Lecture 7: Empathy and Prosocial Behaviour

Question 1

empathy (5)

Answer 1

• “Other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone else”
• Other-oriented → must be directed to/for someone else
• Emotional response → must be feeling something
• Elicited by someone else → can’t just randomly be having a feeling
• Congruent → you’re feeling the same thing as the other person (e.g. if someone’s sad you’re not angry)

Question 2

affective empathy (6)

Answer 2

Composed of four components:

• personal distress: feeling upset because you saw someone else in a bad situation (not feeling bad for/because of the other person)
  
  • The bare minimum on the road to empathy
• emotional contagion: Picking up on someone else’s feelings; feeling something because someone else does without really knowing why (e.g. someone else starts laughing and you do too)
• sympathy: Feeling bad for somebody else (not emotion matching, true empathy)
• emapthy

Question 3

cognitive empathy (3)

Answer 3

• theory of mind
• perspective taking: putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes
• A mental (not emotional) understanding of what’s going on in someone’s head

Question 4

How do we learn empathy? (2)

Answer 4

• Parenting: perspective taking + inductive reasoning
• Emotion regulation

Question 5

learning empathy: parenting (4)

Answer 5

• Parenting that teaches perspective-taking skills is associated with empathy in children
  
  • Inductive reasoning → points out the consequences of actions on others; teaching that other people matter
  • e.g. “How would you feel if your sister hit you?”
• Protection domain parenting → helping kids when they’re upset/distressed through comforting + helping them dealing with emotions
  
  • Doings this models empathic behavior + promotes emotion regulation

Question 6

learning empathy: emotion regulation (11)

Answer 6

• Children: emotion regulation facilitates empathy + prosocial behaviour
• Adults: depends on the type of emotion regulation

Why emotion regulation?

• Seeing other people makes you feel bad → need to regulate negative affect as a response to others’ distress
  
  • If you can’t regulate your own emotions, you can’t help the other person
  • Can do this by suppression your own emotions → help
  • Or reevaluating the situation to determine whether this person actually needs help → alleviate distress by minimizing situation
• Seen more as a tool to help achieve whatever goal you have
  
  • Also influenced by your motivation
  • Motivated → suppress + help
  • Not motivated → reevaluate + escape

Question 7

Why is empathy a good thing? (13)

Answer 7

• Perspective-taking → put yourself in the place of another and feel what they feel
  
  • If you can understand how someone else feels → more likely to see them as people and understand them, feel like they deserve basic rights, etc.
  • Curtail the ingroup vs. outgroup, me vs. you tendencies
• Motivation for prosocial behavior → more likely to do something when we feel it’s the right thing to do
  
  • Emotion, by and large, is the thing that mobilizes us
  • But not as robust as we might think → only low to moderate positive associations between empathy and prosocial behavior
  • Mediating variable: how much you’ve internalized prosocial behavioural values
  • Determines which route you’re going to take (help vs. escape)
  • Empathy is only the fuel in the tank, not the steering wheel for the direction of your action
• Also depends on how you measure empathy
  
  • Toddlers → telling them a story, ask how they feel
  • Kids/adolescents → self-reports or simulated situations
  • Having them report their feelings in the heat of the moment is the best way to measure empathy

Question 8

Hepach, Vaish, & Tomasello (2013) (9)

(hint: 2s, helping)

Answer 8

• Are kids (2 y/o) motivated by selfish reasons?
• Out-of-reach helping task → adult reacher drops something and pretends that it’s out of reach
• 2-year-old got to help, somebody else helped, nobody helped
• Compared to see if kids are helping to get credit for it or for the sake of the person being helped
• Measured galvanic responses
• 2 y/os just as happy to see the person helped when someone else helped and when they themselves helped
• Nobody helped → stress response not alleviated
• Concluded that kids will help just for the sake of helping
• Kids tend to help regardless of if their parent is in the room

Question 9

problems with empathy (8)

Answer 9

• Can we really put ourselves in someone else’s shoes?
  
  • Difficult to feel empathy for people who are dissimilar from us
  • Can we even do it in the first place? It’s very mentally taxing
• Empathy towards whom?
  
  • Who should we feel empathy towards in unfortunate situations?
  • If you’re a doctor that needs to triage, how much should you be empathizing?
• Is empathy really the best approach when making moral decisions?
  
  • Public policy, medical treatment, anything that requires resources

Question 10

Hein et al. (2016) (5)

(hint: MRI)

Answer 10

• MRI study; empathy towards in-group and out-group members
• Participants saw in-group or out-group members receiving painful electric shocks and rated their empathic response
• Participants received shocks and were helped by either in-group or out-group (gave money to stop the shocks)
• Participants had greater empathy for out-group members after receiving help from them
• Demonstrates how empathy is in-group biased

Question 11

prosocial behaviour (3)

Answer 11

• Actions that benefit another
• Helping, sharing, donating (time and/or money), etc.
• Females tend to be naturally more prosocial than males

Question 12

debates about prosocial behaviour motivation (3)

Answer 12

• Does it have to be for welfare of the other?
• Can I do it for self-serving reasons?
• Can empathy be somewhere in the middle?

Question 13

prosocial behaviour and young children (5)

Answer 13

• Young children have a natural propensity for helping and sharing
• Infants (as young as 6 mos) preferred helpers to hinderers
• Sharing starts to be reciprocal around age 3 years
• Toddlers happier when giving treats vs. getting them, even at cost to themselves
• Toddlers (upwards of 6 mos) help spontaneously in a wide variety of situations

Question 14

benefits of prosocial behaviour (7)

Answer 14

• Associated with positive outcomes
• Prosocial spending → happiness
• Volunteering → happiness, self-esteem
• Sharing → better social relationships
• But depends on why you’re being prosocial
  
  • Self-determination theory → need satisfaction
  • Happier doing things when it’s autonomous, makes you feel competent

Question 15

prosocial spending (7)

Answer 15

• Spending money on others → gifts and/or charitable donations
• Depends on who the recipient is
  
  • Friends + family → fulfills need for relatedness → happier
• Depends on the impact
  
  • More specific cause → feels better about donating
• Depends on your mood
  
  • Better mood + happier → more prosocial in general

Question 16

authoritative parenting and prosociality (9)

Answer 16

• Authoritative parenting practices → prosocial behavior in children and adolescents
  
  • Warmth-responsiveness/involvement
  • Inductive discipline
  • Democratic participation
  • Good-natured/easy going
  • (However, generally based on a Western perspective)
• Autonomy supportive parenting → prosocial behaviour
  
  • Giving kids some sort of say in what they do
  • e.g. You have to eat vegetables, but you can have peas or carrots

Question 17

What is the best way to teach kids to be prosocial? (7)

Answer 17

• Through discipline/punishment?
• Through conversations?
• Through modeling behavior?
• A study using the Domains of Socialization found that people are more likely to report learning to be prosocial after seeing someone else be prosocial
  
  • Punishment → inhibiting anti-social behaviour, but not prosocial
  • Conversations → life skills, motivational behaviours, not prosocial
  • Modeling → by far best predictor of prosocial behaviour

Question 18

Does good parenting lead to prosocial children or vice versa? (6)

Answer 18

• Parenting often has a bidirectional effect with child prosocial behavior
  
  • Good parenting → good child outcomes
  • Good child outcomes → good parenting
• Strongest predictor of child prosocial behaviour at T2 is prosociality at T1
  
  • Interestingly, it also predicts quality of mother-child relationship at T1+2
  • Overall, it’s easier to parent good kids

Question 19

lying (5)

Answer 19

• Lying → usually considered something negative, but depends on the type
• White lies: telling a lie so as to spare someone’s feelings
• We try to teach children not to lie, but the fact that they can implies they have reached a significant developmental milestone
  
  • TOM → know that you have knowledge someone else doesn’t
  • Emotional regulation → can’t give away that you’re lying

Question 20

Why do children lie? (2)

Answer 20

• Often to get out of trouble + cover up a misdeed (up until 10-13) b/c they can’t handle intense emotions of being in trouble
• Most kids don’t lie to get other people out of trouble b/c they don’t want to get in trouble personally

Question 21

How do we teach kids not to lie? (4)

Answer 21

• School A: very strict discipline, use of corporal punishment
• School B: moderately strict discipline, verbal admonishments, detention
• Amount of lying didn’t vary between both schools
• School A → best liars b/c trying to not get caught, not trying to not lie