Research on aspects of empathy

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Mark Davis studied self-reports (answers to survey questions) of four types of "empathy," broadly construed as reactivity to others:

• perspective-taking - spontaneously shifting perspectives and adopting the point of view of others in real-life situations


• fantasy imagining - tending to transpose oneself into a fictional situation when reading or watching works of fiction (closely related to narrative transportation)


• empathic concern - feeling concern and sympathy for others


• personal distress - feeling personal anxiety and unease when encountering the feelings of others

The first two refer to tendencies to engage in cognitive processes, and the second two are about emotional responsiveness. Davis found that the four aspects of empathy were generally independent of each other, with these exceptions: (1) Perspective-taking and fantasy imagining (that is, real-life and fictional perspective-taking) were uncorrelated. (2) Perspective-taking was moderately positively related to empathic concern and moderately negatively related to personal distress. (3) Fantasy imagining was moderately positively correlated with empathic concern.

The two things I found most interesting here were first, that I hadn't really been aware of the "personal distress" form of empathy as a widespread and stable personality trait, though it does explain the egocentric reaction of "you're only saying how you feel in order to make me feel bad" that one sometimes gets from people. Second, there's an underlying assumption, especially in liberal Western classrooms at the elementary and adolescent levels, that exposure to literature can teach children how to take the perspectives of people very different from themselves. I'm surprised that Davis found no connection at all between fictional and real-life perspective-taking, and it really undercuts that assumption.