The purpose of this study was to examine the proposition that the accurate perception of the emotional state of another person would serve as an important determinant of the degree of the perceiver's physiological arousal and that this emotional arousal would serve to instigate an act designed to alleviate the distress of the other person. The subjects were asked to administer increasingly painful shocks to a performer who sat behind a screen. Two degrees of responsibility for inflicting pain and two different kinds of feedback of verbal cues of the performer's pain were combined in a 2X2 factorial design. In the Responsibility conditions either the subject or the experimenter took the responsibility for administering the aversive stimulation to the performer. In the Verbal conditions the performer either responded verbally at the moment of apparent shock or remained silent. The subjects, 40 volunteers, 20 males and 20 females, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions with the stipulation that each group contained a balanced number of males and females. During this experiment a Grass Polygraph provided a continuous record of the observing subjects' GSR reactivity. The subjects were also required to complete three of Davitz's test of emotional sensitivity (1964), Knowledge of Vocal Characteristics, Sensitivity to Vocal Stimuli, and the Metaphors Test. The main effects for Responsibility and Verbal conditions were analyzed in terms of their relationship to the experimental measures. The Combined Emotional Sensitivity score and the individual scores on the emotional sensitivity battery for all the subjects were correlated with the experimental measures. This procedure was repeated for each experimental group and for the verbalization trials alone. It was hypothesized that differences in emotional sensitivity, as measured by Davitz's test (1964), would be positively related to the number of sympathetic arousals, increases in the level of conductance, and negatively related to the number of shocks administered to the performer. Increased responsibility for administering the shock to the performer and the feedback of verbal pain cues hypothesized to be related to increases in the level of conductance throughout the whole experiment, to the number of changes in conductance at the time of the administration of the shock to the performer, and the magnitude of the changes in conductance at the time of the administration of the shocks to the performer. It was found that the Verbal condition was related to higher numbers of sympathetic arousals given at the time the shock was administered. This finding was related to S.Berger's (1962) findings and to the two phase model of sympathetic behavior suggested by Paskal and Aronfreed (l965). A significant relationship between the change in the level of conductance and the number of shocks administered was found. This suggested that the subject may have been aroused solely by being asked to witness the administration to aversive stimulation to the subject. However, cognitive-perceptual patterns of emotional sensitivity, as assessed with Davitz's measures, were not found to be related to the experimental measures of sympathetic behavior. It was suggested that these scores may have been determined by factors not necessarily related to the factors under consideration. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

This PhD thesis explores the role of sympathy in the discursive formation of race in Scottish and American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Offering insight into Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as one paradigm that underpins the philosophical terms of sympathy in the Atlantic world, I argue that sympathy as a mode of control and a mechanism of normalisation played a formative role in the transatlantic history of the literary construction of whiteness. My introductory chapter delineates key debates on sentimental literature and argues that race in general and whiteness in particular have been ignored in revisionist accounts of the genre. My second chapter outlines Smith’s concept of sympathy in the context of Scottish Enlightenment theories of stadial history, suggesting that sympathy is always already bound up with a racial understanding of others in a categorical system of cultural development. I examine this dialectic of race and sympathy in the novels of Henry Mackenzie, which present social inequality, colonial exploitation, and slavery as conditions that the sentimental genre cannot rectify. This discussion is continued in chapter three, which deconstructs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental rhetoric in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, suggesting that while it is employed to foster fellow-feeling for the black slave, it also reduces others to the terms of the white self. Chapter four demonstrates that Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s philosophy of white sympathy is fully articulated in Stowe’s New York novels, My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors, as a discourse of affinity, which functions as an advertisement for white bourgeois homogeneity in a developing consumer culture. The concluding chapter explores sympathy in relation to race passing and scientific racism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, where the passing protagonist embodies the gaze of sympathy that cares for others according to their degree of whiteness. Fauset, I argue, critiques the legacy of nineteenth-century sentimental literature, just as she, along with Du Bois and others, opposes eugenicists’ vision of a ‘White Atlantic’ as a new world order.

Thesis--Copenhagen.

Thesis (M.A. in English)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 5, 2010). "Department of English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-88).

This study explores the formation and evolution of Mary Shelley's philosophy of sympathy, one which she continued to revise and refine throughout her lifetime. Her novels, journals, and letters reveal a persistent desire to understand what she perceived to be a deeply fraught emotion, a moral sentiment grounded in paradox. Engaging with the Moral Sense philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-1776), and Adam Smith (1723-1790), Shelley insists that sympathy lies at the very heart of our ethical being, encouraging recognition of and respect for the other. Yet, as she demonstrates in her fiction-from Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Falkner (1837)-when felt to excess, sympathy can mutate into an unnatural and harmful emotion capable of provoking antisocial, immoral, incestuous, and even suicidal behaviour. More than this, Shelley's investigation of sympathy exposes its serious limitations. Predicated on a similarity to self, sympathy, Shelley suggests, often fails when confronted with difference. Finally, through multiple perspectives, Shelley illustrates the complex and contradictory motivations behind sympathy, showing that it can arise from genuine benevolence, self-interest, or a combination of the two, an entangling of intentions that serves to further complicate this moral sentiment. Ultimately, Shelley's philosophy of sympathy acknowledges its shortcomings and potential dangers but nonetheless celebrates sympathy as a social virtue, as the locus of our moral selves.

No abstract included. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

In early and mid-Victorian Britain, men and women from all classes demonstrated a strong fascination with, and sympathy for, seduced and dying women. Though such women were unchaste or “fallen” women, they did not excite the same anxiety and condemnation as did other sexually transgressive women like prostitutes and adulteresses. This thesis demonstrates that the sympathetic trope of the seduced and dying woman in British culture from 1820 to 1870 was a combination of (and an interplay between) fiction and reality. Through a study of melodrama – a largely working-class genre – and “expert” literature – a predominantly middle-class genre, comprised of medical, social, religious and prescriptive writings – this thesis shows how the seduced and dying woman inspired sympathy both across and along class lines. Finally, an analysis of nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of “Seduction and Suicide” illustrates that, while this popular trope inspired sympathy for a certain kind of fallen woman – the feminine, passive and (most importantly) suffering and dying victim of seduction – it also distorted the reality of sexual fall, reinforced patriarchal understandings, and created an exclusive and unattainable standard of sympathy which normalized suicide for fallen women. / Graduate / 2019-08-24

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This thesis posits Enlightenment articulations of sympathy, in its capacity for establishing connections and its failures, as an appropriate methodology to articulate transatlantic literary exchange. Focusing on the sympathetic gap, the space sympathy must traverse, this thesis investigates the effect of emigration and place on genre and follows the trajectory from documentary to fictive forms and from a small gap to one unable to be bridged. Because the gap of sympathy is a spatial argument, the distance between is crucial as it indicates relationship. The introduction outlines my argument, with particular attention to transatlantic criticism, what is meant by the gap of sympathy, and the triad of place, emigration and genre. The first chapter discusses how Adam Smith articulated how one person is able to maintain a stable identity and is able to connect with another through imaginative comparison. The chapter establishes the trajectory of sympathy as the gap moves from smallest to unbridgeable, through comparison, sympathy and the failure of sympathy. In a series of case studies, Chapters Two through Five test out Smith’s theories in literary works; they examine the trajectory of transatlantic sympathy, where the gap moves from rhetorically being small to gaping, and moves generically from documentary forms to fiction. Chapter Two uses emigration guides written by British emigrants, who, because of their emigrant status, write from both an American and British perspective. The guides, because of their promotional intent, tend to underplay the gap of sympathy. Although they could be read as documentary and objective, the guides evidence ideological and rhetorical similarities to transatlantic fiction and thus serve as an entrance into the themes and stylistics one tends to associate with literary genres. Chapter Three examines the transatlantic correspondence of the Kerr family. As the Kerr family corresponds transatlantically (separated in space by the Atlantic and in time by more than 50 years), the issue of space becomes paramount to understanding the correspondence as well as if sympathy works in this generic register. Generically, the transatlantic letter is meant to provide virtual presence amid long stretches of absence; it also becomes an analogue for the absent other and the means by which the family may continue to be imagined across the gap of sympathy. Chapter Four examines Susanna Rowson’s transatlantic works, particularly Charlotte Temple, Slaves in Algiers, and Reuben and Rachel. Rowson’s own emigrant experience provides an entrée to the pain of transcultural sympathy that we see most clearly in Reuben and Rachel. Throughout her works Rowson also advocates a sympathy that is active and moral, rather than emotionally vacuous. Reuben and Rachel illustrates the gap of sympathy being bridged most effectively in cross-cultural adaptations and yet finally settles for a sympathy that must acknowledge separation and difference as well. Chapter Five explores the failures of sympathy and sociability present in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels, Wieland and Edgar Huntly. Characters’ frontier locations and claustrophobic versions of sociability, as well generically, the gothic turn and failure of epistolary exchange, signals the moral ambiguity connected with becoming ‘this new man’ of America. Brown’s epistolary fiction briefly considered offers another generic attempt to examine how the gap of sympathy may be bridged and extend beyond the confines of the family. The Afterword points to the total breakdown of sympathy as a turn inward and away from sociability, where the self becomes frantic and frenetic (as evidenced by Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer); it points to some useful applications to the gap of sympathy for transatlantic literary studies.

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