Empathy Research Relationship With Violence

Empathy, which can encourage prosocial behavior and restrain antisocial behavior, plays an important role in the studies of aggressive and violent behavior. Some studies proved that there was a positive correlation between low empathy and violent behavior. Based on the studies about empathy in home and foreign countries, the paper studied the relationship between empathy and violent tendency by questionnaire and experimental method. The experiment explored two perspective of empathy (trait empathy and context empathy), trying to comprehensively understand the relationship between empathy and violent tendency. Firstly, the paper took100college students as subjects, including52males and48females, to explore the correlation between empathy and violent tendency by the means of questionnaire. Then, the paper took238college students as subjects, including119males and119females, and divided them into two groups randomly:priming group and comparison group. The subjects were given a word search task which served as the nonconsciously prime of empathy. Then the paper explored how the trait empathy (including three dimensions) and the unconscious empathy influenced subjects’degree of agreement to the violent means in the conflict context.Main results and conclusions of this study are concluded as follows:1.There is a significant negative correlation between empathy and violent tendency for college students. And the results are also the same on the cognitive empathy and acts empathy.2.The subjects with high affective empathy had lower degree of agreement to the violent means in the conflict context than the subjects with low affective empathy. But there is no significant difference on total empathy, cognitive empathy and acts empathy.3.The subjects of priming group had lower degree of agreement than the subjects of comparison group. But this difference is only for males. There is no significant difference between priming group and comparison group for females.4.The trait empathy has some influence on the effect of nonconsciously priming of empathy. There was a significant difference between priming group and comparison group for subjects with low trait empathy. The subjects of the priming group had lower degree of agreement to the violent means. But the difference was not significant for the subjects with high trait empathy.