scholarly journals “I Don’t Care About What You Want!” The Relation Between Juvenile Delinquents’ Responses to Social Problem Situations and Empathy in Secure Juvenile Institutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (9) ◽  
pp. 1412-1426 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. J. E. Heynen ◽  
G. H. P. van der Helm ◽  
I. B. Wissink ◽  
G. J. J. M. Stams ◽  
X. M. H. Moonen

The present study examined the relation between juvenile delinquents’ responses to social problem situations and empathy in secure juvenile institutions. The sample consisted of 79 delinquent boys (62%) and 49 delinquent girls (38%), aged 12 to 19 years. Results showed problems with accepting authority to be negatively related to both affective and cognitive empathy. Inadequate coping with competition was negatively related to cognitive empathy, whereas problems with receiving or giving help were negatively related to affective empathy. The central role of authority problems suggests that group workers could influence adolescents’ empathy development by helping them to learn to cope with social problem situations.

Author(s):  
Sergeja Slapničar ◽  
Mina Ličen ◽  
Frank G. H. Hartmann ◽  
Anka Slana Ozimič ◽  
Grega Repovš

Research shows that management accountants’ role to support business unit managers’ decision-making may cause them to succumb to managers’ pressures to misreport. Using electroencephalographic (EEG) evidence, Eskenazi, Hartmann and Rietdijk (2016) demonstrate the role of automatic emotional mimicry, which drives misreporting when managers’ personal interest is at stake, but not when BU interest is at stake. In this study, we aim to replicate this finding using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which enables us to separate affective from cognitive empathy. Thirty accounting professionals completed an emotion observation task during which empathy-related brain activity was recorded. We then explored accountants’ inclination to misreport using empathy-invoking accounting scenarios. We find that the inclination to misreport correlates with activation of cognitive empathy regions, but only for scenarios in which accountants misreport to serve business unit’s interests, rather than managers’ personal interests. We find no evidence for a role of affective empathy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (8) ◽  
pp. 1138-1152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca P. Ang ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
Suzanne L. Seah

The present study examined the relationship between empathy (affective and cognitive) and cyberbullying in a sample of 396 (male = 173, female = 219, and four did not report information on gender) school-going adolescents from Singapore (age ranging from 12 to 18 years). Both types of empathy were negatively associated with cyberbullying as expected, with affective empathy having a stronger association with cyberbullying. We also investigated the mediating and moderating role of normative beliefs about aggression in two pathways—the relationship between affective empathy and cyberbullying and the relationship between cognitive empathy and cyberbullying. Findings suggested that normative beliefs about aggression was a partial mediator and moderator in the affective empathy-beliefs-cyberbullying pathway but normative beliefs about aggression was neither a mediator nor moderator in the cognitive empathy-beliefs-cyberbullying pathway. Normative beliefs about aggression served as the mechanism partially accounting for the relationship between affective empathy and cyberbullying. Furthermore, the relation between affective empathy and cyberbullying was found to be stronger for those with higher levels of normative beliefs of aggression. Collectively, together with other studies, this research contributes to an increasing number of studies demonstrating a stronger association between low empathy (in particular, low affective empathy) and bullying, whether traditional bullying or cyberbullying in adolescents.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Blötner ◽  
Ricarda Steinmayr ◽  
Sebastian Bergold

This meta-analysis investigated how the antagonistic personality trait Machiavellianism (Mach) relates to cognitive and affective empathy. Due to the role of manipulation in Mach, previous research argued that Mach should go along with higher empathic ability but found negative effects very consistently. Thus, some scholars argued that individuals with high scores in Mach had empathic deficits. The current meta-analysis (70 studies, 76 samples, and 232 effect sizes) challenged both perspectives by investigating bivariate and multivariate relations between Mach, self-reported cognitive empathy, cognitive empathic skills, and affective empathy. Further, we tested if gender distributions, student samples, and different utilized Mach scales accounted for differences across studies (i.e., moderated those). Bivariate analyses revealed inverse correlations of Mach with all facets of empathy (ρs from -.10 to -.36). The relations with self-reported and performance-based cognitive empathy almost dissolved when controlling for affective empathy. Neither of the proposed moderators significantly explained differences across studies. In general, studies with a high percentage of men and those comprising non-students revealed more diverse correlations than studies with a large proportion of women and studies that exclusively recruited students. The results suggest low affective empathy in Mach but contradict both the empathic deficits- and the “skilled mind reader”-perspectives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-166
Author(s):  
Caitlin Charlotte Halfpenny ◽  
Lucy Amelia James

Humor is a complex phenomenon. For one individual a joke may be perceived as comical, yet for another, the same joke may be deemed completely inappropriate. The appropriate use of humor is perhaps dependent on how a humorist relates to, understands and can empathize with their audience. Thus, the present research aimed to determine whether empathy is related to junior-school children’s use of different humor styles. It has been proposed that four styles of humor exist, two of which are thought to be adaptive (affiliative and self-enhancing) and two of which are thought to be maladaptive (aggressive and self-defeating). However, research exploring the role of humor styles in younger children’s development has been limited. To investigate this the Humor Styles Questionnaire for young children (HSQ-Y) and the Thinking and Feeling Questionnaire were administered to 214 UK children aged 9-11 years old. Correlational analyses revealed that self-enhancing humor is associated with cognitive empathy, affective empathy and sympathy, affiliative humor is positively associated with cognitive empathy specifically and aggressive humor is negatively associated with affective empathy and sympathy. Possible explanations for these associations are explored, with a consideration of the direction for future research in this predominantly unexplored field of study.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Fido ◽  
Craig A. Harper

In recent times there has been an upturn in the rates of polarization in contemporary democracies, with increasing unrest and incivility between those of different voting factions. In this paper, we investigated whether higher levels of empathy might be associated with reduced levels of polarization, and whether such effects were consistent across different voter groups. A final sample of 262 British voters (Study 1) and 385 American partisans (Study 2) completed measures of cognitive and affective empathy, ingroup identification, and outgroup polarization. Across both studies, lower levels of polarization were predicted by higher levels of cognitive empathy and were greater in ‘Remain’ and ‘Democrat’ voters. However, the significant relationship between ingroup identification and polarization was not moderated by empathy or vote choice. As such, we believe that polarization in these contexts may be conceptualized as being tribal in nature, and symmetrical across different and opposing groups of voters. Nonetheless, we do provide evidence that higher levels of cognitive empathy for one’s political outgroups may reduce polarization in highly politicized contexts.


Author(s):  
Ross Buck ◽  
Zhan Xu

Individual differences in the ability to recognize emotion displays relate strongly to emotional intelligence, and emotional and social competence. However, there is a difference between the ability to judge the emotions of another person (i.e., emotional empathy) and the ability to take the perspective of another person, including making accurate appraisals, attributions, and inferences about the mental states of others (i.e., cognitive empathy). In this chapter, we review the concept of emotional empathy and the current state of the field, including emerging and converging evidence from neuroscience research that emotional and cognitive empathy involve doubly dissociable brain systems. We also discuss emerging literature on the physiological mechanisms underlying empathy in the peripheral and central nervous systems. We then distinguish spontaneous and symbolic communication processes to show how cognitive empathy emerges from emotional empathy during development. Development starts with the prelinguistic mutual contingent responsiveness of infant and caregiver yielding “raw” primary intersubjectivity, then secondary and tertiary intersubjectivity advances with increasing social experience, and finally cognitive empathic abilities expand in perspective taking and Theory of Mind (ToM) skills. We then present an Affect-Reason-Involvement (ARI) model to guide the conceptualization and measurement of emotional and cognitive empathy. We consider emotion correlation scores as a flexible and valid approach to empathy measurement, with implications for understanding the role of discrete emotions in decision making. Finally, we apply this reasoning to recent studies of the role of emotion and empathy in bullying.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Prabhu ◽  
Mohammed Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Elizabeth Starkey

Abstract Empathy plays an important role in designers’ ability to relate to problems faced by others. Several researchers have studied empathy development in engineering design education; however, a majority of this work has focused on teaching designers to empathize with primary users. Little attention in empathy development research is given to empathizing with those affected in a secondary and tertiary capacity. Moreover, little research has investigated the role of students’ empathy in influencing their emphasis on sustainability, especially in the concept evaluation stage. Our aim in this paper is to explore this research gap through an experimental study with engineering students. Specifically, we introduced first-year engineering students at a large public university in the northeastern United States to a short workshop on sustainable design. We compared changes in their trait empathy and attitudes towards sustainability from before to after participating in the workshop. We also compared the relationship between students’ trait empathy, attitudes towards sustainability, and the self-perceived sustainability of their solutions in a design task. From our results, we see that students reported an increase in their beliefs and intentions towards sustainability and a decrease in their personal distress from before to after participating in the workshop. Furthermore, students’ trait empathy correlated negatively with the self-perceived sustainability of their solutions. These findings highlight the need for future work studying the role of empathy in encouraging a sustainable design mindset among designers.


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