Conference Agenda

When a person experiences empathy for someone in need or distress, they usually experience not just warm and sympathetic feelings, but also distress, sadness and sometimes anger. The current trend is to separate out these various elements, either to find the “real” empathy or to differentiate the individual effects each emotion has on motivation (usually to help). But is it not plausible that co-experienced emotions have a reciprocal effect on one another? If so, to understand such mixed emotional episodes, we cannot do with simply understanding one element. In this paper, I argue in favor of a holistic approach to empathy where not only the empathic element, but also the experiential and motivational aspects are understood in terms of affect. In other words, what makes the emotion blend empathic is the addition of care, but neither the experience, nor the motivation can be understood in the absence of the co-occurring emotions sadness and distress.

In everyday life we see a lot of different behaviors associated with empathy: consolation, helping, compassion, to name just a few. Most of these behaviors are not shown by human adults only, but also by human children and apparently by other animals. Thus, the question arises, can all these behaviors be called empathic? Is empathy a unitary phenomenon or do we need to distinguish rather various types of empathy? The variability will be demonstrated by discussing the development of human children with two specific questions: At what age are they able to show compassion, consolation, and targeted helping? And in how far might their understanding of the other be different from that of adults? First, I will shortly introduce a model of 5 steps children undergo during typical development. Second, I will argue that these steps and what differentiates them can inform us on the abilities underlying the complex phenomenon of empathy and it invites to distinguish types of empathy. Splitting empathy into several underlying abilities does not only inform us about the phenomenon itself, but can enable empirical research to develop experimental designs for these specific abilities and thereby different aspects of empathic behavior.

To compare empathy in human and nonhuman animals (hereafter “animals”) we need an adequate conceptual framework characterizing similarities and differences between animal and human empathy. Such a framework is still lacking. The core intuition of our proposal is that empathy typically involves the registration of the other’s relevant affective state, the specific situation, and possibly even mental states (or processes). This is combined with a somewhat flexible selection of a response behavior that accounts for the mental states and the situation of the agent. More precisely: We think that we can cluster relevant elements into five main dimensions, starting with three forms of sensitivity for the other: (1) sensitivity for bodily and affective states of others, (2) perceiving others as individuals in a situation, (3) cognitive perspective taking in relation to the other; in addition, we include as relevant the kind of typically (4) other-oriented response, and (5) the level of flexibility which is connected with the response behavior. Each of these dimensions can be categorized by several different sub-abilities. Further, all five dimensions can be realized to a certain degree. Thus, for each dimension of empathy we can characterize to which degree it is realized in an animal; this leads to new evaluation of and questions about empathic behavior, e.g. is the recently described helping behavior of rats (Bartal, Decety & Mason, 2011) empathic behavior? In their famous experiment, a rat was freely moving in an arena while another rat from the same cage was trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the rat being able to move freely in the arena learned to open the restrainer (with another rat being in it). In a follow-up experiment, the rat could choose between opening the restrainer with her cage mate being trapped or opening a second retainer enabling access to tasty food, chocolate. The rat seemed to register the distress of the trapped animal and first opened her retainer and let her free before opening the second restrainer. Moreover, the helping rat even shared the chocolate with the other rat (Bartal, Decety & Mason, 2011). Should we interpret this as a case of full-blown empathy or do we need to employ a killjoy interpretation according to which the freeing behavior is just triggered by the egoistic desire for social interaction? Our multidimensional approach offers a new way of interpreting the observations.