The Impact Of Individual Experience And Cues On Empathy

In early studies,scholars have tested the relationship between similar experience and empathy.The idea that prior experience with a similar event can facilitate empathy was well supported.However,current studies have shown that similar experience is not the necessary condition to increase empathic responding due to empathy gap.There were two views explaining the phenomenon.One deemed that constrained memory for the impact of past emotional event led people who had endured the event to render less empathy.The other opinion insisted that a man tend to predict or judge his feelings of an event according to the easiness of recalling,thus ignoring the effect of emotion.Argument on two sides is whether emotion about distressed event can be recalled,which is worth studying further.Based on the theory of constrained memory and availability heuristic,the research aimed to examine the impact of individual experience and cues on empathy by experimental method.The research has three experiments.Experiment 1 examined the impact of individual experience on fatigue empathy and anxiety empathy.Participants were assigned to 1 of 3 conditions(currently enduring vs.previously enduring vs.never endured)according to their experience.In each condition,participants read a story about an individual who's experiencing an event and he felt fatigued(stressed out).After reading the vignette,participants completed an empathy measure by using a 7-point scale.The results demonstrated that the individual experience was significant.Participants in the previously endured condition felt less fatigue(anxiety)empathy toward the character than participants in the currently enduring condition and never endured condition.Experiment 2 tested the effect of different cues on anxiety empathy.There were two cues(detailed cues vs.general cues)to remind participants with similar experience of anxiety.Detailed cues used some emotional words to describe anxious feelings and specific details of preparing for the exam.General cues used a few simple words expressing emotions.The result showed that the main effect of cues and experience were significant,but the interaction between cues and experience did not appear.Participants in the detailed cues condition felt more anxiety empathy than participants in the general cues condition and no cues condition,detailed cues were helpful to facilitate anxiety empathy.Experiment 3 created two anxious situations.One was a people who's preparing the postgraduate entrance exam.The other was a people who's applying a job.This experiment aimed to examine the effect of similar experience on anxiety empathy in detailed cues condition.The result showed that participants with similar experience felt more anxiety empathy than participants without similar experience in detailed cues condition.To sum up,the result showed that fatigue empathy gap and anxiety empathy gap existed.Meanwhile,this research found the theory of a constrained memory was proved under general cues and situation condition,people with similar experience felt less empathy toward others.However,in detailed cues condition,the theory of availability heuristic was supported.Participants with similar experience enhanced their empathy dramatically.The detailed cues were able to help people to recall emotional feelings and facilitate empathy.Future research should apply more methods to examine our results.