Proactive-reactive Offenders’ Differences In Empathy For Pain

With the booming and development of social economy, there are large number of problems occurred during the procedures. Security problems are one of the most important issues among these problems. Especially since the beginning of 21st century, these problems strongly blocked the development of our social economy and endangered people’s security of life and property. Furthermore, aggressive attack is of the most extremely dangerous one which will hurt citizens’life and property. So our government pays much attention to how to deal with these problems.In academic circles, especially in criminology, law and psychology, of them all they make every effort to serve for society, doing research based on each area, trying to deal with the complex issues. On to the study of offenders, psychological researchers focus on the personality, mind mechanism and behavior features. In foreign countries, differences of empathy between criminals and non-criminals or offenders and non-offenders real make sense. The researchers believe that criminals have lower empathy than non-criminals, meanwhile, the offenders may have even lower empathy the other criminals or non-offenders. Some argue that low empathy perhaps is one important reason of aggressive attack. Jolliffe and Farrington (2004) use meta-analysis to give a review of 35 literatures about the relationship of offending and empathy. They found in total the same conclusions as mentioned above. But not all of the studies show clearly relationship between empathy and offending. It might be empathy has plenty of different conceptions, and every scales has their own understandings for empathy, or they pay much more attention to some aspects of the conception. At the same time, almost all the inventories are self reported, so social desirability is inevitable. The previously researches have such problems as the conclusions are not consistent, most of them only use self reported scales so as the data is not so objective, and merely researches focus on the empathy differences of two subtype, proactive attack and impulsive attack, which might be the reason make the conclusions not consistent before. In current research, we will combine inventory and behavioral research together to study the might be differences between proactive attack offenders and impulsive offenders. We use IPAS (Impulsive-Proactive Attack Scale) to assort offenders into impulsive attack or proactive attack. First, we use Interpersonal Reaction Inventory (IRI) to measure the cognitive empathy and emotional empathy of the two type offenders. Following are the results of IRI, compared with impulsive attack offenders, the total score of proactive offenders and perspective taking、fantasy、empathy concern are all significant lower, while personal distress is significant higher. Study 2, there are two experiments, in experiment a, subjects were ask to judge the picture weather hurt or not, react time was needed; b session, we need subjects to make sure the intensity of pain use 1 to 5 in total five points, which stand for from no pain to extremely pain. And the react time of proactive offenders is longer the impulsive offenders, intensity of pain is significant lower than the impulsive offenders.