<p dir="ltr">Sexual harassment remains prevalent, underscoring the urgent need for an updated approach to training aimed at reducing its occurrence. Previous studies have revealed that interventions focusing on elements of empathy, such as empathetic concern and perspective-taking, have been effective in diminishing antisocial attitudes like prejudice (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000; Levin et al., 2016; Paluck & Green, 2009). Thus, I suggest that cultivating empathy and perspective-taking may target the root cause of sexual harassment by disrupting the mechanisms that sustain its prevalence. The current study uses a 3 (training modality: Empathy Video Plus Exercises, Empathy Video, Control Video) × 2 (gender: Female and Male) between-subjects research design to investigate the effectiveness of empathy training, encompassing a ten-minute video and perspective-taking exercises, in fostering empathy toward targets of sexual harassment. The empathy video features a Ph.D. graduate student, "Diana," recounting her experiences with sexual harassment, based on a true story and portrayed by a professional actor. Participants engaged in perspective-taking exercises where they described the harassment experience from Diana's perspective and identified short and long-term consequences of experiencing sexual harassment. As anticipated, empathy training significantly increased feelings of empathy, aligning with the findings of Bolinger et al. (2023). Empathy training also significantly increased feelings of personal distress. This heightened feeling of empathy and personal distress subsequently bolstered intentions to engage in bystander intervention and supportive behaviors. However, empathy training did not yield a significant impact on reducing the acceptance of sexual harassment myths. Lastly, empathy training did not diminish intentions among men to engage in sex-based harassment. These findings underscore both the potential and limitations of empathy training in addressing attitudes and behaviors related to sexual harassment.</p>

While digital mediation can facilitate some aspects of communication, such as increasing scope and access to communicative possibilities, those gains are overwhelmed by the challenges of digital mediation to support empathy.The ubiquity of our digital existence throughout much of the developed world has, in a relatively short time, had a profound impact on human communication. Time spent online and in front of a screen has increased exponentially during the last three decades. This has led to a great deal of interpersonal communication becoming digitally mediated. From luddites to web developers, users of digitally mediated communication (DMC) often find it necessary to participate in discourse that utilizes these technologies. In this project, I assess user experiences with DMC on interpersonal discourse to gain insight into user perceptions of empathic communication in the form of Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. I employ survey and interviews protocols on a sampling of undergraduate students on one campus of a regional community college. While some think that DMC opens new spaces for social connections, others believe that DMC has a negative impact on our social relations by challenging empathetic connections between interlocutors. I hypothesize that empirical evidence will support this second view. Results of this investigation may be used to determine the conditions under which empathy is diminished in DMC and help us consider improved protocols for employing this ever-expanding mode of interpersonal communication. This study is unique in that it attempts to evaluate empathy, a concept that is challenging to define, describe, and measure. Hence, questions used in the survey paid attention to perceptions of empathy and survey takers' sentiments regarding the expression of empathy in text-messaging.

The students of today are entrenched in various digital media; film being one of the foremost of these. If history education is to stay relevant for our students, history lessons should mirror the students’ lives outside of school. For this reason, we find it relevant to study the use of film in history education.     Our study sets out to study if, and how, historical feature films can complement traditional instructional text found in history textbooks. We aim to explore students’ thoughts about the relationship between text and film that cover the same historical context, and chose the suffragette movement in England for this context. We use theory concerning historical empathy to analyze our material, specifically historical empathy as presented by Keith Barton and Linda Levstik, which presents a combination of perspective recognition and dimensions of care. The material consists of two surveys and one group interview. We studied one school class. The first survey corresponds with the text, and the other with the film. The group interview took place just after they had seen the film. Our key findings are that students’ expressions of perspective recognition are similar in both surveys. The film survey shows an increase in the category care for, which we link to the filmic power of immersion. In the interview, however, students can deliberate, and thus weigh high levels of perspective recognition with complex aspects of care. In the interview, the students weren’t always able to achieve higher levels of perspective recognition. We link this to the importance of teacher-led instruction before film viewing. Dimensions of care related to students’ willingness to act, and care to, was the most elusive category. Further research would be required to study this dimension.

Mémoire de maîtrise présenté en vue de l’obtention de la maîtrise en psychoéducation, option recherche et stage (M. Sc.) / La compassion est au cœur de la relation d’aide chez les intervenants psychosociaux. Les recherches antérieures ont dévoilé l’importance de ses nombreuses vertus. Cependant les scientifiques la définissent de manière variée selon leurs perspectives théoriques. Elle peut être définie comme une émotion, comme une motivation ou comme un comportement, ce qui pose des enjeux pour sa mesure et donc son appréciation dans les milieux de travail, en particulier en lien avec l’intervention psychosociale. Notre premier objectif a été de tester plusieurs modèles théoriques de composition multidimensionnelle de la compassion en utilisant des données empiriques collectées chez plusieurs centaines d’intervenants du Centre Jeunesse de Montréal. Nous avons utilisé ces différentes associations de variables empiriques chez les intervenants du Centre jeunesse de Montréal. Nous avons pu tester si le modèle le plus parcimonieux de compassion dans notre échantillon devait contenir des variables mesurant la détresse empathique, le souci empathique, la prise de perspective, la capacité à reconnaître les émotions, la chaleur humaine, et la motivation à poser des gestes compassionnels. Un deuxième objectif visait à examiner si ce construit multidimensionnel de compassion était associé aux difficultés de régulation émotionnelle, chez les intervenants psychosociaux. Les résultats de l’analyse factorielle confirmatoire nous ont permis de découvrir que pour les intervenants de Montréal, le construit latent de compassion pouvait se définir à partir des trois variables suivantes : la prise de perspective, la détresse empathique et la chaleur humaine. De plus, les analyses de régression multiple nous ont suggéré que la capacité à émettre de la compassion était significativement influencée par le manque de contrôle des comportements impulsifs, par le manque de conscience émotionnelle, par le manque d’identification des émotions et par le manque d’accès à des stratégies émotionnelles. Notre recherche a permis de mieux étayer le phénomène de compassion, ce qui pourrait éventuellement conduire à des programmes d’intervention visant à la favoriser dans les milieux. Des recherches complémentaires sont toutefois nécessaires pour saisir tous les aspects de sa complexité. / Compassion is at the heart of the helping relationship for psychosocial practitioners. Previous research has revealed the importance of its many virtues. However, scientists define it in a wide variety of ways, depending on their theoretical perspectives. It can be defined as an emotion, as a motivation, or as a behavior, which raises issues for its measurement and thus its appreciation in the workplace, particularly in relation to psychosocial intervention. Our first objective was to test several theoretical models of the multidimensional composition of compassion, using empirical data collected from several hundred workers at the Centre Jeunesse de Montréal. We were able to test whether the most parsimonious model of compassion in our sample should contain variables measuring empathic distress, empathic concern, perspective-taking, ability to recognize emotions, human warmth, and motivation to perform compassionate gestures. A second objective was to examine whether this multidimensional construct of compassion was associated with q emotional regulation difficulties in psychosocial practitioners. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis enabled us to discover that, for the Montreal caregivers, the latent construct of compassion could be defined on the basis of the following three variables: perspective-taking, empathic distress and human warmth. In addition, multiple regression analyses suggested that the ability to emit compassion was significantly influenced by lack of control over impulsive behaviour, lack of emotional awareness, lack of emotional identification and lack of access to emotional strategies. Our research has provided further support for the phenomenon of compassion, which could eventually lead to intervention programs aimed at fostering it in environments. Further research is needed, however, to grasp all aspects of its complexity.

Historical empathy as a didactic tool in teaching about the Holocaust: A qualitative study on history teachers' didactic design of Holocaust education and challenges they see in relation to this teaching.  The author of the study, which includes 44 pages, is Marcus Johannesson. The survey is aimed at teaching about the Holocaust in a Swedish school context. It was carried out against the background of research that has highlighted that students have difficulties in understanding the Holocaust and its circumstances. Considering this, the aim is to contribute with increased knowledge about how teachers handle teaching about the Holocaust and how they believe that such teaching should be designed to develop students' learning. Furthermore, the aim is to investigate what challenges teachers see in relation to teaching about the Holocaust, as well as how historical empathy as a didactic tool can be helpful for history teachers in their teaching. Another aspect that is important for teachers' teaching about the Holocaust is that anti-Semitic expressions are increasing in society. This is because of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The theory that is therefore applied in this study is Jason Endacott's definition of historical empathy, namely a concept that contains the three aspects of historical context, perspective taking and emotional attachment. The conclusion is that the interviewed teachers' design of Holocaust education to varying extents contains the three aspects of historical empathy, which can improve students' opportunities to understand and learn about the genocide. More conclusions are that the teaching needs to be adapted depending on the student group due to social development, that myths and misconceptions about the Holocaust occur in the respondents' classrooms and that historical empathy as a didactic tool can be helpful for current and future history teachers.

Through both a theoretical analysis of the framework itself, as well as ethnographic research of one particular university-community engagement project underway in Provo, UT, this thesis explores both the process of training students for this type of community engagement as well as the malleability of the program format for potential application across other schools and communities. The research findings highlight how the program itself, taking the form of an offered undergraduate course at a liberal arts college in Provo, offers unique opportunities for undergraduate students to engage in applied anthropological work for a client, as well as how the local community center partnered with the university benefits from (and in some cases, resists) the findings of the community engagement made possible through the program.

Personality traits often drive media selectivity, as individuals seek out specific types of media and media genres for gratification. To further understand selectivity in a modern context, this study examined the personality factors of need for cognition, self-esteem, and empathy in relation to engagement with social media, literature, music, podcasts, video games, and tabletop games, with their associated genres. Analyses of 328 participants revealed that personality traits provided minimal to mild influence in media and genre selection, suggesting that the mechanisms behind media selection are comprised of other psychological and sociological factors.

This project examined the effects of threat perceptions and group empathy on racial outgroup attitudes. The relationship between threat perception and increased racial prejudice has been well established within the literature, but the effect of group empathy within this dynamic has been largely undocumented. The following study utilizes data from the American National Election Study 2020 Time Series to analyze racial outgroup attitudes among subsamples of Blacks (n = 726), Hispanics (n = 762), and Whites (n = 5,962). Along with threat perception, group empathy was found to be a salient predictor of outgroup attitudes. These results suggest that an effective technique to reduce negative outgroup attitudes would aim to reduce perceptions of outgroups as threatening and increase group empathy.

Bullying has long-term negative effects on the mental health and wellbeing of everyone involved. School-wide interventions have been successful in some contexts, but they often require significant institutional and financial resources. Empathy is comprised of a cognitive component (perspective taking) and an affective component (empathic concern), both of which may be necessary for prosocial behavior. According to relational frame theory (RFT), empathy involves a transformation of stimulus functions across deictic relations (I-YOU, HERE-THERE, NOW-THEN), which also requires psychological willingness (i.e., psychological flexibility). The present study investigated this theoretical model of empathy based on RFT and the role of this model in middle school bullying. Results tentatively support this model by demonstrating two ways in which psychological flexibility moderates the relationship between deictic framing ability and empathy. The utility of deictic framing and psychological flexibility in predicting bullying behaviors was also examined. Deictic framing ability and psychological flexibility were expected to negatively predict bullying behaviors, and psychological flexibility was expected to moderate the relationship between deictic framing ability and relational bullying in particular. Additional research questions explored the roles of deictic framing and psychological flexibility in the relationship between relational bullying and other relevant psychological determinants: (a) parental discord, (b) social anxiety, and (c) social roles. The results of this study were insufficient to apply this model to bullying behaviors. Methodological and statistical limitations are discussed in depth, and future directions to improve on this study and clarify these relationships are emphasized.

This thesis analyses how an increase in bullying awareness can be produced in children aged 9-12 years old playing an iPad serious game called Attitude Game. The project is conducted in collaboration with the company IUS Innovation, where two prototypes were developed by the author of the study, one with mechanics empowering not to bully and the other with mirror mechanics empowering to bully other children. The experiment was conducted with 29 children from a sports club in Göteborg.  A pre-measurement of empathy and a pre-test-post-test measurement of attitude towards bullied children were used to gather data, together with a post-interview during the experiment. Students were assigned to 3 groups, based on a random selection and previous knowledge about the game. The result of the experiment displayed that there was no statistical difference between the change in attitude towards bullied children regarding the empathy level and the prototype tested. The post-interviews displayed that all the participants understood the serious purpose of the game / <p>In case of further contact, you can also write to the private email of the author: carlosglesdiaz@gmail.com</p>