Objective: Emerging theory and research suggest that self-compassion promotes the practice of health behaviors, and implicates self-regulation as an explanatory factor. However, previous investigations focused only on behavior intentions or health risk behaviors, and did not investigate the role of emotions. This study expands on this research using a small-scale meta-analysis approach with our own data sets to examine the associations of self-compassion with a set of health-promoting behaviors, and test the roles of high positive affect and low negative affect as potential explanatory mechanisms. Method: Fifteen independent samples (N = 3,252) with correlations of self-compassion with the frequency of self-reported health-promoting behaviors (eating habits, exercise, sleep behaviors, and stress management) were meta-analyzed. Eight of these samples completed measures of positive and negative affect. Results: Self-compassion was positively associated with the practice of health-promoting behaviors across all 15 samples. The meta-analysis revealed a small effect size (average r = .25; p < .001) of self-compassion and health behaviors, with low variability. Tests of the indirect effects of self-compassion on health behaviors through positive and negative affect with multiple mediator analyses revealed small effects for each. Separate meta-analyses of the indirect effects (IE) were significant for positive (average IE = .08; p < .001) and negative affect (average IE = .06; p < .001), and their combined indirect effects (average IE = .15; p < .0001). Conclusion: Self-compassion may be an important quality to cultivate for promoting positive health behaviors, due in part to its association with adaptive emotions.

Eighteenth-century opéras comiques often turn around moments of sympathy--moral and affective bonds through which the Enlightenment imagined a natural basis for the social order as well as the pleasures and transformative potential of art. Through musico-literary analysis informed by models of moral and aesthetic relationality that I derive from Dubos, Marivaux, Rousseau and Diderot, I argue that opéras comiques written and performed between 1835and the Revolution feature three distinct forms of sympathy: 1) a worldly-sensuous sympathy most typically found in the common subgenre of the sentimental pastorale and characterized by a happy blending of moral and sensual connections; 2) an amorous intersubjectivity found occasionally in sentimental comedies and characterized by a sometimes empowering, sometimes trying encounter with an other experienced as a site of subjective freedom; and finally 3) a sacrificial sympathy found most frequently in Michel-Jean Sedaine's sometimes pointedly anti-worldly, morally sober lyric dramas and characterized by an obstacle-triggered leap into an identificatory, affective imagination. Although there is much that distinguishes these forms of sympathy, they are all shaped by eighteenth-century empiricist assumptions as to the existence of a basic relationality between the self and his or her social environment and thus resist a standard critical model that sees such emotional ties as merely the effect of some more fundamental separation between self and other.

Homeless outreach programs vary widely in their approaches to client treatment. At the Grace Café, an organization that serves daily meals to people who are homeless, the concept of dignity is central to guest treatment. According to the café's ideology, the importance of providing food is secondary to serving with dignity. This research explores dignity as an ideal of client treatment at the Grace Café. Based on ethnographic research, this paper explores how dignity is communicated to volunteers, implemented in service, and challenged at the Grace Café.

My dissertation examines how representations of physical and mental suffering in literary texts reveal paradoxes in the structure of sympathy that remain under-explored by literary scholars. In the philosophical thought of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, sympathy was a feature of the "moral sense," an aesthetic intuition that, with proper training, could compel individuals to act ethically in society. However, because sympathy allowed individuals to feel the experiences of others, not just through the imagination, but in connection with the body itself, the motivation for sympathizing with pain presented a significant problem for Enlightenment philosophy. Largely divested of its religious contexts, pain was increasingly classified as a mechanism that registered distress or pathology in the body, and as an experience that human beings instinctively avoid. Terry Eagleton, Adela Pinch, and G. J. Barker-Benfield, among others, have analyzed sympathy and the culture of sentimentality in terms of their moral relativism, derivative emotionality, and regulatory influence on gendered behavior and social norms. My dissertation makes a needed contribution to the field by focusing on the ways pain reveals structural contradictions in sympathy's claim to penetrate the boundaries of subjective experience, an experience that was becoming "buffered"-- to use Charles Taylor's term -- from the influence of others. Each chapter of my dissertation positions a landmark text--Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805) -- within the context of Enlightenment moral sense philosophy to highlight the intentional and unintentional ways literary authors modified philosophical formulations of sympathy to create the ethically complex pleasure of sympathizing with the pain of others. Because the concepts of pain and subjectivity were taking on modern shapes in these texts, literary critics must reconsider how ethical claims were made by the aesthetic practice of connecting representations of pain with the pleasure of sympathizing. Globalized media are bringing increasingly distant experiences of pain to our attention in increasingly intimate ways. These technologies can be invaluable for promoting a sense of social responsibility for the pain of even the most distant others, but only if we hold ourselves accountable for how and why we look.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2007 Jun 15

George Eliot filled her novels with discussions of art and references to specific paintings and sculptures. Though this element of her fiction is easy for the contemporary reader to overlook, it was well loved by her Victorian readership, and is invested with a great deal of thematic content. This thesis analyzes representations of the visual arts in Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, investigating the way that art becomes inseparable from Eliot’s larger moral themes of sympathy and historical consciousness.

Why do we care for future generations? This work argues that the reason we care for future generations lies in our psychogenetic nature. When we think of future generations, we feel that we have to do something for them. If we all have a common feeling profile, it is plausible to assume that this common feeling profile includes &ldquo / caring for future generations&rdquo / , because all of us do care for at least our own future generations. This psychogenetic disposition enables us to explain why sometimes we act as if we do not care for future generations as well. I believe that instead of telling people what their obligations are, it would be more realistic to reach their feelings deep inside: once people are aware of their true feelings, the situation can change.

The aim of this study is to examine Hume&rsquo / s moral theory as expressed in his two main books, Treatise and Enquiry and to show the defects of this theory. Without explaining some basic doctrines such as moral motivation, moral judgment, sympathy, passions, virtues, justice e.t.c., it is not possible to understand Hume&rsquo / s moral theory. To this aim, first, Hume&rsquo / s moral theory is explained in detail. Next, in order to provide a deeper understanding of the theory, its relation with his epistemology and his aesthetics are explained. Afterwards, few philosophers who influenced Hume&rsquo / s thought such as Hobbes, Mandeville, Hutcheson have been briefly discussed. Consequently, it is claimed that Hume&rsquo / s moral theory has a heterogeneous structure so it is difficult to understand his moral theory. Hume&rsquo / s moral theory contains an ambiguity due to his conception of sympathy, which has led to some misinterpretations.

This dissertation examines (1) whether there are differences in how sympathy is expressed in situations of differing gravity by native speakers (NSs) of Spanish and English, as well as intermediate second language (L2) learners of Spanish; and (2) Spanish NSs' thoughts regarding learners' nonstandard reactions to these situations. The data collection involved an informal conversation eliciting sympathy and a retrospective interview. Sympathy is examined not only as an emotion but also as a means to achieve social or conversational goals. Hence, the analysis involves both linguistic and sociological theories. Using aspects of Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), Conversation Analysis (Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and following Clark's (1997) ideas on the process of giving sympathy, it was found that when reacting to an interlocutor's hardships, speakers may experience genuine overt sympathy, covert sympathy or surface sympathy, which are influenced by social and politeness factors, personality differences and conversational structure. Results also indicate that differences exist in how sympathy is expressed by NSs of English and Spanish, particularly for low gravity situations. For high gravity situations, speakers of both languages tended to rely more on the use of formulaic expressions. Also, learners were often unable to react due to linguistic limitations. Some learners transferred pragmatic knowledge from their L1 to their L2, while others had acquired sufficient L2 pragmatic information to react appropriately. Finally, it was seen that NSs are more lenient regarding pragmatic errors committed by non-NSs of the language, but many consider that failing to express compassion in certain contexts could negatively impact the communication or relationship between interlocutors. The findings suggest that learning to express emotion such as compassion is an important part of achieving L2 communicative competence and, since cultural and pragmatic differences exist among languages, learners should be exposed to real-life, communicative situations in order to acquire such emotive skills. This dissertation contributes to the fields of second language acquisition and pragmatics by combining cognitive, affective and social factors to show how they interact with language production and comprehension. / text

This study examined links between antisocial behaviour, moral emotions (i.e., sympathy and guilt), and negative emotionality in an ethnically diverse sample of 4- and 8-year-old children (N = 79). Primary caregivers reported their children’s antisocial behaviour, sympathy, and negative emotionality through a questionnaire and across a 10-day span via daily diary entries (n = 474 records). In a semi-structured interview, children reported their sympathy levels and guilt feelings. Children with high guilt in harm contexts and low negative emotionality were rated as less antisocial in both questionnaire and diary reports. For children with low guilt in exclusion contexts, low sympathy ratings predicted higher questionnaire-reported antisocial behaviour. For children with high guilt in prosocial omission contexts, high sympathy ratings predicted lower diary-reported antisocial behaviour. Lastly, high sympathy ratings predicted lower questionnaire-reported antisocial behaviour for children with low negative emotionality.