The present study focused upon both behavioral and cognitive aspects of sympathetic responses in preschool children. Subjects, 36 boys and girls aged 33-75 months, were seen at their regular day care center. An attempt was made to promote comforting behavior through the use of a peer model both alone and accompanied by an adult's inductive statement regarding the consequences of a sympathetic response; a six year-old girl served as the sympathetic model and as an apparently injured victim in need of comforting. In addition, age- and sex-related relationships for the measures of social cognition, affective perspective-taking and knowledge of strategies for intervening when another person's plight invites sympathetic concern, were examined. The former measure employed a commonly used task presenting children with picture stories in which a target character's facial expression is not congruent with information provided by the story situation. Such stimuli have been thought to assess the ability to assume the emotional point of view of a particular person (empathic judgment), as opposed to the egocentric projection of one's own perspective onto another (projective judgment). Capacities for recognizing and explaining situationally consistent emotions (social comprehension and explanation of affect) and explaining the incongruent facial and situational cues (awareness of discrepancy) were also evaluated. The psychometric properties of these measures were a major concern; consequently, internal consistency reliability as well as age- and sex-related differences among item means, which were presumed to reflect differences in item difficulty, were examined for each component of both measures. Finally, relationships among all measures were examined.

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<p>This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.</p> / Dissertation

David Hume argues that reflections upon public utility explain the psychological foundations of justice and the moral feelings attendant on it. Adam Smith objects that Hume’s theory of justice is psychologically implausible. A just punishment attracts the approval of every citizen on Hume’s alleged view. Not every citizen can consider the abstract public interest every time, Smith observes, so Hume can’t have explained all of justice. I argue, in response, that Smith’s objection has not accounted for all of the causal processes that Hume draws upon in support of reflections upon public utility. Conventions establish the very possibility of public interest, and socializing processes lend the public interest its moral salience. Human nature includes a species-general passion for acquiring property for the sake of family. The motivational centrality and universal scope of this passion, coupled with the dramatic psychological power of sympathy, generates the first moral feelings. Social conditioning develops those feelings into attitudes about reward and punishment. Hume’s theory of justice, with his conjectures about sociocultural processes, is both psychologically plausible and more complex than commentators tend to appreciate.

Trata-se de explorar o tema da identidade pessoal no Tratado da natureza humana (1739-1740) de Hume, segundo três pontos de vista: a simpatia, a imaginação e as paixões. De início, mediante o estudo da relação entre as ideias de eu e de outro no princípio da simpatia, procuramos mostrar como esse princípio carrega em si um significado mais profundo do que a mera comunicação de paixões ou afetos usualmente privilegiada entre os intérpretes. Com efeito, se examinarmos a dependência entre o indivíduo e seu semelhante, encontramos no mecanismo simpático um conflito quanto à natureza da identidade pessoal: o eu é, ao mesmo tempo, a percepção mais forte que se pode ter no pensamento, e, sem a exterioridade, nas palavras de Hume, o eu é na realidade nada. A fim de esclarecer o conflito, propomos o seguinte: num primeiro momento, investiga-se a imaginação, em virtude da qual uma ficção do eu é engendrada no pensamento; num segundo, a sucessão de paixões, em que um eu de prazer e dor é produzido. Sem a intenção de privilegiar a imaginação ou as paixões como princípio de formação da identidade, ou mesmo de especular a respeito de uma articulação exaustiva entre elas, pretendemos apreender sob os três pontos de vista (incluindo a simpatia) o que haveria de essencial à identidade: uma ordem que se estabelece a partir da desordem, e que se encontra a todo momento por ela ameaçada. / This work explores the theme of personal identity in Humes Treatise of human nature (1739-1740), according to these three points of view: sympathy, imagination and passions. First of all, through the study of the relation between the self and the ideia of other in the principle of sympathy, we intend to show that this principle carries within itself a meaning more significant than a mere communication of passions or affects usually adopted by the commentators. In effect, if we examine the dependency between the individual and his similar, we find in the mechanism of sympathy a conflict regarding the nature of personal identity: the self is, at the same time, the liveliest perception we can have in the thought, and, without the exteriority, according to Humes words, the self is in reality nothing. In order to overcome the conflict, we propose: first, the investigation of the imagination, through which a fiction of the self is created in the thought; second, the succession of passions, where a self of pleasure and pain is produced. Without the intention of favouring the imagination or the passions as the principle of the formation of identity, neither with the intention of speculating about an exhaustive articulation between these two, we intend to consider by the three points of view (including that of sympathy) what would be the essential about personal identity: an order that is established by the disorder, and that is at all times threatened by that very disorder.

Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / Addressing a gathering of social scientists at Boston’s Lowell Institute in 1870, Frederic Law Olmsted worried that the "restraining and confining conditions" of the American city compelled its inhabitants to "walk circumspectly, watchfully, jealously" and to "look closely upon others without sympathy." Olmsted was telling his audience what many had already been saying, and would continue to say, about urban life: sympathy was hard to come by in the city. The urban intellectuals that I examine in this study view with greater optimism the affective possibilities of the city’s social landscape. Rather than describe the city as a place that necessarily precludes or interferes with the sympathetic process, late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban intellectuals such as Stephen Crane, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling and Jane Jacobs attempt to redefine the nature of that process. Their descriptions of urban relationships reconfigure the affective patterns that lay at the heart of a sentimental culture of sympathy—patterns that had remained, in many ways, deeply connected to those described by Adam Smith and other eighteenth-century moral philosophers. This study traces the development of what I call "urban sympathy" by demonstrating how observers of city life translate received literary and nonliterary idioms into cultural forms that capture the everyday emotions and obligations arising in the city’s small-scale contact zones—its streets, sidewalks, front stoops, theaters, cafes and corner stores. Urban Sympathy calls attention to the ways in which urban intellectuals with different religious, racial, economic, scientific and professional commitments urbanize the social project of a nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Rather than view the sympathetic exchange as dependent upon access to another’s private feelings, these writers describe an affective process that deals in publicly traded emotions. Where many see the act of identification as sympathy’s inevitable product, these observers of city life tend to characterize an awareness and preservation of differences as urban sympathy’s outcome. While scholars traditionally criticize the sympathetic process for ignoring the larger social structures in which its participants are entangled, several of these writers cultivate a sympathetic style that attempts to account for individuals and the larger social, economic and political forces that shape them. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:40:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mariel Rosauro Zasso.pdf: 735888 bytes, checksum: b4e98a2bb7429588cbba159468fa5130 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-03-05 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This essay talks about theoretical devices with which we can operate relations of sympathy in clinical encounters. We propose to highlight the complexity of the issue through a brief overview of what happened with the idea of sympathy throughout the history of Western thought. From the viewpoint of conceptual connections, we rely especially to David Hume, for whom, in the eighteenth century, the issue that influences the theme of sympathy is that of relations between humans. Because sympathy is a passion, and like all passion, in Hume, is characterized by its partiality, the difficulty to consider, in the social point of view, is the sympathy's intensity reduccion as it extends. A sympathy's clinic is thematized in resonance with this problem, discussed with help of Gilles Deleuze's book Empirisme et subjectivité (1953). This clinical practice should promote the intensification of sympathy without recreate the relational limitation that it suffers from restricted groups, like family, and be able to establish itself as a nomadic place of relations of sympathy's extent, in favor of an affirmation of differential life / Esta dissertação discorre acerca de dispositivos teóricos com os quais podemos operar relações de simpatia em encontros clínicos. Propomonos a evidenciar a complexidade do tema através de um breve apanhado daquilo que se passou com a idéia de simpatia ao longo da história do pensamento ocidental. Do ponto de vista das conexões conceituais, recorremos especialmente a David Hume, para quem, no séc XVIII, a problemática que influencia o tema da simpatia é o das relações entre os humanos. Como a simpatia é uma paixão, e como toda paixão, em Hume, se caracteriza por sua parcialidade, a dificuldade a ser levada em conta, do ponto de vista social, é a redução da intensidade da simpatia à medida que ela se estende. Uma clínica da simpatia é tematizada em ressonância com esse problema, discutido com ajuda do livro de Gilles Deleuze (19251995) Empirisme et subjectivité, de 1953. Tal clinicar deve possibilitar a intensificação da simpatia sem recriar a limitação relacional que ela sofre em grupos restritos, como a família; e ser capaz de constituirse como lugar nômade de uma extensão das relações de simpatia, em favor de uma afirmação diferencial da vida

The goal of this study was to examine if, how, and why sympathy and empathy was created in Nabokov’s two narratives dealing with pedophilia; Lolita and The Enchanter. A large amount of research did exist on this subject regarding Lolita, but not on The Enchanter. Since Nabokov has referred to The Enchanter as a kind of pre-Lolita in the “Authors Note One” in The Enchanter, I thought it would be interesting to see what similar techniques he used to generate sympathy and empathy from the reader in the two books, and to examine if they had any differences regarding the subject. After a close reading of the books, some defining features could be found to be connected to sympathy and empathy. These features had to do with the narration, the form, and the language. The protagonists used these different feature to create a bond with the reader, a bond that is then used to make the reader feel for or/and with the protagonists. Lolita is a longer, more developed, and more comprehensive story than The Enchanter which gives Humbert more time to create and use this bond with the reader. Therefore, Lolita is more likely to generate empathy and sympathy from the reader. If a reader experiences those emotions though, depends on the individual reader. All I have presented in this essay is related to how Nabokov invite empathy and sympathy from the reader when reading Lolita and The Enchanter. That does not mean all readers experience these emotions since it is an individual process that depends on how each reader interprets the narrative.