I feel so sorry!: tapping the joint influence of empathy and personal distress on helping behavior
Entity
UAM. Departamento de Psicología Social y MetodologíaPublisher
Springer New York LLCDate
2012-05-15Citation
10.1007/s11031-012-9302-9
Motivation and Emotion 37.2 (2013): 335-345
ISSN
0146-7239 (print); 1573-6644 (online)DOI
10.1007/s11031-012-9302-9Funded by
The research was financed by two grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) PSI2008-04849/PSIC and PSI2011-28720.Project
Gobierno de España. PSI2008-04849/PSIC; Gobierno de España. PSI2011-28720Editor's Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11031-012-9302-9Subjects
Empathy; Personal distress; Helping behavior; PsicologíaNote
The author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be provided by inserting the DOI number of the article in the following sentence: “The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/[insert DOI]”Rights
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012Abstract
Observing a person in need usually provokes a compound and dynamic emotional experience made up of empathy and personal distress which, in turn, may influence
helping behavior. As the exclusive use of rating scales to measure these two emotions does not permit the analysis of their concurrent evolution, we added the analogical
emotional scale (AES) in order to measure how these two emotions evolve throughout the emotional experience, from its onset to its conclusion. Therefore, in two studies, the concurrence of empathy and personal distress was induced, both rating scales and AES were used, and participants were given an unexpected opportunity to help. Two effects were found. First, the helping behavior was lower when personal distress prevailed over empathy at the end of the experience (Studies 1 and 2). Second, this ‘‘end’’ effect was coherent with the nature of the different motives evoked by personal distress and empathy—directed to increasing either one’s own welfare (egoistic) or the victim’s
welfare (altruism) (Study 2). These results support the usefulness of combining the rating scales and the AES for gaining a better understanding of the nature and behavioral consequences of complex, compound and dynamic emotional experiences.
Files in this item
Google Scholar:Carrera Levillain, Pilar
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Oceja Fernández, Luis Venancio
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Caballero González, Amparo
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Muñoz Cáceres, María Dolores
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López Pérez, Belén
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Ambrona Benito, Tamara
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