To what extent can simple mental exercises cause shifts in empathic habits? Can we use mobile technology to make people more empathic? It may depend on how empathy is measured. Scholars have identified a number of different facets and correlates of empathy. This study is among the first to take a comprehensive, multidimensional approach to empathy to determine how empathy training could affect ...

Although the study of empathy within the helping professions has a long history, it is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, whose precise definition remains elusive. Despite the ambiguous nature of empathy, it has been theorized to be an important relationship variable that positively affects client outcomes in medicine and psychotherapy. However, since numerous problems exist in the measurement...

Empathy refers to the thoughts and feelings of one individual in response to the observed (emotional) experiences of another individual. Empathy, however, can occur toward persons experiencing a variety of emotions, raising the question of whether or not empathy can be emotion specific. This paper discusses theoretical and empirical support for the emotion specificity of empathy. We present a n...

The Young Children's Empathy Measure is a brief measure of young children's cognitive and affective perspective taking developed to assess preschool children's empathy. The Cronbach alpha coefficient of internal reliability for the empathy score was acceptable and interrater reliability across four rates was very high. The children's empathy scores were correlated with their ages and social dev...

Previous research has demonstrated the influence of parenting on the development of children's empathy. However, few studies have considered the impact of parents on empathy in adulthood, specific components of empathy, or the importance of parent and child biological sex. In the present study, 226 participants (71 men) completed online versions of the Parental Bonding Instrument (Parker et al....

Empathic failures are common in hostile intergroup contexts; repairing empathy is therefore a major focus of peacebuilding efforts. However, it is unclear which aspect of empathy is most relevant to intergroup conflict. Although trait empathic concern predicts prosociality in interpersonal settings, we hypothesized that the best predictor of meaningful intergroup attitudes and behaviors might n...

This paper presents and explicates the theory of empathy found in Edith Stein’s early philosophy, notably in the book On the Problem of Empathy, published in 1917, but also by proceeding from complementary thoughts on bodily intentionality and intersubjectivity found in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities published in 1922. In these works Stein puts forward an innovative and detailed th...

A key question in research on empathy is what interpersonal motivations might be activated by empathy. Does empathy promote only a concern with other's outcomes ("altruism"), as well as decreased concern with one's own outcomes ("selflessness"), or an increased concern with equality in outcomes ("egalitarianism")? These interpersonal motivations were assessed with a series of experimental games...

OBJECTIVE High-quality patient-clinician communication is associated with better medication adherence, but the specific language components associated with adherence are poorly understood. We examined how patient and clinician language may influence adherence. METHODS We audio-recorded primary care encounters from 63 patients newly diagnosed with depression and prescribed an antidepressant me...