| This study investigated the impact of life-condition information on empathic response to a target whose emotional presentation on one occasion was incongruous with what would be expected given the prior life-condition information. Subjects were 119 undergraduates (83 women, 36 men) who completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980) earlier in the semester. Subjects completed a neutral baseline task, then heard audiotaped segments of a confederate talking about a significant sad event in her life, and then about a minor, happy event. One group was told the happy event preceded the sad event, while a second group was told the sad event preceded the happy event. A comparison group heard only the happy segment. Self-reported mood was used to assess empathic distress at baseline and following the audiotaped segments.; There was a significant difference between subjects based on the order they believed the events had occurred. All subjects who had the information about the sad event reported that they were affected by it. However, subjects who thought the happy event followed the sad event expressed significantly less empathic distress in response to the happy event than subjects who thought the happy event preceded the sad event. Subjects who thought the happy event followed the sad event reported that they felt glad that the target found joy given her sad life condition. As a result, their level of empathic distress was not statistically different from that of the subjects who heard only the tape of the happy event. Subjects who thought the happy event preceded the sad event could not escape their distress and experienced the most distress of the three groups in response to the happy event. Males and females showed the same pattern of empathic response to the manipulation, though on self-report measures of predispositional empathy, females tended to rate themselves as more empathic than males. Predispositional cognitive and affective empathy played distinct roles in predicting empathic response. The findings provide strong support for Hoffman's (2000) developmental theory of empathy and illustrate the importance of using a multidimensional measure to capture the various components of an empathic response. |
