Building empathy through psychological interventions
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Empathy—the ability to share and understand others' emotions—is a social bridge that connects people to one another. It facilitates important outcomes including prosocial behavior, emotional wellbeing, and social centrality, and reduces harmful social forces like prejudice and bullying. Given these benefits, researchers have tried to increase empathy through intervention, often developing a person's empathy-related skills like emotion recognition and empathic communication. But skills-related interventions overlook an essential determinant of empathy: people's desire to empathize. I propose that increasing people's motivation to empathize through psychological intervention can create enduring and generalizable changes in empathy that practically benefit people's social and emotional lives. In this dissertation, I design, administer, and evaluate novel, motivation-based empathy interventions within two populations undergoing significant life changes: college freshmen (chapter 2) and seventh graders (chapter 3). I find that these interventions addressing people's mindsets of empathy or their perceptions of the social normativity of empathy differentially elicit changes in empathy and social behavior in these two groups. These data suggest that shifting motivation related to empathy is a promising new tool for improving social and emotional outcomes during important developmental periods.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Weisz, Erika |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Zaki, Jamil, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Zaki, Jamil, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Dweck, Carol S, 1946- |
| Thesis advisor | Gross, James J |
| Degree committee member | Dweck, Carol S, 1946- |
| Degree committee member | Gross, James J |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Erika Weisz. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Erika Elizabeth Weisz
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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