Strategic Regulation of Empathy

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.

Cruelty and indifference are the point: Preference for hierarchy is related to support for policies that harm marginalized groups through feeling both less empathy and more schadenfreude

“…Empathy and counter-empathy are also related to harmful intergroup outcomes. While there are many definitions and types of empathy 2 (M. H. Davis, 1983;Weisz & Cikara, 2021), most of the work on SDO and empathic responding has focused on trait levels of affective empathy. For our purposes, we too focus on the affective nature of empathy and counterempathy-feeling rather than knowing what another is feeling.…”

Empathy at the Gates: Reassessing Its Role in Moral Decision Making

“…Whether compassion should be classified as a sub-component of empathy or if it is a separate process is still an open question which future research should examine. Recent research has already begun investigating the different components of empathy and whether they are separate or co-occur in daily life experiences (for review see Weisz and Cikara, 2020;Depow et al, 2021). One possibility laid out by Decety (2021), based on an understanding of the evolutionary roots of empathy, is that empathy's core constituents are (1) emotion sharing, which evolved to facilitate cooperation, and (2) concern for others' well-being, which is an adaptive mechanism that evolved to facilitate the care of offspring.…”

What Matters Most? The Power of Kafka’s Metamorphosis to Advance Understandings of HIV Stigma and Inform Empathy in Medical Health Education

“…Notably, there is no consensus on definitions for empathy in the literature; it is a subtle, complex construct to operationalize with many studies relying on self-reports-posing challenges to the validity of research on empathy (Kelm et al 2014;Batt-Rawden et al 2013). With those provisos, many researchers increasingly agree that empathy is an umbrella term having at least three components, one I adopt here (Weisz and Cikara 2020).…”