Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between representation and abstraction has been regarded predominantly in terms of opposition. One of the prominent early twentieth-century defenders of this approach is Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), who introduces representation and abstraction as antithetic modes of art-making in Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908). However, while he distinguishes between abstraction and representation on theoretical grounds, Worringer also observes that, in the history of art, these modes of art-making coexist. The current thesis examines Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory, inquiring into his perspective on the personal responses of viewers and artists to the world, and the manifestations of these responses in art. Abstraction and Empathy addresses issues of empathy, form, and will, in aesthetics and art-making; it discusses and extends the writings of Theodor Lipps, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Alois Riegl. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Worringer’s book attracted much attention: like its sequel, Form in Gothic (1910), it was often associated with the rise to prominence of Expressionism in Germany. Later in the twentieth century, Worringer’s thought came under the scrutiny of Rudolf Arnheim, who criticized Worringer’s emphasis on abstract-representational opposition. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari praised Worringer’s approach to antithesis, yet questioned the terms Worringer proposed as opposites. For Arnheim, Deleuze and Guattari, alternatives to the antithesis between abstraction and representation became visible. Indeed, in Worringer’s time, artists such as Adolf Hildebrand, Ferdinand Hodler, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky underscored the common grounds between representation and abstraction. Exploring Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, as well as the words and works of Hildebrand, Hodler, Cézanne, Monet and Kandinsky, this thesis aims to highlight abstract-representational interplay as observable in early twentieth-century writing and art-making.

Empathy, oxytocin, and depression are three subjects that are widely researched. Empathy means experiencing or understanding the emotions of an individual who is being observed. Oxytocin has frequently been shown to have a connection to lactation and labor. Depression is a common sickness that results in malfunctioning, suffering, and a shorter life. The mutual relationship and connection of all three has received limited research. The aim of this essay is to explore how they all relate to one another, to see what neural areas of involvement they have in common, and finally to see if there is a potential to administer oxytocin in order to alter empathy and/or depression. The sources used are published literature on the topics, found in for example Google Scholar and Worldcat. What was found was that both emotional and cognitive empathy have a positive relationship with oxytocin. Emotional empathy has in most research a positive relationship with depression while cognitive empathy seems to have a negative relationship with depression.Depression has a negative correlation with oxytocin. The neural areas of common involvement were amygdala, hippocampus, and cingulate cortex. Future research should look at how empathy, oxytocin, and depression affect each other, and why this happens. It is also important to look at the possibilities of affecting a neural area involved in empathy, oxytocin, and/or depression in order to make an impact on any of these factors.

The present thesis deals with the concept of empathy for pain, its neurobiological underpinnings and modulations of the phenomenon. Empathy for pain is understood as the empathic response that occurs when recognising another in pain and entails at least the affective processes of actually felt pain in oneself. Cortical areas of importance for empathy for pain are the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Moreover, the phenomenon is correlated with high levels of empathy, as established by behavioural self-reports. Further, empathy for pain has been shown to be highly susceptible to modulatory factors giving rise to changes in the empathic response. Perceived fairness, perspective taking, intent and out-groups are all factors that can evoke change in the subsequent empathy for pain responses in humans. These modulatory factors provide insight into in- and out-group mechanisms. Cognitive strategies can regulate a diminished empathy for pain response, although further research is needed on how to cultivate and strengthen our ability to have empathy for another’s pain.

The phenomenon of empathy has been fascinating laymen and scholars for centuries and has recently been an important subject for cognitive neuroscientific study. Empathy refers to the ability to understand and share others’ emotions and a characteristic of this ability is the capacity to empathize with others in pain. This review intends to examine and read up on the current state of the field of the neural and behavioral mechanisms associated with empathy for pain. The neural underpinnings of the first-hand experience of pain have been shown to be activated in a person observing the suffering individual, and this similarity in brain activity has been referred to as shared networks. This phenomenon plays an important role in the study of empathy. However, different factors have been shown to influence empathy for pain, such as age, gender, affective link between observer and sufferer, as well as phylogenetic similarity. This thesis discusses these differences, as well as atypical aspects affecting the empathic ability such as synaesthesia for pain, psychopathy and Asperger’s disease. Further, empathy for pain can be modulated by the individual observing someone in pain. For example, caregivers often down-regulate their empathic response to patients in pain, possibly in order to focus on their treatment and assistance. Also, paying attention to harmful stimuli heightens the perception of pain; therefore, the painful experience can be less remarkable when focusing on something else. The effect of empathy from others directed to oneself when suffering is discussed, as well as the consistency and limitations of presented research.

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder that results in antisocial, manipulative, and callous behavior. The main diagnostic instrument for assessing psychopathy is the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. This thesis will introduce the psychopathy construct, including what is known as subclinical psychopathy. Subclinical psychopathy refers to individuals who exhibit many of the characteristics of psychopathy, except for some of the more severe antisocial behaviors. This constellation of traits allows the subclinical psychopath to avoid incarceration. The fundamental difference between clinical and subclinical psychopaths is a major question in the field of psychopathy and is the main theme of this thesis. Impaired empathy is one of the key aspects of psychopathy and it may be a significant factor in both clinical and subclinical psychopaths. Subclinical psychopathy may be related to a moderated or altered expression of empathy. Hence, the empathy construct is a secondary concern in this thesis. This thesis has two aims: (a) to argue that the conceptualization of subclinical psychopathy is flawed and needs revision in accordance with less ambiguous criteria; and (b) to present data in support of the hypothesis that subclinical psychopaths have intact, or even enhanced, cognitive capacities in contrast to clinical psychopaths.

Given the large homogeneous workforce of predominately White, middle-class female K–12 educators combined with the rising population of diverse students in the United States and the disproportionate achievement gap of students of color compared to their White peers, I sought to discover how new millennial educators defined and used empathy to build their own cultural competencies as well as discover how these teachers used empathy to strengthen the teacherstudent relationships across cultural differences. Using the conceptual frameworks of Paulo Freire’s (1970) pedagogy and Wang et al.’s (2003) definition of ethno-cultural empathy, I conducted a critical narrative inquiry of five first-year teachers who did not share the racial or ethnic background of the majority of their students of color. From the participants’ stories, six major themes surfaced: (a) the role of empathy in the teacher-student relationships, (b) the struggle between empathy and sympathy, (c) their contrasting views on empathy and content, (d) the relationship between empathy and cultural competency, (e) the importance of empathy related to trauma, and (f) the personal limitations of empathy. I present a proposal for a new theoretical framework resulting from the symbiotic relationship of ethno-cultural empathy and critical pedagogy, called Critical Empathy, as well as recommendations for teacher formation institutions to prioritize an empathy formation that focuses on critical empathy development, self-awareness, administrative management, and self-care strategies.

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between parental empathy (PE) and parental acceptance (PA) and the effect of filial therapy training (FTT) on this relationship. Filial therapy training is a parent education program in which the goal is the development of PE and PA. The Measurement of Empathy in Adult-Child Interaction (MEACI) and the Porter Parental Acceptance Scale (PPAS) are two widely used instruments in filial therapy studies to measure PE and PA, respectively. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between parental empathy and parental acceptance, and the effect of filial therapy training on this relationship. Specifically, this study was designed to investigate the correlations between the MEACI and the PPAS.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In this study we examined 381 interactions between Donors and Fundraisers from a large research university by analyzing their Contact Reports. Specifically, we examined whether we could extract measures of fundraiser empathy through the application of a coding scheme and linguistics analysis, and whether there are differences in the reports based on donor characteristics. We found evidence that there are significant differences between how fundraisers write reports and what they include in them, based on school of graduation and type of interaction, but little difference in their treatment by donor gender. We conclude that indeed measures of empathy can be extracted from Contact Reports, but that minimum standards of reporting should be adopted by fundraising organizations in order to support using Contact Reports as qualitative evaluation tools.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The social cognitive ability to identify another’s internal state and social affective ability to share another’s emotional experience, known as empathy, are integral to healthy social functioning. During tasks, neural systems active when adolescents empathize include cognitive (medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and affective (anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex) regions that are consistent with the adult task-based literature implicating the default mode, salience, and frontoparietal networks. However, task-based studies are limited to examining neural regions probed by the task; thus, do not capture broader patterns of information processing associated with complex processes, such as empathy. Methods of functional connectivity capture broader patterns of information processing at the level of network connectivity. Although it has clear advantages in identifying neural vulnerabilities to disorder, functional connectivity has yet to be used in adolescent investigations of empathy. Via parent- and self-report, deficits in either cognitive or affective processes central to empathy associate with the most widely agreed on classifications of behavioral disorders in adolescents – transdiagnostic symptoms of internalizing and externalizing. However, this evidence relies exclusively on self-report measures and research has yet to examine the neural connectivity underlying transdiagnostic symptoms in relation to cognitive and affective empathy. What has yet to be known is (1) how the social cognitive and affective processes of empathy are functionally connected across a heterogeneous sample of adolescents and (2) the association of cognitive, affective, and imbalanced empathy with transdiagnostic symptoms. Addressing these gaps in knowledge is an important incremental step for specifying vulnerabilities not fully captured via subjective report alone. This information can be used to improve prevention and intervention strategies. The present study will examine the functional connectivity of neural networks underlying empathy in early to mid-adolescents and their association with transdiagnostic symptoms.

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