1. Empathy is a complex, multifaceted construct that involves affective, cognitive, and behavioral components.
  2. Affective empathy refers to the ability to share and understand the emotions of others, while cognitive empathy involves understanding another person’s perspective or mental state.
  3. Empathy is linked to prosocial behavior, such as helping, sharing, and cooperating, as well as improved interpersonal relationships and reduced aggression.
  4. Empathy can be influenced by genetic, neurological, and environmental factors, such as upbringing, socialization, and cultural context.
  5. Research has shown that empathy can be cultivated through various interventions, such as mindfulness training, perspective-taking exercises, and empathy-focused education programs.
  6. Empathy can be affected by situational factors, such as stress, cognitive load, and the nature of the relationship between the empathizer and the person they are empathizing with.
  7. Gender differences in empathy have been widely studied, with some research suggesting that women tend to exhibit higher levels of empathy than men. Females have more oxytocin, which is positively correlated to emotional empathy, while males have more testosterone, which is negatively correlated to cognitive empathy (Wuying & Jiamei, 2014). However, these differences are also influenced by socialization and cultural factors.
  8. Empathy is associated with better mental health, increased resilience, and lower rates of burnout, particularly in helping professions such as healthcare and social work.
  9. Mirror neurons are a specialized type of brain cell that may contribute to empathy by allowing individuals to mimic and understand the actions and emotions of others. Mirror neurons develop through sensorimotor associative learning instead of being a specific genetic adaptation. That is, they activate when an individual performs or observes a similar action rather than having a specific evolutionary purpose or adaptive function. Mirror neurons can change in radical ways through sensorimotor training. Human infants receive enough sensorimotor experience to train associative learning of mirror neurons (Cook, Bird, Catmur, Press, & Heyes. Mirror neurons: From origin to function, 2014).
  10. There is a growing body of research on the role of empathy in technology, exploring how artificial intelligence and virtual reality can be used to foster empathy and understanding among individuals and groups.

Findings On Empathy: Studies & References

  1. Grühn, D., Rebucal, K., Diehl, M., Lumley, M., & Labouvie-Vief, G. (2008). Empathy across the adult lifespan: Longitudinal and experience-sampling findings. Emotion, 8(6), 753.
  2. Paleari, F. G., Regalia, C., & Fincham, F. (2005). Marital quality, forgiveness, empathy, and rumination: A longitudinal analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(3), 368-378.
  3. Ickes, W., & Tooke, W. (1988). The observational method: Studying the interactions of minds and bodies. In S. Duck, D.F. Hay, S.E. Hobfoll, W. Ickes, & B. Montgomery (Eds.), Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research, and interventions (pp. 79-97). Chichester: Wiley.
  4. Klein, K. J., & Hodges, S. D. (2001). Gender differences, motivation, and empathic accuracy: When it pays to understand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(6), 720-730.
  5. Greenson, R. R. (1977). Empathy And Its Vicissitudes. Classics in psychoanalytic technique, 227.
  6. Meffert, H., Gazzola, V., den Boer, J. A., Bartels, A. A., & Keysers, C. (2013). Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy. Brain, 136(8), 2550-2562.
  7. Nummenmaa, L., Hirvonen, J., Parkkola, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2008). Is emotional contagion special? An fMRI study on neural systems for affective and cognitive empathy. Neuroimage, 43(3), 571-580.
  8. Goerlich-Dobre, K. S., Lamm, C., Pripfl, J., Habel, U., & Votinov, M. (2015). The left amygdala: A shared substrate of alexithymia and empathy. NeuroImage.
  9. Kanske, P., Böckler, A., Trautwein, F. M., & Singer, T. (2015). Dissecting the social brain: Introducing the EmpaToM to reveal distinct neural networks and brain-behavior relations for empathy and Theory of Mind. NeuroImage.
  10. Eres, R., Decety, J., Louis, W. R., & Molenberghs, P. (2015). Individual differences in local gray matter density are associated with differences in affective and cognitive empathy. NeuroImage.
  11. Decety, J., Skelly, L., Yoder, K. J., & Kiehl, K. A. (2014). Neural processing of dynamic emotional facial expressions in psychopaths. Social Neuroscience, 9(1), 36-49.
  12. Martin, L. J., Hathaway, G., Isbester, K., Mirali, S., Acland, E. L., Niederstrasser, N., … & Mogil, J. S. (2015). Reducing social stress elicits emotional contagion of pain in mouse and human strangers. Current Biology, 25(3), 326-332.
  13. Pew Research Center (2014, October 22). “Online Harassment”. Retrieved August 27, 2015. Available at pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/
  14. Shultz, E., Heilman, R., & Hart, K. J. (2014). Cyber-bullying: An exploration of bystander behavior and motivation. Cyberpsychology, 8(4).
  15. Machackova, H., Dedkova, L., & Mezulanikova, K. (2015). Brief report: The bystander effect in cyberbullying incidents. Journal of adolescence, 43, 96-99.
  16. Hortensius, R., & de Gelder, B. (2014). The neural basis of the bystander effect—The influence of group size on neural activity when witnessing an emergency. Neuroimage, 93, 53-58.
  17. Eman, S., Nicolson, R. I., & Blades, M. Understanding Antisocial Behaviors: The Roles of Sensation Seeking and Subtypes of Empathy, The IAFOR North American Conference on Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences, 2014.
  18. Hysek, C. M., Schmid, Y., Simmler, L. D., Domes, G., Heinrichs, M., Eisenegger, C., … & Liechti, M. E. (2014). MDMA enhances emotional empathy and prosocial behavior. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 9(11), 1645.
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  20. Vachon, D. D., Lynam, D. R., & Johnson, J. A. (2014). The (non) relation between empathy and aggression: surprising results from a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(3), 751.
  21. Swain, J. E., Konrath, S., Brown, S. L., Finegood, E. D., Akce, L. B., Dayton, C. J., & Ho, S. S. (2012). Parenting and beyond: common neurocircuits underlying parental and altruistic caregiving. Parenting, 12(2-3), 115-123.
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  23. Nightingale SD, Yarnold PR, Greenberg MS. Sympathy, empathy, and physician resource utilization. J Gen Intern Med. 1991;6:420-3.
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  27. Williams, B., Brown, T., & McKenna, L., et al. (2015, June). Student empathy levels across 12 medical and health professions: An interventional study – Springer. Retrieved August 29, 2015, from springer.com/article/10.1186/s40639-015-0013-4/fulltext.html
  28. Cheung, D. H., & Reeves, A. (2014). Can We Teach Empathy?: Evidence from the Evaluation of a Course Titled “Compassion in Medicine”. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 20(5), A7-A7.
  29. Carr, L., Iacoboni, M., Dubeau, M. C., Mazziotta, J. C., & Lenzi, G. L. (2003). Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: a relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(9), 5497-5502.
  30. Gallese, V. (2001). The ‘shared manifold’ hypothesis. From mirror neurons to empathy. Journal of consciousness studies, 8(5-7), 33-50.
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  35. Jan, F. and Jan, M. (2015) Burnout Syndrome during Pediatric Residency Training. Open Journal of Pediatrics, 5, 218-222. doi: 10.4236/ojped.2015.53033.
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  37. Potter, P., Pion, S., & Gentry, J. E. (2015). Compassion Fatigue Resiliency Training: The Experience of Facilitators. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 46(2), 83.
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