Evolutionary accounts of empathy often focus on the ways in which empathy-motivated helping can give rise to indirect fitness benefits. These accounts posit that empathy is adaptive insofar as it motivates strategic helping behavior, but they neglect a key feature of the empathic process – it can prepare one to act effectively within a shared environment. In particular, adopting the affective and motivational states of others provides a rapid and automatic way to avoid danger and threat, which play a disproportionately large role in shaping behavior. Based on the idea that empathic processes facilitate adaptive reactions to threat, I conducted four experiments to test the hypothesis that empathic reactions reflect withdrawal motivation. In the first experiment I used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure baseline right-frontal cortical asymmetry, a reliable neural correlate of withdrawal motivation. I then assessed empathic reactions to images of children ostensibly taken from a charity campaign. Participants who showed greater right-frontal cortical asymmetry also showed stronger empathic reactions to the images. In the second study I used self-report measures fear and anger to assess dispositional withdrawal- and approach-motivation, respectively. This time, participants indicated their empathic reactions to targets experiencing happiness and targets experiencing sadness. Empathy for both types of targets was positively related to fear and negatively related to physical aggression, again supporting a link between empathy and withdrawal motivation. In the third study I measured state withdrawal motivation by using facial electromyography (EMG) to assess disgust expressions towards charity images. These expressions were positively correlated with empathic reactions, demonstrating that state withdrawal motivation is also positively related to empathy. In the final study I manipulated approach and withdrawal emotions by having participants make emotional facial expressions. Focusing on fear and anger, I found that participants were more empathic when making fearful faces than when making angry faces, although these results must be interpreted with caution, as the manipulation may not have had the intended effects on emotional state. Taken together, these four studies provide converging evidence of an association between withdrawal motivation and empathy, supporting the idea that empathy plays a role in the adaptive response to threat.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/34949 |
| Date | 07 January 2013 |
| Creators | Tullett, Alexa |
| Contributors | Inzlicht, Michael |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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