The Interactive Effects Of Social Context And Empathizers On Empathy

As a kind of common social psychological phenomenon in interpersonal interaction,empathy is an affective state stemming from apprehension of another's emotional state or context and which is congruent with it.Empathy could not happen if there is only empathizer.In fact,empathy happens in special social context.However,there are still many questions could not be explored by previous researches in this area.For example,previous researches usually focused on only one kind of social context factors and seldom paid attention to the interaction between factors of social context;previous researches usually focused on pain empathy and no research explored the emotion empathy in specific social context;theory researches paid more attention to the empathy deficits of patients or neural process that how social context information affected empathy but ignored to explain the effects of social context on empathy from the perspective of mental process.Based on the analysis,this study aimed to explore the characteristic of the effects of social context on empathy with ERP technologies.Moreover,this study also aimed to analyze the relationship between factors of social context from the perspective of phenomenology,and then,two sets of behavioral experiments were conducted to examine the effects of those factors on empathy and how these effects were modulated by the factors of empathizers.At last,the theoretical analysis of effects of social context factors on empathy was proposed based on all results and demonstrated through laboratory experiment.Six parts focusing on above-mentioned research ideas in the paper are as follows:Part one(Chapter one): Philology method was used to argue the definition of empathy.Philology and logistic methods were used to introduce and evaluate the previous researches in this area.Part two(Chapter two): Based on the part one,several research hypotheses were proposed and specific research protocol was created.Part three(Chapter three): an investigation from the perspectiveIV phenomenology was conducted to generalize the most important factors in social context.Part four(Chapter four): two sets of laboratory experiments were conducted to explore how empathizer's factors modulated the effects of social context,in which the variations resulted from the investigation.Part five(Chapter five and Chapter six): two ERP experiments were conducted to explore how the social context played role on empathy when the former was manipulated as contextual stimulus and how this effect would be modulated by the load of empathizers.Part six(Chapter seven and Chapter eight): above-mentioned results were summarized up.Based on the summarization,a theoretical analysis on the effects of social context on empathy was proposed to explain the phenomenon of empathy in real life.Through the above-mentioned research,some results were drawn as follows:1.The main social context factors could be generalized to two kinds: targets and events.The former included the gender of target and the relationship between the target and empathizer.The latter included that the positivity of events and the deservingness of events.The characteristics of targets and events played a critical role on the happening of empathy.2.The effects of social context on empathy were moderated by empathizers,such as experience of empathizers and sex roles of empathizers.As relatively stable factors of empathizers,rich life experiences of empathizers provided a capability base for empathy and femininity or androgynous provided a motivational base for empathy.3.The pictures of social context played a role on the early and late stages of empathic process,no matter they were showed by subliminal or normal way.The effects of social context showed as sensitivity to negative social context and made empathizers responded with faster RT and higher accuracy when the value of social context and emotional face were consistent,whereas larger amplitude when the value of social context and emotional face were inconsistent..4.As one kind of status factors of empathizers,cognitive load moderated the effect of social context on empathy.Under the condition of high cognitive load,negative social context attracted more attention of empathizers and made some effect on empathic process.Totally speaking,based on the interview of empathy experiences in real life,we analyzed the social contextual factors at first.Then,the following experience studies used the contextual factors as some independent variables and factors of empathizers as other independent variables to explore how the empathy was affected by them,and some meaningful results were got.