Empathy-related Responding: Associations with Prosocial Behavior, Aggression, and Intergroup Relations

By N. Eisenberg, Natalie D. Eggum, Laura Di Giunta. Social Issues and Policy Review, 2010

637 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Empathy-related responding, including empathy, sympathy, and personal distress, has been implicated in conceptual models and theories about prosocial behavior and altruism, aggression and antisocial behavior, and intergroup relationships. Conceptual arguments and empirical findings related to each of these topics are reviewed. In general, there is evidence that empathy and/or sympathy are important correlates of, and likely contributors to, other-oriented prosocial behavior, the inhibition of aggression and antisocial behavior, and the quality of intergroup relationships. Applied implications of these findings, including preventative studies, are discussed, as are possible future directions.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d223b663c2260cce299660239a13c4176913c79

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Robert Thornberg
2. Tiziana Pozzoli
3. T. Jungert
4. Gianluca Gini
5. Rebecca Y. Hei Li
6. Bradley A White
7. David Silbersweig
8. David R. Vago

In Education

1. Rebecca Y. Hei Li
2. W. I. Wong
3. Gianluca Gini
4. Robert Thornberg
5. Tiziana Pozzoli
6. T. Jungert

In Social Psychology

1. Robert Thornberg
2. Tiziana Pozzoli
3. T. Jungert
4. Gianluca Gini
5. David Silbersweig
6. David R. Vago
7. R. Witenberg
8. Claire Robson

Citations in the corpus

• Gender-Typed Play and Social Abilities in Boys and Girls: Are They Related? (2016, background): “…there is a female advantage in self-reported empathy among Chinese primary and secondary school students; this empathy is also positively correlated with prosocial behavior (Geng et al. 2012), a finding also documented by research in the West (Eisenberg and Miller 1987; Eisenberg et al. 2010).”
• Unique and Interactive Effects of Moral Emotions and Moral Disengagement on Bullying and Defending among School Children (2015, background): “Like empathy, sympathy also has been found to be positively associated with prosocial behavior (for reviews, see Eisenberg et al., 2006, 2010; Hoffman, 2000) and negatively associated with aggression (Carlo et al., 2010; MacEvoy & Leff, 2012).”
• Who cares when nobody is watching? Psychopathic traits and empathy in prosocial behaviors (2014, background): “In particular, personal distress has been found to be either unrelated or inversely related to prosocial behavior in emotionally reactive individuals, who tend to cope with others’ signals of neediness or distress by avoiding or responding negatively to the distressed or needy individual, rather tha”
• Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness (2012, background): “Prosocial behavior is typically defined as voluntary behavior intended to benefit another (Eisenberg et al., 2010).”
• Age-related neural dynamics of empathy in preschoolers: an EEG study with naturalistic viewing (2026, unknown): “Research has shown that children with higher empathy levels demonstrate increased helping behavior towards distressed peers and show greater concern for others’ wellbeing ( Malti et al. 2009, Eisenberg et al. 2010).”