The Effect Of Self-Other Distinction And Overlap On Types Of Helping Responses And Empathy

Empathy has always received widespread attention in many disciplines such as psychology,sociology,and neurophysiology.Empathy has been proven to be a complex concept with multiple components.Self-other distinction and self-other overlap are considered important to empathy process.Researchers have been trying to clarify the relationship between self-other distinction and empathy,and the relationship between selfother overlap and empathy.The present research examines the effects of self-other distinction and self-other overlap on empathy and the verbal response of helpers in helping situations under the Chinese cultural background.In Study 1,the participants’ helping verbal responses were collected.After coding and counting these responses,a total of six response types were obtained.The frequency of occurrence from high to low is:advice,analyzing,comfort,self-disclosure,empathy,and inquiry.In addition,the five most frequently-occurring responses composed of different response types are:advice-analyzing,comfort-advice,comfort-analyzing,advice-selfdisclosure,and comfort-self-disclosure.The first study enriches the research on the daily help response types under the Chinese cultural background,and provides a basis for the experimental design of the second study.Study 2 created a real interpersonal helping situation,and explored the effects of differentiation of self(reflecting the ability of self-other distinction)and self-other overlap on empathy and the preference of helping responses.Also study 2 explored the differences in the degree of understanding and help scores of different response types(empathy,advice,comfort)from the perspective of helpers and helpees.The results show that self-other distinction and self-other overlap have different influences on the three components of empathy,but roughly reflect the relationship:If the degree of self-other distinction is low,and the degree of self-other overlap is high,the individual tends to have stronger emotional empathy;if the degree of self-other distinction is high,and the degree of self-other overlap is low,the individual tends to have better performance in cognitive empathy and behavior empathy.However,self-other distinction and self-other overlap cannot predict the individual’s preference of types of helping response.The results also show that the helpers prefer giving advice while the helpees prefer hearing comfort in the helping situation.When considering the scoring of the response types of the helper,it shows that the helpers’score for the response is higher than the helpees’ score for the same response,and the difference is more obvious in the score of helpfulness.In addition,there is no difference among the scores of understanding of three types of response,but the scores of helpfulness of empathy are lower than those of advice and comfort.This result reflects to a certain extent the individual’s beliefs and attitudes towards empathy,and partly explains the phenomenon that empathic expression rarely occurs in daily life.Finally,the findings of the present research are integrated and discussed.The implications,limitations,and future directions are presented.