1. What Is Empathy?
1. Batson, C. D. (2011). These things called empathy: Eight related but distinct phenomena. In J. Decety and W. Ickes (Eds.), The social neuroscience of empathy, pp. 3–15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Coplan, A. (2011). Understanding empathy: Its features and effects. In A. Coplan and P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives, pp. 3–18. New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Singer, T., and Decety, J. (2011). Social neuroscience of empathy. In J. Decety and J. T. Cacioppo (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of social neuroscience, pp. 551–64. New York: Oxford University Press.
The literature on the neuroscience of empathy, while relatively new, is developing rapidly. I have tried to include as much of that research throughout the book as possible. A sample of additional sources that outline the emerging neuroscience linked to identifying empathy includes: Decety, J., and Jackson, P. L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 3, 71–100; Decety, J., and Lamm C. (2006). Human empathy through the lens of social neuroscience. The Scientific World Journal 6, 1146–63; Decety, J. (2015). The neural pathways, development and functions of empathy. Current Opinion in Behavioral Science 3, 1–6; Singer and Decety 2011, pp. 551–64; Singer, T., and Lamm, C. (2009). The social neuroscience of empathy. The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009: Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1156, 81–96.
4. A history of the development of the term empathy can be found in Davis, M. H. (1996). Empathy: A social psychological approach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
5. Hackney, H. (1978). The evolution of empathy. Personnel and Guidance Journal 57 (1), 35–38.
6. An excellent source that traces the history of violence throughout human development and across civilizations worldwide is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). Pinker documents the extent of violence throughout history and what events and structures incubate or suppress violence.
7. de Waal, F. B. M. (2009). The age of empathy: Nature’s lessons for a kinder society. New York: Random House.
9. Darwin, C. (1981). The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
10. Shermer, M. (2006). Why Darwin matters: The case against intelligent design. New York: Henry Holt. See particularly pp. 130–32.
12. Of course, I am referring to all of humanity with all its forms of gender expression and sexual identity. But to preserve the accuracy of the words of Darwin, I have left his use of narrow gender terms, such as here where he uses the word man to refer to all human beings. Consider this an example of how we have changed language empathically by refusing to use a narrow term like man to assume the meaning of all of humanity.
13. Shermer 2006, p. 106.
14. A comprehensive source on mirroring is Marco Iacoboni’s Mirroring people: The new science of how we connect with others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Foundational work on mirroring was done by the Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti. Some sources for his work include: Rizzolatti, G., Fabbri-Destro, M., and Cattaneo, L. (2009). Mirror neurons and their clinical relevance. Nature Clinical Practice Neurology 5 (1), 24–34; Rizzolatti, G., and Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27, 169–92.
15. Müller, B. C. N., Maaskant, A. J., van Baaren, R. B., and Dijksterhuis, A. (2012). Prosocial consequences of imitation. Psychological Reports 110 (3), 891–98.
16. van Baaren, R., Holland, R. W., Kawakami, K., and van Knippenberg, A. (2004). Mimicry and prosocial behavior. Psychological Science 15 (1), 71–74.
17. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss, Volume 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
18. Mukulincer, M., and Shaver, P. R. (2015). An attachment perspective on prosocial attitudes and behavior. In D. A. Schroeder and W. G. Graziano (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior, pp. 209–30. New York: Oxford University Press.
19. A more detailed discussion of the brain biology behind empathy can be found in chapter 2 of Assessing Empathy, which reflects the work of my research team as we developed instruments to measure interpersonal and social empathy. Segal, E. A., Gerdes, K. E., Lietz, C. A., Wagaman, M. A., and Geiger, J. M. (2017). Assessing empathy. New York: Columbia University Press. For general background on the neuroscience aspects of empathy, see Kilroy, E., and Aziz-Zadeh, L. (2017). Neuroimaging research on empathy and shared neural networks. In M. Kondo (Ed.), Empathy: An evidence-based interdisciplinary perspective, pp. 25–41. London: InTech Open Publishers.
20. For more on affective response, see Decety, J., and Skelly, L. R. (2014). The neural underpinnings of the experience of empathy: Lessons for psychopathy. In K. N. Ochsner and S. M. Kosslyn (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive neuroscience, Volume 2: The cutting edges, pp. 228–43. New York: Oxford University Press; Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., and Target, M. (2004). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. New York: Other Press.
21. For more on affective mentalizing, see Schnell, K., Bluschke, S., Konradt, B., and Walter, H. (2011). Functional relations of empathy and mentalizing: An fMRI study on the neural basis of cognitive empathy. NeuroImage 54, 1743–54.
22. For more on self-other awareness, see Decety, J., and Sommerville, J. A. (2003). Shared representations between self and other: A social cognitive neuroscience view. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (12), 527–33; Moran, J. M., Kelley, W. M., and Heatherton, T. F. (2014). Self-knowledge. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive neuroscience, Volume 2: The cutting edges, 135–47.
23. For more on emotional contagion and the difference with empathy, see Hatfield, E., Rapson, R. L., and Le, Y-C. L. (2011). Emotional contagion and empathy. In The social neuroscience of empathy, pp. 19–30; McCall, C., and Singer, T. (2013). Empathy and the brain. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and M. V. Lombardo (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental social neuroscience, pp. 195–213. New York: Oxford University Press.
24. For more on perspective taking, see Decety, J. (2005). Perspective taking as the royal avenue to empathy. In B. F. Malle and S. D. Hodges (Eds.), Other minds: How humans bridge the divide between self and others, pp. 143–57. New York: Guilford Press. Coplan 2011 gives an excellent explanation of the difference between self-focused and other-focused perspective taking.
25. I use the term welfare here because that is what is typically used in common speech and is the term that my students usually come into the classroom using. But the term I prefer to use as a public policy researcher is public assistance, which is the accurate term and does not bring up all sorts of biases and negative associations.
26. For more on emotion regulation, see Eisenberg, N., Smith, C. L., Sadovsky, A., and Spinrad, T. L. (2004). Effortful control: Relations with emotion regulation, adjustment, and socialization in childhood. In R. F. Baumeister and K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications, pp. 259–82. New York: Guilford Press.
27. Zaki, J., and Ochsner, K. (2012). The neuroscience of empathy: Progress, pitfalls and promise. Nature Neuroscience 15 (5), 675–80.
28. Galinsky, A. D., Ku, G., and Wang, C. S. (2005). Perspective-taking and self-other overlap: Fostering social bonds and facilitating social coordination. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 8 (2), 109–24.
29. Roan, L., Strong, B., Foss, P., Yager, M., Gelbach, H., and Metcalf, K. A. (2009). Social perspective taking. Technical Report 1259. Arlington, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral Social Sciences.
31. Segal, E. A. (2006). Welfare as we should know it: Social empathy and welfare reform. In K. M. Kilty and E. A. Segal (Eds.), The promise of welfare reform: Political rhetoric and the reality of poverty in the twenty-first century, pp. 265–74. New York: Haworth Press.
32. Segal, E. A., and Kilty, K. M. (2003). Political promises for welfare reform. Journal of Poverty 7 (1–2), 51–67.
33. These quotes come directly from the Congressional Record 1996 (142 [115], H9493–9415) on the day the legislation was passed, July 31, 1996. Journalist Jason DeParle wrote a compelling book that gives a detailed look at what went on politically over welfare reform while looking at the lives of three families and how those changes directly affected them: DeParle, J. (2004). American dream: Three women, ten kids, and a nation’s drive to end welfare. New York: Penguin. This is an example of social empathy in action.
34. Eisenberg, N. (2002). Distinctions among various modes of empathy-related reactions: A matter of importance in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (1), 33–34.
35. Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 10, 85; Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (1), 113–26.
36. Decety, J., and Lamm C. (2011). Empathy versus personal distress: Recent evidence from social neuroscience. In The social neuroscience of empathy, pp. 199-214.
37. At the time, this gaffe made by the former First Lady got a lot of mention, but was dropped rather quickly, likely as a courtesy to a woman who was no longer technically in the public realm (although her son was the sitting president and was criticized for problems with the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina). The original story can be found at “Barbara Bush: Things working out ‘very well’ for poor evacuees from New Orleans,” Editor and Publisher, September 5, 2005, http://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/barbara-bush-things-working-out-very-well-for-poor-evacuees-from-new-orleans. A follow up to that story can be found at “One year ago today: Barbara Bush’s infamous remarks about Hurricane Katrina evacuees,” Editor and Publisher, September 5, 2006, and can be found at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/one-year-ago-today-barbara-bush-s-infamous-remarks-about-hurricane-katrina-evacuees.
39. Goetz, J. I., Keltner, D., and Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin 136 (3), 351–74.
40. Singer and Lamm 2009, p. 84.
41. Bloom, P. (2016). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. New York: HarperCollins.
2. Why Do We Need Empathy?
1. John Bowlby is considered the originator of attachment theory. A great deal of research has followed and a comprehensive examination can be found in the Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, third edition, edited by J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (New York: Guilford Press, 2016). The chapter titled “A lifespan perspective on attachment and care for others” is particularly helpful in explaining how empathy is related.
2. Mukulincer, M., and Shaver, P. R. (2015). An attachment perspective on prosocial attitudes and behavior. In D. A. Schroeder and W. G. Graziano (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior, pp. 209–30. New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Decety, J., and Meyer, M. (2008). From emotion resonance to empathic understanding: A social developmental neuroscience account. Development and Psychopathology 20, 1053–80.
4. Nelson, C. A., Fox, N. A., and Zeanah, C. H. (2014). Romania’s abandoned children: Deprivation, brain development and the struggle for recovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5. Kim, S., and Kochanska, G. (2017). Relational antecedents and social implications of the emotion of empathy: Evidence from three studies. Emotion 17 (6), 981–92.
6. Batson, C. D., and Shaw, L. L. (1991). Evidence for altruism: Toward a pluralism of prosocial motives. Psychological Inquiry 2 (2), 107–22.
7. Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetic evolution of social behavior. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (parts 1 and 2), 1–52.
8. de Waal, F. B. M. (2008). Putting the altruism back into altruism: The evolution of empathy. Annual Review of Psychology 59, 279–300.
9. de Waal, F. B. M. (2012). The antiquity of empathy. Science 336, 874–76.
10. See chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of otherness and what it means.
11. Stone, B. L. (2008). The evolution of culture and sociology. American Sociologist 39 (1), 68–85.
12. Rumble, A. C., Van Lange, P. A. M., and Parks, C. (2010). The benefits of empathy: When empathy may sustain cooperation in social dilemmas. European Journal of Social Psychology 40, 856–66.
13. Young, L., and Waytz, A. (2013). Mind attribution is for morality. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and M. V. Lombardo (Eds.), Understanding other minds, pp. 93–103. New York: Oxford University Press.
14. Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (multiple empathizing can be found on page 24); Hoffman, M. L. (2011). Empathy, justice, and the law. In A. Coplan and P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives, pp. 230–54. New York: Oxford University Press.
17. Hauser, D. J., Preston, S. D., and Stansfield, R. B. (2013). Altruism in the wild: When affiliative motives to help positive people overtake empathic motives to help the distressed. Journal of Experimental Psychology 143 (3), 1295–1305.
18. Aknin, L. B., Hamlin, J. K., and Dunn, E. W. (2012). Giving leads to happiness in young children. PLos ONE 7 (6), e39211, 1–4. Earlier research indicates that prosocial helping behavior begins early in life. See Warneken, F., and Tomasello, M. (2007). Helping and cooperation at 14 months of age. Infancy 11, 271–94.
19. Ali, R. M., and Bozorgi, Z. C. (2016). The relationship of altruistic behavior, empathetic sense, and social responsibility with happiness among university students. Practice in Clinical Psychology 4 (1), 51–56.
20. Helliwell, J., Layard, R., and Sachs, J. (2017). World happiness report 2017. New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
21. Hampton, K. N. (2016). Why is helping behavior declining in the United States but not in Canada?: Ethnic diversity, new technologies, and other explanation. City and Community 15 (4), 380–99.
22. van der Meer, T., and Tolsma, J. (2014). Ethnic diversity and its effects on social cohesion. Annual Review of Sociology 40, 459–78.
23. van der Meer and Tolsma’s (2014) research included Western European countries. They found that attitudes toward immigrants in those countries looked more like Canada’s than the United States’ and thus reinforced their conclusion of the influence of the uniqueness of U.S. history and the legacy of slavery. Since the studies they reviewed, Western Europe has been targeted by terrorists, many of who are immigrants or one generation removed from immigration. We might see a change in attitudes toward multiculturalism and diversity in future research as a consequence of these terror events.
24. Rifkin, J. (2009). The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: Penguin.
26. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.
27. Equal Justice Initiative. (2015). Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror, 2nd ed. Montgomery, AL: Author.
29. As cited in Takaki, R. (2008). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America, rev. ed. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, p. 82.
31. Lim, D., and DeSteno, D. (2016). Suffering and compassion: The links among adverse life experiences, empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior. Emotion 16 (2), 175–82.
32. Benard, B. (2004). Resiliency: What we have learned. San Francisco, CA: WestEd.
33. Lietz, C. A. (2011). Empathic action and family resilience: A narrative examination of the benefits of helping others. Journal of Social Service Research 37 (3), 254–65.
34. Righetti, F., Gere, J., Hofmann, W., Visserman, M. L., and Van Lange, P. A. M. (2016). The burden of empathy: Partners’ responses to divergence of interests in daily life. Emotion 16 (5), 684–90.
35. Manczak, E. M., DeLongis, A., and Chen, E. (2016). Does empathy have a cost? Diverging psychological and physiological effects within families. Health Psychology 35 (3), 211–18.
36. Covell, C. N., Huss, M. T., and Langhinrichsen-Rohling, J. (2007). Empathic deficits among male batterers: A multidimensional approach. Journal of Family Violence 22 (3), 165–74.
37. Gini, G., Albiero, P., Benelli, B., and Altoe, G. (2008). Determinants of adolescents’ active defending and passive bystanding behavior in bullying. Journal of Adolescence 31, 93–105.
38. Elsegood, K. J., and Duff, S. C. (2010). Theory of mind in men who have sexually offended against children. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 22 (1), 112–31.
39. Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The science of evil: On empathy and the origins of cruelty. New York: Basic Books.
40. Glick, P. (2008). When neighbors blame neighbors: Scapegoating and the breakdown of ethnic relations. In V. M. Esses and R. A. Vernon (Eds.), Explaining the breakdown of ethnic relations, pp. 123–46. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
41. Almeida, P. R., Seixas, M. J., Ferreira-Santos, F., Vieira, J. B., Paiva, T. O., Moreira, P. S., and Costa, P. (2015). Empathic, moral and antisocial outcomes associated with distinct components of psychopathy in healthy individuals: A triarchic model approach. Personality and Individual Differences 85, 205–11.
3. If It’s So Important, Why Is Empathy So Hard?
1. Lamm, C., Meltzoff, A. N., and Decety, J. (2009). How do we empathize with someone who is not like us? A functional magnetic resonance study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22 (2), 362–76.
2. Recall the discussion of kin selection in chapter 2.
3. Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American 223 (5), 96–102; Tajfel, H., Billig, M., Bundy, R., and Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology 1 (2), 149–78; Billig, M., and Tajfel, H. (1973). Social categorization and similarity in intergroup behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology 3 (1), 27–52.
4. Brewer, M. B. (1979). In-group bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin 86 (2), 307–24.
5. Brown, L. M., Bradley, M. M., and Lang, P. J. (2006). Affective reactions to pictures of ingroup and outgroup members. Biological Psychology 71, 303–11; Gutsell, J. N., and Inzlicht, M. (2012). Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: Neural evidence of an empathy gap. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7, 596–603; Mathur, V. A., Harada, T., Lipke, T., and Chiao, J. Y. (2010). Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation. Neuroimage 51, 1468–75; O’Brien, E., and Ellsworth, P. C. (2012). More than skin deep: Visceral states are not projected onto dissimilar others. Psychological Science 23 (4), 391–96; Molenberghs, P. (2013). The neuroscience of in-group-bias. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 37, 1530–36; Molenberghs, P., and Morrison, S. (2014). The role of the medial prefrontal cortex in social categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9, 292–96.
6. Cikara, M., and Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). The neuroscience of intergroup relations: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science 9 (3), 245–74.
7. Eres, R., and Molenberghs, P. (2013). The influence of group membership on the neural correlates involved in empathy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (article 176), 1–6; Meyer, M. L., Masten, C. L., Ma, Y., Wang, C., Shi, Z., Eisenberger, N. I., and Han, S. (2013). Empathy for the social suffering of friends and strangers recruits distinct patterns of brain activation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8 (4), 446–54.
8. Swann, W. B., Jetten, J., Gómez, Á., Whitehouse, H., and Bastian, B. (2012). When group membership gets personal: A theory of identity fusion. Psychological Review 119 (3), 441–56.
11. Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: New Press.
12. Alexander 2012, pp. 243–44.
13. Eres, R., and Molenberghs, P. (2013). The influence of group membership on the neural correlates involved in empathy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (article 176), 1–6.
14. Avenanti, A., Sirigu, A., and Aglioti, S. M. (2010). Racial bias reduces empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-race pain. Current Biology 20, 1018–22.
15. Gutsell, J. N., and Inzlicht, M. (2012). Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: Neural evidence of an empathy gap. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7, 596–603.
16. Chiao, J. Y., and Mathur, V. A. (2010). Intergroup empathy: How does race affect empathic neural responses? Current Biology 20, R478–R80.
17. Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American 223 (5), 96–102; Cikara, M., and Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). The neuroscience of intergroup relations: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science 9 (3), 245–74.
18. Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., and Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (26), 15387–92; Van Bavel, J. J., and Cunningham, W. A. (2009). Self-categorization with a novel mixed-race group moderates automatic social and racial biases. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (3), 321–35.
19. Decety, J., Echols, S., and Correll, J. (2009). The blame game: The effect of responsibility and social stigma on empathy for pain. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22 (5), 985–97.
20. For a full history of AIDS and the public policies that were debated during the 1980s and 1990s, see Shilts, R. (1987). And the Band Played On. New York: Penguin. It was also made into an HBO movie.
21. Hobson, N. M., and Inzlicht, M. (2016). The mere presence of an outgroup member disrupts the brain’s feedback-monitoring system. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11 (11), 1698–1706.
22. Lotz-Schmitt, K., Siem, B., and Stürmer, S. (2015). Empathy as a motivator of dyadic helping across group boundaries: The dis-inhibiting effect of the recipient’s perceived benevolence. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 20 (2), 1–27.
23. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.
24. Harris, L. T., and Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science 17 (10), 847–53.
25. Glick, P. (2005). Choice of scapegoats. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, and L. A. Rudman (Eds.), On the nature of prejudice: 50 years after Allport, pp. 244–61. Malden, MA: Blackwell; Glick, P. (2008). When neighbors blame neighbors: Scapegoating and the breakdown of ethnic relations. In V. M. Esses and R. A. Vernon (Eds.), Explaining the breakdown of ethnic relations, pp. 123–46. Malden, MA: Blackwell; Glick, P., and Paluck, E. L. (2013). The aftermath of genocide: History as a proximal cause. Journal of Social Issues 69 (1), 200–208.
26. Staub, E. (2015). The roots of helping, heroic rescue and resistance to and the prevention of mass violence: Active bystandership in extreme times and in building peaceful societies. In D. A. Schroeder and W. G. Graziano (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior, pp. 693–717. New York: Oxford University Press.
27. Cikara, M., Bruneau, E., Van Bavel, J. J., and Saxe, R. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 55, 110–25.
28. Fox, G. R., Sobhani, M., and Aziz-Zadeh, L. (2013). Witnessing hateful people in pain modulates brain activity in regions associated with physical pain and reward. Frontiers in Psychology 4 (article 772), 1–13.
29. The studies are discussed fully in Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil inside human violence and cruelty. New York: Holt Paperbacks.
30. See Baumeister 1997, pp. 211–12.
31. Grossman, D. (2009). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society, rev. ed. New York: Little, Brown.
32. Grossman 2009, p. 161.
33. Saguy, T., Szekeres, H., Nouri, R., Goldenberg, A., Doron, G., Dovidio, J. F., Yunger, C., and Halperin, E. (2015). Awareness of intergroup help can rehumanize the out-group. Social Psychological and Personality Science 6 (5), 551–58.
34. Jones, R. P. (2015). The end of white Christian America. New York: Simon & Schuster.
35. Shretha, L. B., and Heisler, E. J. (2011). The changing demographic profile of the United States. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.
39. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2014). BLS Report No. 1052. Women in the labor force: A databook.
42. Kraus, M. W., Côté, S., and Keltner, D. (2010). Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy. Psychological Science 21 (11), 1716–23; DeTurk, S. (2001). Intercultural empathy: Myth, competency, or possibility for alliance building? Communication Education 50, 374–84.
44. Stephan, W. G. (2014). Intergroup anxiety: Theory, research, and practice. Personality and Social Psychology Review 18 (3), 239–55.
45. Turner, R. N., Hewstone, M., Voci, A., Paolini, S., and Christ, O. (2007). Reducing prejudice via direct and extended cross-group friendship. European Review of Social Psychology 18, 212–55.
46. Vezzali, L., Hewstone, M., Capozza, D., Trifiletti, E., and Di Bernardo, G. A. (2017). Improving intergroup relations with extended contact among young children: Mediation by intergroup empathy and moderation by direct intergroup contact. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 27, 35–49.
4. Are Power and Politics Barriers to Empathy?
1. Fiske, S. T. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist 48, 621–28.
2. Sturm, R. E., and Antonakis, J. (2015). Interpersonal power: A review, critique, and research agenda. Journal of Management 41 (1), 136–63.
7. Pew Research Center. (September 18, 2014). Teaching the children: Sharp ideological differences, some common ground.
8. Dodd, M. D., Hibbing, J. R., and Smith, K. B. (2011). The politics of attention: Gaze-cuing effects are moderated by political temperament. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 73 (1), 24–29.
9. Amodio, D. M., Jost, J. T., Master, S. L., and Yee, C. M. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience 10, 1246–47.
10. Alford, J. R., Funk, C. L., and Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review 99 (2), 153–67.
11. Block, J., and Block, J. H. (2006). Nursery school personality and political orientation two decades later. Journal of Research in Personality 40, 734–49.
12. Jost, H. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., and Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin 129 (3), 339–75.
13. Napier, J. L., Huang, J., Vonasch, A. J., and Bargh, J. A. (2018). Superheroes for change: Physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives. European Journal of Social Psychology 48 (2), 187–95.
14. Chiao, J. Y., Mathur, V. A., Harada, T., and Lipke, T. (2009). Neural basis of preference for human social hierarchy versus egalitarianism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1167, 174–81.
15. Sherman, G. D., Lerner, J. S., Renshon, J., Ma-Kellams, C., and Joel, S. (2015). Perceiving others’ feelings: The importance of personality and social structure. Social Psychological and Personality Science 6 (5), 559–69.
16. Sidanius, J., Kteily, N., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Ho, A. K., Sibley, C., and Duriez, B. (2013). You’re inferior and not worth our concern: The interface between empathy and social dominance orientation. Journal of Personality 81 (3), 313–23.
17. Chen, S., Lee-Chai, A. Y., and Bargh, J. A. (2001). Relationship orientation as a moderator of the effects of social power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2), 173–87.
18. Fiske, S. T. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist 48, 621–28, p. 624.
19. Hogeveen, J., Inzlicht, M., and Obhi, S. S. (2014). Power changes how the brain responds to others. Journal of Experimental Psychology 143 (2), 755–62.
20. van Kleef, G. A., Oveis, C., van der Löwe, I., LuoKogan, A., Goetz, J., and Keltner, D. (2008). Power, distress, and compassion: Turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychological Science 19 (12), 1315–22.
21. Guinote, A. (2007a). Power affects basic cognition: Increased attentional inhibition and flexibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43, 685–97 (use of the term peripheral information can be found on p. 694); Guinote, A. (2007b). Power and goal pursuit. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, 1076–87.
22. Smith, P. K., and Trope, Y. (2006). You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: Power priming and abstract information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, 578–96; Smith, P. K., Jostmann, N. B., Galinsky, A. D., and van Dijk, W. W. (2008). Lacking power impairs executive functions. Psychological Science 19, 441–47.
23. Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., and Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science 17 (12), 1068–74.
24. Lammers, J., Galinsky, A. D., Dubois, D., and Rucker, D. D. (2015). Power and morality. Current Opinion in Psychology 6, 15–19.
25. Galinsky, A. D., Gruenfeld, D. H., Magee, J. C. (2003). From power to action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (3), 453–66.
26. Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., Jordan, J., Pollmann, M., and Stapel, A. (2011). Power increases infidelity among men and women. Psychological Science 22 (9), 1191–97.
27. Piff, P. K., Stancato, D. M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., and Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (11), 4086–91.
28. Van Kleef, G. A., Oveis, C., Homan, A. C., van der Löwe, I., and Keltner, D. (2015). Power gets you high: The powerful are more inspired by themselves than by others. Social Psychological and Personality Science 6 (4), 472–80, p. 478.
29. Boksem, M. A. S., Smolders, R., and De Cremer, D. (2012). Social power and approach-related neural activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7 (5), 516–20.
30. Dubois, D., Rucker, D. D., and Galinsky, A. D. (2015). Social class, power, and selfishness: When and why upper and lower class individuals behave unethically. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108 (3), 436–49.
32. Obama, B. (2006). The audacity of hope. New York: Random House, p. 66.
33. Cited in Hoffman, M. L. (2011). Empathy, justice, and the law. In A. Coplan and P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives, pp. 231–54. New York: Oxford University Press. See p. 239.
34. Segal, E. A. (1995). Frances Perkins. In F. N. Magill (Ed.), Great lives from history: American women, pp. 1438–42. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.
35. Leuchtenburg, W. E. (1963). Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. New York: Harper & Row, p. 131.
36. An excellent source for learning more about the history of the civil rights movement and the life of Martin Luther King Jr. is a trilogy of books written by Taylor Branch. The first book gives the background and chronicles the events that led up to the March on Washington. Branch, T. (1988). Parting the waters: America in the King years, 1954–1963. New York: Simon & Schuster; Branch, T. (1998). Pillar of fire: America in the King years, 1963–1965. New York: Simon & Schuster; Branch, T. (2006). At Canaan’s edge: America in the King years, 1965–1968. New York: Simon & Schuster.
38. Mills, N. (2006). Hurricane Katrina and Robert Kennedy. Dissent Magazine 53 (2), 5–6.
39. Schmid Mast, M., and Darioly, A. (2014). Emotion recognition accuracy in hierarchical relationships. Swiss Journal of Psychology 73 (2), 69–75.
41. Lammers, J., and Stapel, D. A. (2011). Power increases dehumanization. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 14 (1), 113–26, p. 113.
42. Lammers and Stapel 2011.
43. Gwinn, J. D., Judd, C. M., and Park, B. (2013). Less power = less human? Effects of power differentials on dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49, 464–70.
44. Segal, E. A., and Wagaman, M. A. (2017). Social empathy as a framework for teaching social justice. Journal of Social Work Education 53 (2), 201–11.
45. This definition can be found at http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/politically%20correct. Additional interesting takes on political correctness can be found in Safire, W. (2008). Safire’s political dictionary. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press; Hess, A. (July 19, 2016). How “political correctness” went from punch line to panic. New York Times Magazine; and Robbins, S. P. (2016). From the editor—Sticks and stones: Trigger warnings, macroaggressions, and political correctness. Journal of Social Work Education 52 (1), 1–5.
48. Côté, S., Kraus, M. W., Cheng, B. H., Oveis, C., van der Löwe, I., Lian, H., and Keltner, D. (2011). Social power facilitates the effect of prosocial orientation on empathic accuracy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2), 217–32.
49. Hu, M., Rucker, D. D., Galinsky, A. D. (2016). From the immoral to the incorruptible: How prescriptive expectations turn the powerful into paragons of virtue. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 42 (6), 826–37.
50. Schmid Mast, M., Jonas, K., and Hall, J. A. (2009). Give a person power and he or she will show interpersonal sensitivity: The phenomenon and its why and when. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97 (5), 835–50.
51. Blader, S. L., Shirako, A., and Chen, Y.-R. (2016). Looking out from the top: Differential effects of status and power on perspective taking. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 42 (6), 723–37, p. 731.
5. What If Stress, Depression, and Other Health Factors Block Empathy?
1. Rizzolatti, G., and Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27, 169–92.
2. A great source on mirror neurons is Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring people: The new science of how we connect with others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
3. Hickok, G. (2008). Eight problems for the mirror neuron theory of action understanding in monkeys and humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21 (7), 1229–43.
4. Iacoboni, M. (2009). Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons. Annual Review of Psychology 60, 653–70.
5. Eagleman, D. (2015). The brain. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 181.
6. For more detail, including a plot of the regions within the brain, and the full list of sources, see Segal, E. A., Gerdes, K. E., Lietz, C. A., Wagaman, M. A., and Geiger, J. M. (2017). Assessing empathy. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 36 and 37.
7. Hillis, A. E. (2014). Inability to empathize: Brain lesions that disrupt sharing and understanding another’s emotions. Brain: A Journal of Neurology 137, 981–97.
8. Yeh, Z.-T., and Tsai, C.-F. (2014). Impairment on theory of mind and empathy in patients with stroke. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 68, 612–20.
9. Herbert, G., Lafargue, G., Bonnetblanc, F., Moritz-Gasser, S., and Duffau, H. (2013). Is the right frontal cortex really crucial in the mentalizing network? A longitudinal study in patients with a slow-growing lesion. Cortex 49, 2711–27; Herbert, G., Lafargue, G., Moritz-Gasser, S., de Champfleur, N. M., Costi, E., Bonnetblanc, F., and Duffau, H. (2015). A disconnection account of subjective empathy impairments in diffuse low-grade glioma patients. Neuropsychologia 70, 165–76.
10. Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping. Third edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
11. Sapolsky 2004, pp. 13–14.
12. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2014). Excessive stress disrupts the architecture of the developing brain: Working Paper 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center on the Developing Child.
13. Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signaling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature 10, 410–22; Lupien, S. J., McEwen, B. S., Gunnar, M. R., and Heim, C. (2009). Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behavior and cognition. Nature 10, 434–45; Hanson, J. L., Naceqicz, B. M., Sutterer, M. J., Cayo, A. A., Schaefer, S. M., Rudolph, K. D., Shirtcliff, E. A., Pollak, S. D., and Davidson, R. J. (2015). Behavioral problems after early life stress: Contributions of the hippocampus and amygdala. Biological Psychology 77 (4), 314–23.
14. Taylor, S. E. (2010). Mechanisms linking early life stress to adult health outcomes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107 (19), 8507–12.
15. Buruck, G., Wendsche, J., Melzer, M., Strobel, A., and Dörfel, D. (2014). Acute psychosocial stress and emotion regulation skills modulate empathic reactions to pain in others. Frontiers in Psychology 5, Article 517, 1–16.
16. Tomovo, L., von Dawans, B., Heinrichs, M., Silani, G., and Lamm, C. (2014). Is stress affecting our ability to tune into others? Evidence for gender differences in the effects of stress on self-other distinction. Psychoneuroendocrinology 43, 95–104.
17. Wolf, O. T., Schulte, J. M., Drimalla, H., Hamacher-Dang, T. C., Knoch, D., and Dziobek, I. (2015). Enhanced emotional empathy after psychosocial stress in young healthy men. Stress 18 (6), 631–37.
18. Evans, G. W., and Fuller-Rowell, E. (2013). Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and young adult working memory: The protective role of self-regulatory capacity. Developmental Science 16 (5), 688–96; Chen, E. (2012). Protective factors for health among low-socioeconomic-status individuals. Current Directions in Psychological Science 21 (3), 189–93.
20. Mazza, M., Tempesta, D., Pino, M. C., Nigri, A., Catalucci, A., Guadagni, V., Gallucci, M., Iaria, G., and Ferrara, M. (2015). Neural activity related to cognitive and emotional empathy in post-traumatic stress disorder. Behavioural Brain Research 282 (1), 37–45; Nietlisbach, G., Maercker, A., Rössler, W., and Haker, H. (2010). Are empathic abilities impaired in posttraumatic stress disorder? Psychological Reports 106 (3), 832–44.
22. Proctor, B. D., Semega, J. L., and Kollar, M. A. (2016). Income and poverty in the United States: 2015. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.
23. Sapolsky 2004, p. 366.
24. Mackey, A. P., Finn, A. S., Leonard, J. A., Jacoby-Senghor, D. S., West, M. R., Gabrieli, C. F. O., and Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2015). Neuroanatomical correlates of the income-achievement gap. Psychological Science 26 (6), 925–33; Hair, N. L., Hanson, J. L., Wolfe, B. L., and Pollak, S. D. (2015). Association of child poverty, brain development, and academic achievement. JAMA Pediatrics 169 (9), 822–29.
25. Lawson, G. M., Duda, J. T., Avants, B. B., Wu, J., and Farah, M. J. (2013). Association between children’s socioeconomic status and prefrontal cortical thickness. Developmental Science 16 (5), 641–52; Gianaros, P. J., Manuck, S. B., Sheu, L. K., Kuan, D. C. H., Votruba-Drzal, E., Craig, A. E., and Hariri, A. R. (2011). Parental education predicts corticostriatal functionality in adulthood. Cerebral Cortex 21, 896–910.
26. Kraus, M. W., Piff, P. K., and Keltner, D. (2011). Social class as culture: The convergence of resources and rank in the social realm. Current Directions in Psychological Science 20 (4), 246–50.
27. Pietz, P., and Knowles, E. D. (2016). Social class and the motivational relevance of other human beings: Evidence from visual attention. Psychological Science 27 (11), 1517–27; Varnum, M. E. W., Blais, C., and Brewer, G. A. (2016). Social class affects Mu-suppression during action observation. Social Neuroscience 11 (4), 449–54.
28. Kraus, M. W., Côté, S., and Keltner, D. (2010). Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy. Psychological Science 21 (11), 1716–23.
30. Fawley-King, K., and Merz, E. C. (2014). Effects of child maltreatment on brain development. In H. C. Matto, J. Strolin-Goltzman, and M. S. Ballan (Eds.), Neuroscience for social work: Current research and practice, pp. 111–39. New York: Springer.
31. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2012). The science of neglect: The persistent absence of responsive care disrupts the developing brain: Working Paper 12. Cambridge, MA: Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
32. Kim, J., and Cicchetti, D. (2010). Longitudinal pathways linking child maltreatment, emotion regulation, peer relations, and psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51 (6), 706–16.
33. Tupler, L. A., and De Bellis, M. D. (2006). Segmented hippocampal volume in children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder. Biological Psychiatry 59 (6), 523–29.
34. Gunnar, M. R., Frenn, K., Wewerka, S. S., and Van Ryzin, M. J. (2009). Moderate versus severe early life stress: Associations with stress reactivity and regulation in 10–12 year old children. Psychoneuroendocrinology 34 (1), 62–75.
35. Perez, H. C. S., Ikram, M. A., Direk, N., Prigerson, H. G., Freak-Poli, R., Verhaaren, B. F. J., Hofman, A., Vernooij, M., and Tiemeier, H. (2015). Cognition, structural brain changes and complicated grief. A population-based Study. Psychological Medicine 45 (7), 1389–99.
36. Bühler, M., and Mann, K. (2011). Alcohol and the human brain: A systematic review of different neuroimaging methods. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 35 (10), 1771–93.
37. Welch, K. A., Carson, A., and Lawrie, S. M. (2013). Brain structure in adolescents and young adults with alcohol problems: Systematic review of imaging studies. Alcohol and Alcoholism 48 (4), 433–44.
38. Schmidt, T., Roser, P., Ze, O., Juckel, G., Suchan, B., and Thoma, P. (2017). Cortical thickness and trait empathy in patients and people at high risk for alcohol use disorders. Psychopharmacology 234, 3521–33.
39. Mischkowski, D., Crocker, J., and Way, B. M. (2016). From painkiller to empathy killer: Acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11 (9), 1345–53.
40. Tully, J., and Petrinovic, M. M. (2017). Acetaminophen study yields new insights into neurobiological underpinnings of empathy. Journal of Neurophysiology 117 (5), 1844–46.
41. De Dreu, C. W. K., and Kret, M. E. (2016). Oxytocin conditions intergroup relations through upregulated in-group empathy, cooperation, conformity, and defense. Biological Psychiatry 79 (3), 165–73; Heinrichs, M., Chen, F. S., and Domes, G. (2013). Social neuropeptides in the human brain: Oxytocin and social behavior. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and M. V. Lombardo (Eds.), Understanding other minds, pp. 291–307. New York: Oxford University Press.
42. Uzefovsky, F., Shaleve, I., Israel, S., Edelman, S., Raz, Y., Mankuta, D., Knafo-Noam, A., and Ebstein, R. P. (2015). Oxytocin receptor and vasopressin receptor 1a genes are respectively associated with emotional and cognitive empathy. Hormones and Behavior 67, 60–65.
43. Palgi, S., Klein, E., and Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2016). The role of oxytocin in empathy PTSD. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 1, 70–75.
44. Almeida, P. R., Seixas, M. J., Ferreira-Santos, F., Vieira, J. B., Paiva, T. O., Moreira, P. S., and Costa, P. (2015). Empathic, moral, and antisocial outcomes associated with distinct components of psychopathy in healthy individuals: A Triarchic model approach. Personality and Individual Differences 85, 205–11.
45. Decety, J., Chen, C., Harenski, C., and Keihl, K. A. (2013). An fMRI study of affective perspective taking in individuals with psychopathy: Imagining another in pain does not evoke empathy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7, Article 489, 1–12.
46. Blair, R. J. R. (2007). The amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in morality and psychopathy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (9), 387–92; Blair, R. J. R. (2010). Psychopathy, frustration, and reactive aggression: The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex. British Journal of Psychology 101, 383–99.
47. Marsh, A. A., Finger, E. C., Fowler, K. A., Jurkowitz, I. T. N., Schechter, J. C., Yu, H. H., Pine, D. S., and Blair, R. J. R. (2011). Reduced amygdala-orbitofrontal connectivity during moral judgments in youths with disruptive behavior disorders and psychopathic traits. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 194, 279–86.
48. Luckhurst, C., Hatfiled, E., and Gelvin-Smith, C. (2017). Capacity for empathy and emotional contagion in those with psychopathic personalities. Interpersona 11 (1), 70–91.
6. Where Is Religion in Empathy?
1. See Zinn, H. (2003). A people’s history of the United States 1492–present. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, p. 14.
5. Peter Nabokov’s book Native American Testimony (New York: Penguin, 1991) provides moving first-person accounts by American Indians that cover five hundred years of history in the United States country.
6. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.
8. Conaway, C. (2016). Shadows in the golden land. Moment Magazine 41 (5), 47–55.
9. Jeong, M. (2017). Strangers in their own land. Moment Magazine 42 (5), 37–43.
10. Kimball, C. (2008). When religion becomes evil. New York: Harper.
11. Harris, S. (2005). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: W. W. Norton.
17. Batson, C. D. (1983). Sociobiology and the role of religion in promoting prosocial behavior: An alternative view. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (6), 1380–85.
18. Duriez, B. (2004). Are religious people nicer people? Taking a closer look at the religion-empathy relationship. Mental Health, Religion, and Culture 7 (3), 249–54.
19. Huber, J. T., and MacDonald, D. A. (2012). An investigation of the relations between altruism, empathy, and spirituality. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 52 (2), 206–21.
20. Alma, H. A. (2008). Self-development as a spiritual process: The role of empathy and imagination in finding spiritual orientation. Pastoral Psychology 57, 59–63.
21. Hobson, N. M., and Inzlicht, M. (2016). Recognizing religion’s dark side: Religious ritual increases antisociality and hinders self-control. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39, 30–31; Hobson, N. M., Gino, F., Norton, M. I., and Inzlicht, M. (2017). When novel rituals impact intergroup bias: Evidence from economic games and neurophysiology. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NXAB7.
22. Brown, R. K., Kaiser, A., and Jackson, J. S. (2014). Worship discourse and white race-based policy attitudes. Review of Religious Research 56, 291–312; Edgell, P., and Tranby, E. (2007). Religion influences on understandings of racial inequality in the United States. Social Problems 54 (2), 263–88; Hinojosa, V. J., and Park, J. Z. (2004). Religion and the paradox of racial inequality attitudes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, 229–38.
23. Buber, M. (2010, originally published in English in 1937). I and thou. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing.
24. The parable can be found in the Talmud, the record of Rabbinic teachings (Talmud Shabbat 31a).
7. Can We Have Empathy with Technology?
1. Campbell, S. W., and Park, Y. J. (2008). Social implications of mobile telephony: The rise of personal communication society. Sociology Compass 2 (2), 371–87; Ling, R. (2010). New tech, new ties: How mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Carrier, L. M., Spradlin, A., Bunce, J. P., and Rosen, L. D. (2015). Virtual empathy: Positive and negative impacts of going online upon empathy in young adults. Computers in Human Behavior 52, 39–48.
3. Zhao, J., Abrahamson, K., Anderson, J. G., Ha, S., and Widdows, R. (2013). Trust, empathy, social identity, and contribution of knowledge within patient online communities. Behaviour & Information Technology 32 (10), 1041–48.
4. Vervloet, M., van Dijk, L., Santen-Reestman, J., van Vlijmen, B., van Wingerden, P., Bouvy, M. L., and de Bakker, D. H. (2012). SMS reminders improve adherence to oral medication in type 2 diabetes patients who are real time electronically monitored. International Journal of Medical Informatics 81 (9), 594–604.
5. Patrick, K., Raab, F., Adams, M. A., Dillon, L., Zabinski, M., Rock, C. L., Griswold, W. G., and Norman, G. J. (2009). A text-massage-based intervention for weight loss: Randomized controlled trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research 11 (1), e1.
6. Konrath, S., Falk, E., Fuhrel-Forbis, A., Liu, M., Swain, J., Tolman, R., Cunningham, R., and Walton, M. (2015). Can text messages increase empathy and prosocial behavior? The development and initial validation of text to Connect. PLoS ONE 10 (9), e0137585.
7. Mills, K. L. (2014). Effects of internet use on the adolescent brain: Despite popular claims, experimental evidence remains scarce. Science and Society 18 (8), 385–87. Specifically, see p. 385 and Box 1 for the story on Socrates.
9. Spies Shapiro, L. A., and Margolin, G. (2014). Growing up wired: Social networking sites and adolescent psychosocial development. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 17 (1), 1–18.
10. Kross, E., Verduyn, P., Demiralp, E., Park, J., Lee, D. S., Lin, N., Shablack, H., Jonides, J., and Ybarra, O. (2013). Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults. PLoS ONE 8 (8), e69841.
11. Kelly, C. R., Grinband, J., and Hirsch, J. (2007). Repeated exposure to media violence is associated with diminished response in an inhibitory frontolimbic network. PLoS ONE 12, e1268; Gentile, D. A., Swing, E. L., Anderson, C. A., Rinker, D., and Thomas, K. M. (2016). Differential neural recruitment during violent video game play in violent- and nonviolent-game players. Psychology of Popular Media Culture 5 (1), 39–51.
12. Szycik, G. R., Mohammadi, B., Münte, T. F., and te Wildt, B. T. (2017). Lack of evidence that neural empathic responses are blunted in excessive users of violent video games: An fMRI study. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00174
13. Gabbiadini, A., Riva, P., Andrighetto, L., Volpato, C., and Bushman, B. J. (2016). Acting like a tough guy: Violent-sexist video games, identification with game characters, masculine beliefs, and empathy for female violence victims. PLoS ONE 11 (4), 1–14.
14. U.S. Department of Education. (2015). Student reports of bullying and cyber-bullying: Results from the 2013 school crime supplement to the national crime victimization survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.
15. Joliffe, D., and Farrington, D. P. (2006). Examining the relationship between low empathy and bullying. Aggressive Behavior 32, 540–50; Ang, R. P., and Goh, D. H. (2010). Cyberbullying among adolescents: The role of affective and cognitive empathy, and gender. Child Psychiatry and Human Development 41, 387–97; Renati, R., Berrone, C., and Zanetti, M. A. (2012). Morally disengaged and unempathic: Do cyberbullies fit these definitions? An exploratory study. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15 (8), 1–8; Del Rey, R., Lazuras, L., Casas, J. A., Barkoukis, V., Ortega-Ruiz, R., and Tsorbatzoudis, H. (2016). Does empathy predict (cyber)bullying perpetration, and how do age, gender and nationality affect this relationship? Learning and Individual Differences 45, 275–81.
16. Joliffe, D., and Farrington, D. P. (2011). Is low empathy related to bullying after controlling for individual and social background variables? Journal of Adolescence 34, 59–71.
17. Bazelon, E. (2013). Sticks and stones: Defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering the power of character and empathy. New York: Random House.
18. Phillips, W. (2015). This is why we can’t have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
19. See Phillips 2015, p. 26.
20. Sest, N., and March, E. (2017). Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism and empathy. Personality and Individual Differences 119, 69–72.
23. The research in Gentile et al. 2016 supports this point. In addition, there are books that draw on the scientific evidence that our brains are not made to deeply process multiple inputs of information at the same time. Several books that cover this are Medina, J. (2008). Brain rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press; Klingberg, T. (2009). The overflowing brain: Information overload and the limits of working memory. New York: Oxford University Press; Levitin, D. J. (2014). The organized mind: Thinking straight in the age of information overload. New York: Penguin Random House. The Levitin book offers a lot of suggestions on how to deal with today’s information overload.
24. Sean Spicer, who at the time held the position of White House press secretary, confirmed that the president’s Tweets were official policy at a press conference on June 6, 2017. Jenkins, A. (June 6, 2017). “Sean Spicer says President Trump considers his tweets ‘official’ White House statements.” Time. http://time.com/4808270/sean-spicer-donald-trump-twitter-statements.
8. Social Empathy—Making the World a Better Place
1. Segal, E. A., Gerdes, K. E., Lietz, C. A., Wagaman, M. A., and Geiger, J. M. (2017). Assessing empathy. New York: Columbia University Press.
2. This is from early analysis of data collected under a National Science Foundation grant (no. 1530847), Promoting empathy and collaborative decision making for natural resource management using a computer-mediated scenario.
3. Iacoboni, M., Molnar-Szakacs, I., Gallese, V., Buccino, G., Mazziotta, J. C., and Rizzolatti, G. (2005). Grasping the intentions of others with one’s own mirror neuron system. PLoS Biology 3 (3), 529–35.
4. Lamm, C., Nusbaum, H. C., Meltzoff, A. N., and Decety, J. (2007). What are you feeling? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the modulation of sensory and affective responses during empathy for pain. PLoS ONE 12 (e1292), 1–16.
6. Wagaman, M. A. (2011). Social empathy as a framework for adolescent empowerment. Journal of Social Service Research 37, 278–93.
7. Davidson, R. J., and Begley, S. (2012). The emotional life of your brain. New York: Hudson Street Press; Eagleman, D. (2015). The brain: The story of you. New York: Pantheon Books.
8. Pascual-Leone, A., Amedi, A., Fregni, F., and Merabet, L. B. (2005). The plastic human brain cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience 28, 377–401.
9. Merabet, L. B., and Pascual-Leone, A. (2010). Neural reorganization following sensory loss: The opportunity of change. National Review of Neuroscience 11 (1), 44–52; Ortiz-Terán, L., Ortiz, T., Perez, D. L., Aragón, J. I., Diez, I., Pascual-Leone, A., and Sepulcre, J. (2016). Brain plasticity in blind subjects centralizes beyond the modal cortices. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00061; Ortiz-Terán, L., Diez, I., Ortiz, T., Perez, D. L., Aragón, J. I., Costumero, V., Pascual-Leone, A., El Fakhri, G., and Sepulcre, J. (2017). Brain circuit-gene expression relationships and neuroplasticity of multisensory cortices in blind children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (26), 6830–35.
10. Department of Health and Human Services. (2016). Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program: Eleventh report to Congress. Washington, DC: Author.
11. Congressional Research Service. (2017). Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF): Size of the population eligible for receiving cash assistance. Washington, DC: Author.
14. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (January 18, 2018). “U.S. federal poverty guidelines used to determine financial eligibility for certain federal programs.” https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines.
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17. White House. (2008). Fact sheet: Bipartisan growth package will help protect our nation’s economic health. Washington, DC: Office of the President of the United States.
19. Romig, K., and Sherman, A. (2016). Social Security keeps 22 million Americans out of poverty. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
20. Steuerle, C. E., and Quakenbush, C. (2015). Social Security and Medicare lifetime benefits and taxes. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
21. Congressional Joint Commission on Taxation. (January 30, 2017). Estimates of federal tax expenditures for fiscal years 2016–2020. Washington, DC: Author.
Epilogue
1. I have been working on this three-tiered model for years. For earlier versions, see Segal, E. A. (2011). Social empathy: A model built on empathy, contextual understanding, and social responsibility that promotes social justice. Journal of Social Service Research 37 (3), 266–277; Segal, E. A. (2007). Social empathy: A new paradigm to address poverty. Journal of Poverty 11 (3), 65–81.
3. Levitt, P. (2015). Artifacts and allegiances: How museums put the nation and world on display. Oakland: University of California Press.
5. Segal, E. A., Gerdes, K. E., Stromwall, L., and Napoli, M. (2010). Privilege through the lens of empathy. Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping 16 (1), 79–87; 79–80.
