This research program explored links among prosocial motives, empathy, and helping behavior. Preliminary work found significant relations among components of self-reported empathy and personality (N = 223). In Study 1, the authors examined the generality of prosocial behavior across situations and group memberships of victims (N = 622). In Study 2, empathic focus and the victim's outgroup statu...

Lay intuitions suggest that the ability to share, celebrate, and enjoy others’ positive emotions – a phenomenon we term positive empathy – bolsters individual well-being and relationship strength. However, it is unclear from the current literature whether (i) positive empathy is distinct from highly related constructs and (ii) whether positive empathy is associated with salutary social and pers...

We perform appropriate social actions in the various scenes of everyday life. For example, we speculate about other people's intentions and feelings in order to understand them, or inhibit negative emotions such as anger toward them. Furthermore, we engage in altruistic behaviors out of consideration and empathy for unrelated others. Even for a person who we do not like, we can also be sensitiv...

Interpersonal touch is of paramount importance in human social bonding and close relationships, allowing a unique channel for affect communication. So far the effect of touch on human physiology has been studied at an individual level. The present study aims at extending the study of affective touch from isolated individuals to truly interacting dyads. We have designed an ecological paradigm wh...

Abundant evidence across the behavioral and social sciences suggests that there are substantial individual differences in pro-social behavior. However, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that underlie social preferences. This paper investigates whether empathy and Theory of Mind shape individual differences in pro-social behavior as conventionally observed in neutrally framed so...

Empathy, feeling what others feel, is regarded as a special phenomenon that is separate from other emotional experiences. Emotion theories say little about feeling emotions for others and empathy theories say little about how feeling emotions for others relates to normal firsthand emotional experience. Current empathy theories focus on how we feel emotions for others who feel the same thing, bu...

[This corrects the article on p. 161 in vol. 6, PMID: 25750631.].

OBJECTIVE Positive empathy (PE), a type of empathy response that focuses on a client's hidden message of desire for a better life, was hypothesized to increase the expression of positive emotions, approach goals, and strengths, and to communicate equivalent understanding when compared to traditional empathy (TE). METHOD We examined 4 hypotheses in 2 studies. In study 1, college participants r...

The Covid-19 pandemic has created many problems. This paper was performed to predict moral reasoning through spiritual health and personality through mediation role of  empathy in physicians and nurses. The current research is a cross-sectional analysis conducted on 320 physicians and nurses working in the corona hospital ward. Available sampling approach, research equipment included Personalit...

Research shows that we spontaneously imitate people. Moreover, empathy predicts the degree of this non-conscious imitation. Little is known, however, if or how this expression of empathy is influenced by stable physical characteristics of our interaction-partners. In two studies, we tested whether attractiveness of others moderated the relation between empathy and imitation. While seeing a woma...