Results of 3 experiments suggest that feeling empathy for a member of a stigmatized group can improve attitudes toward the group as a whole. In Experiments 1 and 2, inducing empathy for a young woman with AIDS (Experiment 1) or a homeless man (Experiment 2) led to more positive attitudes toward people with AIDS or toward the homeless, respectively. Experiment 3 tested possible limits of the emp...

This qualitative study offers a novel exploration of the links between social media, virtual intergroup contact, and empathy by examining how empathy is expressed through interactions on a popular social media blog. Global leaders are encouraging individuals to engage in behaviors and support policies that provide basic social foundations. It is difficult to motivate people to undertake such ac...

Empathy is a complex psychological response in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others (Ickes, 1997). There is broad agreement about two primary components of empathy: (1) an affective response to another person, which may (but not always) entail sharing that person’s emotional state; and (2) a cognitive capacit...

INTRODUCTION Adopting another person's visuospatial perspective has been associated with empathy, which involves adopting the psychological perspective of another individual. Both reduced empathy and abnormal visuospatial processing have been observed in those with schizophrenia and schizophrenia-related personality traits. In the current study, we sought to explore the relationship between emp...

BACKGROUND The cultivation of empathy for healthcare providers is an important issue in medical education. Narrative medicine (NM) has been shown to foster empathy. To our knowledge, there has been no research that examines whether a NM programme affects multi-professional healthcare providers' empathy. Our study aims to fill this gap by investigating whether a NM programme effects multi-profes...

Despite its early origins and adaptive functions, empathy is not inevitable; people routinely fail to empathize with others, especially members of different social or cultural groups. In five experiments, we systematically explore how social identity, functional relations between groups, competitive threat, and perceived entitativity contribute to intergroup empathy bias: the tendency not only ...

The ability to predict the behavior of others based on their mental states is crucial for social functioning. Previous studies have provided evidence for the role of Oxytocin (OXT) in enhancing the ability to mentalize. It has also been demonstrated that the effect of OXT seems to strongly depend on socio-cognitive skills with more pronounced effects in individuals with lower socio-cognitive sk...

The present study examined whether surface acted empathy led to decreased burnout among providers of emotional support without adversely affecting recipients. Measures were tested via an in-lab simulated conversation between strangers and through an online survey asking participants about real-life conversations. Study 1 (95 pairs of female participants) had manipulation failure, but still part...

CONTEXT Many studies have reported a decline in empathy as allopathic medical students progress through medical school. Data are needed to compare the pattern of changes in empathy in osteopathic and allopathic medical students. Also, it is important to investigate the associations between measures of empathy and attitudes toward interprofessional collaboration, which are among major elements o...

The debate over the ethics of radically, technologically altering the capacities and traditional form of the human body is rife with appeals to and dismissals of the importance of the integrity of the human species. Species-integrist arguments can be found in authors as varied as Annas, Fukuyama, Habermas, and Agar. However, the ethical salience of species integrity is widely contested by autho...