Previous research has documented that Asians tend to somatize negative experiences to a greater degree than Westerners. It is posited that somatization may be a more functional communication strategy in Korean than American context. We examined the effects of somatization in communications of distress among participants from the US and Korea. We predicted that the communicative benefits of soma...

Seeing others is a central metaphor in James Cameron’s film Avatar, used as a means to express empathy and empathic bonding throughout the film, both between humans and the Na’vi, and between the Na’vi and the animals that inhabit their world. Empathy entails an ability to see and feel the world from another’s perspective—feeling with rather than feeling for. Jake Sully’s shifting and boundary-...

CONTEXT There is considerable interest in the attributes other than cognitive ability that medical students need in order to be professionally successful, with a particular focus on empathy and emotional intelligence (EI). Selection considerations have also motivated interest in such attributes as predictors of academic success. There are reports of declines in empathy in US medical students, b...

MacKayfs initial chapter of this book demonstrates the complexity of the empathy construct by reviewing various definitions and conceptualizations of empathy. The present chapter analyzes empathy as a personality disposition. Empathy-like any personality disposition-possesses four levels of meaning. These four levels of meaning are: (1) global, evaluative impressions about an actor perceived by...

Ninety-nine 2-year-olds, out of a larger sample of 474 children, were classified as high (n = 49) or low (n = 50) in externalizing (aggressive/destructive) behaviors based on maternal reports assessed twice across a 2-month period. During a laboratory assessment, these toddlers participated in two empathy-eliciting tasks, from which affective, behavioral, and physiological measures were derived...

Initially thought of as a unitary ability, empathy has been more recently considered to consist of 2 components (i.e., an affective and a cognitive component). The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) is a tool that has been used to assess empathy in young people and adolescents on the basis of this dual-component conception (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). Recent studies of empathy have led to it being def...

BACKGROUND The literature indicates that medical practitioners experience declining empathy levels in clinical practice. This highlights the need to educate medical students about empathy as an attribute early in the academic curriculum. The objective of this study was to evaluate year one students' self-reported empathy levels following a 2-hour empathy workshop at a large medical school in Ma...

Empathy is an essential part of normal social functioning, yet there are precious few instruments for measuring individual differences in this domain. In this article we review psychological theories of empathy and its measurement. Previous instruments that purport to measure this have not always focused purely on empathy. We report a new self-report questionnaire, the Empathy Quotient (EQ), fo...