Empathetic Embarrassment Influence On Willingness For Help:the Role Of Interpersonal Relationship (Intimacy Or Remoteness)

Objective:Willingness for help as an important aspect of pro-social behavior,also attracts wide attention from the psychologists.Among the factors influencing the willingness for help,the effect of emotion cannot be ignored.One will feel embarrassed when feeling others’ embarrassment,which is called the appearance of empathetic embarrassment.It is not only an emotional experience but also an empathetic reaction.The study,by investigating how empathetic embarrassment and interpersonal relationship(intimacy or remoteness)affect the willingness for help,aims to provide theoretical and practical support for indigenous research of pro-social study.Method:The priming materials used abroad cannot be used directly in the Chinese population,on the basis of inquiring and collating pertinent literature at home and abroad,the study first revises the priming materials of empathetic embarrassment and verifies the effectiveness of the priming materials,which confirms the materials used for the formal experiment and investigates how empathetic embarrassment and interpersonal relationship(intimacy or remoteness)affect the willingness for help.The formal experiment was divided into two steps:first investigating the extent to which the individual would like to offer help when facing strangers’ asking for help in the embarrassing situation,which aims to find out the willingness for help of the individual with empathetic embarrassment emotion;and then further discussing the willingness for help of the individual facing acquaintance of different levels of intimacy in different types of empathetic embarrassment(empathic embarrassment,vicarious embarrassmeni).Result:In the preliminary experiment,the priming materials of empathetic embarrassment is effective.In the Experiment Ⅰ,control groups were set to investigate the influence that empathetic embarrassment had on the willingness for help and it turns out that willingness for help in different groups is obviously different,there are not interaction between gender and empathetic embarrassment,and the main effect of gender and types of empathetic embarrassment are not obvious.In the Experiment Ⅱ,the main effects of types of empathetic embarrassment and interpersonal relationship(intimacy or remoteness)are obvious;The interaction between types of empathetic embarrassment and interpersonal relationship(intimacy or remoteness)is not obvious.Conclusion:(l)Operating instructions and watching pictures of embarrassing situation can effectively activate the emotion of empathetic embarrassment;(2)Individual with empathetic embarrassment will reduce the willingness for help when facing strangers.(3)when facing with acquaintance,the willingness for help of individual in empathic embarrassment is higher than in vicarious embarrassment,meanwhile the effect of differential sequence of relationship for the willingness for help is obvious and people will more willing to help who are close to them;(4)The effect of differential sequence of relationship for the empathetic embarrassment is obvious.People experienced more embarrassment from those with intimacy.