Attitude to Animals and Empathy: Comparing Animal Protection and General Community Samples
117 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT Although a number of studies have examined a range of demographic and personality variables that may impact upon attitudes towards the treatment of non-human species, little consensus has been reached within the literature. The aim of the current study was to evaluate and assess levels of human-directed empathy and attitudes towards the treatment of animals in two diverse populations, namely the general community (n = 543) and those within the animal protection field (n = 389). Both groups of participants completed the Attitude Towards the Treatment of Animals Scale (AAS) and the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a measure of human-directed empathy. Comparisons between the two samples indicated that those within the animal protection community scored more highly on both the animal attitude and human-directed empathy measures. Correlational analyses revealed a positive relation between AAS and IRI scores for both samples, whilst the strength of the correlation was greater for those within the animal protection sample. These findings are discussed.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db3f02d10d0ac08f12c2661b074d853e8305ee48
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
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Citations in the corpus
- The Relationship between Empathy, Perception of Pain and Attitudes toward Pets among Norwegian Dog Owners (2010, background): “The Relationship between Empathy, Attitudes and Pain There is growing evidence for a positive relationship between empathy and positive attitudes toward animals (e.g., Furnham, McManus and Scott 2003; Taylor and Signal 2005; Signal and Taylor 2007).”
- Moral Emotions and Social Activism: The Case of Animal Rights (2009, background): “Interestingly, the mean AAS scores of the subjects in our activist and nonaligned groups were nearly identical to those obtained by Signal and Taylor (2007) in a study using the AAS with samples of animal activists and community members in Australia.”
- Brief Measures of the Animal Attitude Scale (2015, background): “Sex Differences Nearly all administrations of the 20-item AAS have found that women are more concerned with animal protection than men (e.g., Herzog, Betchart and Pittman 1991; Signal and Taylor 2007; Daly and Morton 2008; Binngießer, Wilhelm and Randler 2013).”