In her article "DeLillo's Falling Man and the Trouble with Sympathy in Narratives of Terrorism" Jessica McDonald discusses the ways Don DeLillo's characterization of a 9/11 terrorist elicits reader sympathy in his 2007 novel Falling Man. McDonald argues that introducing sympathy into narratives of terrorism undermines attempts to understand the contextual issues out of which terrorism arises ev...

“Empathy” and “Sympathy” are often confusingly used. Beside the difference in their usage, the key component could be a sort of emotional state to be shared, and the way to represent or manipulate it might be different. This could be clearer when we attempt to design it for artificial agents. This paper argues what are differences between empathy and sympathy, and how to design each of them for...

D Hume endorses three statements that are difficult to reconcile: (1) sympathy with those in distress is sufficient to produce compassion toward their plight, (2) adopting the moral point of view often requires us to sympathize with the pain and suffering of distant strangers, but (3) our care and concern is limited to those in our close circle. Hume manages to resolve this tension, however, by...

Across four experiments, participants saw companies as capable of having ‘agentic’ mental states, such as having intentions, but incapable of having ‘experiential’ mental states, such as feeling pain. This difference in mental state ascription caused companies to elicit anger as villains, but not sympathy as victims. Differences in sympathy were mediated by perceived capacities for experience. ...

Two studies investigated the role of children’s moral motivation and sympathy in prosocial behavior. Study 1 measured other-reported prosocial behavior, and selfand other-reported sympathy. Moral motivation was assessed by emotion attributions and moral reasoning following hypothetical transgressions in a representative longitudinal sample of Swiss 6-year-old children (N = 1,273). Prosocial beh...

Empathic responses, such as sympathy towards others, are a key ingredient in the decision to provide help to those in need. The determinants of empathic responses are usually thought to be the vividness, similarity, and proximity of the victim. However, recent research highlights the role that attention plays in the generation of feelings. We expanded on this idea by investigating whether sympa...

Many of your readers will have read of the death of Mr. David Fuller and his entire family in the helicopter crash off the Isles of Scilly on 16th July 1983. He was appointed to the Foundation Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery on 6th September 1982 and was due to take up his appointment on 1 st September 1983. As Professor Williamson recorded in the January/April 1983 issue of this Journal, his Chai...