The Impact Of Perspective Taking On Helping Behavior: The Mediating Effect Of Empathic Concern And Personal Distress

The relationship between empathy and helping behavior is a central issue in developmental and social psychology. Most research before considered perspective taking as an antecedent of empathic response. Perspective taking could lead to helping behavior through empathy. State empathy contains two components, one is called empathic concern and another is called personal distress. Empathic concern is defined as another-oriented emotional response that stemmed from the concern to another. Personal distress is defined as a self-focused, aversive reaction to another. The purpose of the paper is to explore the effecting of empathy concern and personal distress on helping behavior.In Exp 1, with 91 vocational school students as subjects, single variable between-subject factorial design was adopted to compare the empathic response under the objective condition, imagine-other condition and imagine-self condition. The following results were shown:(1) Participates in the imagine condition reported feeling more empathic concern and personal distress than did Participates in the objective condition; (2) Participates in the imagine-self condition reported feeling more personal distress than did participates in the imagine-other condition, but the empathic concern that participates reported had no significant difference in both conditions:(a)In the imagine-self condition, both empathic concern and personal distress were high, with no reliable difference. (b)In the imagine-other condition, empathy was significantly higher than personal distress.In Exp 2, with 120 vocational school students as subjects, double variable which were perspective taking and the type of video between-subject factorial design was adopted. We wanted to explore if participants who watch the video which caused feelings of happiness experiences less personal distress, while empathic concern remained. Moreover, the variance analysis and regression analysis were used to further examine the function of empathic concern, personal distress on the effect of perspective taking on helping behavior. The following results were shown:(1)Under the imagine-self condition, watching the video which caused feelings of happiness could evoke less personal distress, while empathic concern remained; (2)Under the same level of higher empathic concern, participates who experienced more personal distress would more likely to help other.Under the same level of lower personal distress, participates who experienced more empathic concern would more likely to help other; (3) Empathic concern and personal distress could mediate the effect of perspective taking on helping behavior.Based on the above, we proposed the mechanism of helping behavior evoked by empathic response, that is to say, both empathic concern and personal distress were the mediator of perspective taking on helping behavior. The motivation evoked by empathy was neither pure altruism or pure egoistic, but the mixture of two motivations. The innovation of this research lies in the experimental operation on the separating personal distress from empathy concern and the exploring their influences on helping behavior. This research not only improved the two-stage model of empathy-mediated helping behavior, but also proposed some suggestions of the empathic education for the higher vocational school students. Furthermore, it contains theoretical implication and practice implication.