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Do we feel the same empathy for loved and hated peers?

ABSTRACT: Empathy allows us to understand and react to other people's feelings and sensations; we can more accurately judge another person's situation when we are aware of his/her emotions. Empathy for pain is a good working model of the behavioral and neural processes involved in empathy in general. Although the influence of perspective-taking processes (notably "Self" vs. "Other") on pain rating has been studied, the impact of the degree of familiarity with the person representing the "Other" perspective has not been previously addressed. In the present study, we asked participants to adopt four different perspectives: "Self", "Other-Most-Loved-Familiar", "Other-Most-Hated-Familiar" and "Other-Stranger". The results showed that higher pain ratings were attributed to the Other-Most-Loved-Familiar perspective than to the Self, Other-Stranger and Other-Most-Hated-Familiar perspectives. Moreover, participants were quicker to rate pain for the Other-Most-Loved-Familiar perspective and the Self-perspective than for the other two perspectives. These results for a perspective-taking task therefore more clearly define the role of familiarity in empathy for pain.

SUBMITTER: Bucchioni G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4449017 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Do we feel the same empathy for loved and hated peers?

Bucchioni Giulia G Lelard Thierry T Ahmaidi Said S Godefroy Olivier O Krystkowiak Pierre P Mouras Harold H

PloS one 20150529 5

Empathy allows us to understand and react to other people's feelings and sensations; we can more accurately judge another person's situation when we are aware of his/her emotions. Empathy for pain is a good working model of the behavioral and neural processes involved in empathy in general. Although the influence of perspective-taking processes (notably "Self" vs. "Other") on pain rating has been studied, the impact of the degree of familiarity with the person representing the "Other" perspectiv ...[more]

PMID: 26024234

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Project description:Providing remote psychotherapy using technology is a growing practice, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if in numerous studies video conferencing psychotherapy (VCP) was found to be clinically effective, some doubts continue to exist about how the psychotherapeutic alliance works in the online setting, and the characteristics of the empathic process are still poorly understood. This is an exploratory study aimed at analyzing the degree of empathy between the psychotherapist and client pair, and the degree of support perceived by the client who shall be referred to as the patient interchangeably in this study, comparing the sessions in person with those online, during the current pandemic, in order to discriminate the impact of empathy in the digital setting. The sample analyzed was composed of 23 patients with different severity of pathology engaged in online and in-person therapeutic sessions with five psychotherapists of different theoretical leanings. The scores of the support and empathy scale, obtained by both members of the psychotherapeutic couple in the two settings, were analyzed and compared. The test used belongs to an Italian adaptation of the Empathic Understanding (EU) of the Relationship Inventory. What emerged from comparing the scores was interesting: Unlike the psychotherapists, the patients perceived their therapists as significantly more empathic and supportive in the remote setting. These are rather important data, because the literature documents that client empathic perception measures represent a more accurate measure of the empathic relationship and, in general, can predict a good treatment outcome. Although these results need further investigation, they represent an important contribution in filling the scientific gap in the understanding of digital empathy. Also, this study provides new insights for future research on the characteristics and impact empathy has on the practice of remote psychotherapy.

Project description:CONTEXT:There is need for a short validated self-report instrument for assessing the feeling of being loved. The Feeling Loved instrument asks: "Do you feel loved?" and "How loved do you feel?" as well as "Do you love yourself?" and "How much do you love yourself?" with 100 mm visual analogue scales assessing the continuous response options. OBJECTIVE:To assess convergent and discriminant validity and to explore psychometric structure for this novel self-report measure. DESIGN:Convergent validity comparators include: general mental health, perceived social support, perceived stress, depressive symptoms, and positive/negative emotion. Discriminant validity comparators include: gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and body mass index. Latent class analysis techniques explore psychometric structure. SETTING:Baseline evaluation for a randomized controlled trial. PARTICIPANTS:Community-recruited adults in Madison, Wisconsin. INTERVENTION:This validation study is based on pre-intervention data. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:Strength of correlation with comparators is used to assess convergence and discrimination. Goodness-of-fit indicators assess latent class models. RESULTS:Of n?=?412 respondents, 92% answered positively to both Yes/No questions, and 59% self-rated ?75/100 on both 0-to-100 VAS scales. Supporting convergent validity, highly significant (p < 0.001) Spearman's rho=? correlations of a summed Feeling Loved score were: mental health (??=?0.49); social support (??=?0.46); perceived stress (??=?-0.46), depressive symptoms (??=?-0.31), and both positive (??=?0.50) and negative (??=?-0.43) emotion. Significant associations were also found for personality indicators. Supporting discriminant validity, Feeling Loved scores did not correlate significantly with physical health (??=?-0.08), body mass index (??=?0.01), age (??=?0.06), or income (??=?0.07) (p values all ? 0.12). Latent class analysis models suggested a 3-class structure, with strong goodness-of-fit indicators.

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Do we feel the same empathy for loved and hated peers?

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Do we feel the same empathy for loved and hated peers?

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