Peer sexuality educators' accounts of their work reveal two approaches to empathy with their students: affinity and alliance. ‘Affinity-based empathy’ rests on the idea that the more commonalities sexuality educators and students share (or perceive they share), the more they will be able to empathise with one another, while ‘alliance-based empathy’ is an analytical process of considering the social contexts that shape others' lives. We assess the potential for each source of empathy to equip peer sexuality educators to counter hierarchical models of teaching and learning, effect social change and promote the interests of youth. Because shared identity categories prove difficult to manage and sustain, we find affinity alone does not offer peer sexuality educators lasting opportunities to work with young people. In contrast, developing alliance-based empathy prepares peer educators – indeed, all sexuality educators – to identify inequalities or barriers that others face and seek ways to foster social change. We conclude with recommendations for future research.

Fearful that colleges students today are 40% lower in empathy than colleges students 20 years ago (Komives, 2017), Dr. Carson Medley created the PEAKS (Persistence, Empathy, Authenticity, Knowledge, Skills) course. As a culminating activity, the class will turn Carter Hall into the first-ever nationwide college campus and student-led Empathy Museum for a day based on different experiential learning experiences offered throughout the semester. Each group of students will be responsible for turning one of their experiences into an exhibit at the Honors College Empathy Museum. Each exhibit will require an interview and research about the issue. The entire campus (students, staff, faculty, and administrators) will be invited to participate in the interactive empathy museum. The curators (a chemistry major and a microbiology major) for the museum are Changemaker Scholars. The Changemaker program curriculum focuses on human rights, global awareness, and global engagement through the lens of volunteering and community engagement. The purpose of this Changemaker Capstone is to inspire others around the world to create their own Empathy Museums to address xenophobia, Black Lives Matter, gender inequities, immigration policies, LGTBQI+ rights, politics, global warming, the Covid-19 pandemic, and others. We believe that these empathy-focused exhibits will empower and affirm spaces on college campuses as restorative environments and reiterate the healing power of beauty and culture.

Research on medical interpreters (MIs) in recent years has informed us of the visible and active participating roles that MIs play in the doctor-interpreter-patient triadic encounter. The use of multi-faceted, authentic data has also allowed both verbal and nonverbal nuances to be studied. However, while empirical studies have shown that physician empathy in medical communication is beneficial to the patient's healthcare outcomes, empathy in medical interpreting, especially the one that is expressed nonverbally, is rarely examined in medical interpreting research, even though MI is the key communication facilitator and in principle shares a communicative goal with the doctor. This study aims to acquire a deeper understanding of how an MI's empathy is constructed nonverbally and perceived by service users, and how it affects interlocutors and the communication process. This research argues that MI empathy in communication is desired and should be incorporated in the training, assessment, and most importantly, in the interpreting practice. Three sets of research questions are thus formed: 1) How do Mis communicate empathy, if any, for and to the patient? 2) How do the other medical interview participants (doctor and patient) and observers (video observers) perceive the empathic performance of the interpreters? Is there any discrepancy? Why? and 3) How do internal and external factors such as an MI's nonverbal sensitivity and personality traits influence empathic performance? The findings are expected to inform medical interpreting training and assessment and to enhance doctors' awareness of the roles of MIs so that a more patient-centred and empathic communication environment can be nurtured.

It is estimated that by 2020 there will be 2.8 million long-term care beds in residential facilities, staffed primarily with nursing assistants as the front-line care providers. The American Healthcare Association 2012 staffing survey showed that the median annual turnover rate for nursing assistants in the United States is 51.5%. High rates of turnover are associated not only with poorer quality of care but also with increased costs for facilities. The purpose of this project was to understand characteristics that are associated with long-term employment in the nursing assistant role by describing the personality characteristic of empathy in the nursing assistant population with career longevity. The practice-focused question focused on the level of empathy among nursing assistants in long-term care who have been in their role 3 years or longer. The purposive sample group included 60 nursing assistants from 10 long-term care facilities in New Jersey. Data were collected using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index instrument, which comprises 4, 7-item subscales that consider aspects of the global concept of empathy. The overall findings of this study did not establish a significant relationship between empathy and retention; however, notable shifts in the empathy subscale scores of participants related to gender and length of tenure were noted. The results of this study could promote positive social change by helping administrators select nursing assistants suited to working in long-term care facilities, which may result in lower turnover and improved patient outcomes among the population in long-term care.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Background: People with schizophrenia experience significant deficits in empathic skills, which are important for effective interpersonal relationships. Researchers have speculated about the roles of personal distress, emotion regulation, and metacognition in empathic interaction, but the impact of these constructs on empathy has yet to be empirically investigated. This study examines the relationships among these constructs in a sample of people with schizophrenia receiving community-based treatment (N = 58). It was hypothesized that better emotion regulation and metacognition, as well as reduced personal distress, would predict empathy. Further, emotion regulation was expected to mediate the relationship between personal distress and empathy, and metacognition was expected to moderate the relationship between personal distress and empathy. Method: Participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder completed self-report questionnaires of emotion regulation and personal distress, a performance-based measure of empathy, and an observer-rated interview to assess metacognition. Results: Metacognition, but not emotion regulation or personal distress, significantly predicted cognitive empathy performance, with a trend-level association for affective empathy performance. Mediation analyses revealed that emotion regulation mediates the relationship between personal distress and affective empathy performance, and moderation analyses revealed that metacognition moderates the same relationship. Moderation results suggest the relationship between personal distress and affective empathy performance is significant for those with low metacognition, but that the relationship is the opposite of hypotheses – increased personal distress is associated with better performance. Conclusions: This study is the first of its kind to examine performance-based empathy with personal distress, emotion regulation, and metacognition. Results suggest interventions targeted to improve metacognition may be useful in enhancing empathic skills. Future work is needed to improve existing measures of empathy and personal distress, and to parse apart the intricacies of the relationships among personal distress, emotion regulation, and empathy.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation contains three essays examining empathy and its implications for prosocial behavior and arts engagement. Empathy here refers to both compassion and concern for others (emotional empathy) and the understanding of the feelings and needs of others (cognitive empathy). Empathy is fundamental to our social life, and this dissertation explores its implications for two essential components of social life: prosocial behavior and arts engagement. Chapter 2 examines how three dimensions of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983)—empathic concern, perspective taking, and personal distress—are associated with charitable giving, and whether these associations vary across charitable causes. Using data from a nationally representative sample of American adults, the study confirms that the three IRI dimensions are associated with charitable giving in different ways. Chapter 3 focuses on the interplay of trait empathy and people’s tendencies to diversify (spread out) their prosocial behavior. By analyzing data from two samples of American adults, this study reveals that people with higher empathic concern (emotional empathy) versus higher perspective taking (cognitive empathy) have distinct patterns in how they spread out their monetary gifts, but trait empathy is not associated with the distribution of time spent in helping others.

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Empathy represents one multifaceted component of social cognition that is thought to be significantly impaired in individuals with schizophrenia. Psychophysical tasks of smell identification and hedonic processing of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant odors share common neural networks involved in empathy. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between odor identification, odor ratings, and self-reported empathy in 25 outpatients with schizophrenia and 25 nonpsychiatric individuals. Group differences on empathy scores and unirhinal smell identification performance (with hedonic and intensity ratings) were examined, along with the relationships between smell identification scores, self-reported empathy, and schizophrenia symptomatology. The preliminary findings suggest that individuals with schizophrenia display significant differences from controls on measures of self-reported empathy, odor identification, and hedonic ratings of odors. Deficits in self-reported global and affective empathy were influenced by group and sex, whereas cognitive empathy was reduced across all patients in comparison to controls. Patients displayed reduced unirhinal odor identification accuracy for pleasant but not neutral or unpleasant odors in comparison to controls. Central to the overall aim of the current study, a robust positive correlation was observed between left- and right-nostril hedonic ratings for pleasant odors and self-reported global and affective empathy scores across all participants. In patients, we also found a statistical trend between affective empathy and left-nostril identification accuracy across all odors. Collectively, the results lend support to the role of olfactory-limbic brain regions in the hedonic processing of odors and suggest that aberrant performance observed in schizophrenia may be related to abnormalities in the anatomical and physiological substrates that also subserve empathy.