who score lower.

  • show lower rates of systemic inflammation, suggesting that empathy in the parentchild relationship confers measurable psychological and physiological benefits to children [74].

• Perspective-taking also carries benefits in close relationships. It is positively associated with efforts to reconcile (rather than retaliate) during conflict [77]

• a necessary component of empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately infer others emotions), which tracks satisfaction in romantic relationships [75]

• Negotiation

Criticisms Such findings have sparked recent debates challenging empathy’s utility: are the benefits of empathy really worth the costs?

some forms of empathy appear to

• • increase risk for experiencing occupational exhaustion among clinicians [8,9].

  • Empathy for one’s own group can exacerbate rather than mitigate hostility toward other groups [10].

  • And though empathy can motivate people to help others, it can paradoxically reduce the impact of aid by narrowing the focus of helpers’ concern to proximal recipients instead of distal and needier ones [11].

  • can even exacerbate existing problems in intergroup relations by driving discrimination [10] and polarization [37]

  • empathy can also inhibit helping behavior by constraining the scope of need to which perceivers are sensitive [36]

Definitions

• Empathy is a multi-componential phenomenon, involving processes that allow people to share, understand, and respond to others’ emotions.

• researchers do not always agree on the exact definition of empathy [12,13],

3 parts

Affective empathy

• emotion contagion, or experience sharing, whereby people vicariously feel others’ emotional states.

Cognitive component,

• known as theory of mind, mentalizing, cognitive empathy, or perspective-taking, whereby people explicitly consider others’ thoughts and experiences.

Compassion, prosocial concern, or empathic concern

• Finally, empathy involves a motivational component, which has been called compassion, prosocial concern, or empathic concern, which refers to the desire to promote others’ well-being or alleviate their suffering [14–16].

Blocks to Empathy

• • But experiencing others’ pain can also induce personal distress, a self-oriented feeling that motivates perceivers to attend to and alleviate their own suffering instead of a target’s suffering [50,51]. Personal distress can drive perceivers to avoid targets’ suffering, precluding opportunities for helping altogether [52,53]

  • Occupational burnout.