Social Empathy as a Framework for Adolescent Empowerment

ABSTRACT

Adolescent empowerment has been used to develop programs addressing a variety of issues that put young people at risk. Empowerment has been associated with positive outcomes in youth, including increases in resilience, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and civic engagement. This article reviews a selection of applications of empowerment with adolescents to identify how the concept is defined, applied, and measured. Key challenges to implementing adolescent empowerment programs are identified. Based on the review, social empathy is proposed as a framework for adolescent empowerment program developers. Using social empathy as a framework allows for consistency in definition and flexibility in application to apply to diverse groups of youth in various settings. A social empathy framework also establishes key outcomes that can be measured to ensure program effectiveness. By employing social empathy as a framework, service providers can draw on the value that empowerment, both as a process and an outcome, brings to their work with adolescents.     

Association of Personal Distress With Burnout,Compassion Fatigue,and Compassion Satisfaction Among Clinical Social Workers

ABSTRACT

Studies of empathy and empathy-related responding show that while some people respond to observing the suffering of another with a prosocial concern and urge to help the suffering person, others have an aversive, avoidant response that is primarily self-focused and aimed toward relieving their own distress rather than helping the other person. This self-focused response, labeled personal distress, is associated with various social and psychological problems. This article discusses the concept of personal distress and describes a study of licensed clinical social workers (n = 171) that examines the relationship of personal distress and three other aspects of the empathy construct with compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. Results of ordinary least squares multiple regression analyses indicate that the model of empathy components and control variables explain 20% to 23% of the variance in the dependent variables. Personal distress is the only component of the empathy construct with significant associations with the dependent variables. Higher personal distress is associated with higher compassion fatigue and burnout and lower compassion satisfaction among clinical social workers. Implications for future research and for social work education are discussed.     

Introduction: 21st-Century Conceptualizations of Empathy: Implications for Social Work Practice and Research

ABSTRACT

The articles in this special section seek to better define empathy, discuss how it can be cultivated, and highlight how empathy can strengthen families and empower adolescents. The authors encourage a greater understanding and application of the concept and offer implications regarding how empathy can create insights that help practitioners develop services and policies and further research efforts that are socially and economically just, sensitive to clients’ needs, and based on the reality of their experiences. The introduction to the section discusses the underlying motivation for the focus on empathy and provides an overview of each of the five articles.     

Empathy and Observed Anger and Aggression in Five-Year-Olds

In Roberts and Strayer (1996 ), we reported that emotional expressiveness and anger were important predictors of empathy for school‐age children, and that empathy strongly predicted prosocial behaviors aggregated across methods and sources. In this paper, we report how empathy was associated with direct observations of anger and aggression in peer play groups. Twenty‐four initially unacquainted five‐year‐old children (50% girls) were randomly assigned to six same‐sex groups; each group met for three one‐hour play sessions. Physical and verbal aggression, object struggles and anger were coded from videotapes, as were prosocial and social behaviors. As expected, empathy (aggregated across methods and sources) was negatively associated with aggression and anger, and positively associated with prosocial behaviors. Although children who were more angry were also more aggressive, anger and aggression did not covary across play sessions as a simple causal model requires. These results suggest further directions for research in emotions and aggression.     

Autism, Empathy and Questions of Moral Agency

In moral psychology, it has long been argued that empathy is a necessary capacity of both properly developing moral agents and developed moral agency ( Blair, 2008 ; Hume et al., 1978 ). This view stands in tension with the belief that some individuals diagnosed with autism—which is typically characterized as a deficiency in social reciprocity (including empathy)—are moral agents. In this paper we propose to explore this tension and perhaps trouble how we commonly see those with autism. To make this task manageable, we will consider whether high functioning individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder are capable of empathetic responses. If they are, then they possess a capacity that, on the view above, is required for moral agency. If they are not so capable, and yet sometimes engage in moral behaviour, this casts some doubt on the claim that empathy is required for moral agency. This second possibility will necessitate an exploration of the capacity of some individuals with autism to engage in moral behaviour, giving us further grounds to re-see these individuals as moral agents.     

Unique and Interactive Effects of Empathy and Social Status on Involvement in Bullying

This study investigated the relationships between affective and cognitive empathy, social preference and perceived popularity, and involvement in bullying situations by bullying others or defending the victimized children. The participants were 266 primary and 195 secondary school students. Affective and cognitive empathy, as well as the status variables, had some significant main effects on involvement in bullying. In addition, several interaction effects emerged. For instance, the positive association between affective empathy and defending behavior was stronger among boys who had a high status (i.e., were highly preferred) in the group. The results highlight the importance of studying child-by-environment models, which take into account both child characteristics and interpersonal variables in predicting social adjustment.     

建设一个富有共情心的生态文明

共情心和慈悲心应该成为生态文明时代的核心价值观。通过对心型!学家费什巴赫对共情理解的疏理,依据怀特海的过程哲学或有机哲学,给予共情一界定,共情是一种具有更广大慈悲情怀的深度共情,包括相互扶持、相互帮助及关爱他者,深度地感受到他人的感受。怀特海的哲学为这样一种更宽广的深度共情提供了宇宙论的支撑。在怀特海那里,宇宙是情感的海洋,感受他者的感受是我们与他者建立联系的基本方式。     

A Framework for Cultivating and Increasing Child Welfare Workers’ Empathy Toward Parents

ABSTRACT

Much emphasis has been placed on child welfare workers’ skills and attributes when working with parents involved in the child welfare system; however, few studies have examined the potential benefits of using an empathic approach to interacting with parents. Child welfare workers may have negative perceptions of parents involved in the child welfare system and might have a tendency to reflect these attitudes and value judgments in their practice. The lack of empathic understanding and communication between workers and parents impacts service implementation and the success of family interventions. Increasing the workers’ ability to empathize with parents can enhance their relationship while increasing parent participation in services and ultimately family reunification. This article will discuss specific ways to cultivate and increase child welfare workers’ empathy for parents by enhancing workers’ emotional response and self/other-awareness, ability to perspective take, emotion regulation, and their ability to make appropriate decisions. Implications for application to practice and training are discussed as is the need for future research to validate the proposed framework for increasing child welfare workers’ empathy toward parents.     

Children's Anger, Emotional Expressiveness, and Empathy: Relations with Parents' Empathy, Emotional Expressiveness, and Parenting Practices

In Roberts and Strayer (1996 ) we described how emotional factors were strongly related to children's empathy, which in turn strongly predicted prosocial behavior. This paper focuses on how these child emotional factors, assessed across methods and sources, related to parental factors (empathy, emotional expressiveness, encouragement of children's emotional expressiveness, warmth and control) for a subset of 50 two‐parent families from our earlier sample. Parents reported on their emotional characteristics and parenting; children (5 to 13 years old; 42% girls) also described parenting practices. Children's age and parenting factors accounted for an average of 32% of the variance in child emotional factors, which, with role‐taking, strongly predicted children's empathy. In contrast to earlier, less comprehensive studies, we found important paths between parents’ and children's empathy, mediated by children's anger. These countervailing pathways largely neutralized each other, resulting in the low correlations usually seen when parents’ and children's empathy are examined in isolation. Thus our findings are an important confirmation and extension of the theoretically expected link between parents’ and children's empathy.     

Empathy to action: Child and adolescent out‐group attitudes and prosocial behaviors in a setting of intergroup conflict

The paper explored how to promote constructive intergroup relations among children and young people in a context of protracted conflict. Across two studies, the Empathy–Attitudes–Action model was examined in middle childhood and adolescence. More specifically, we tested the relations among dispositional empathy, out‐group attitudes, and prosocial behaviors for youth born after the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. In one correlational (Study 1: N = 132; 6–11 years old: M = 8.42 years, SD = 1.23) and one longitudinal design (Study 2: N = 466; 14–15 years old), bootstrapped mediation analyses revealed that empathy was associated with more positive attitudes toward the conflict‐related out‐group, which in turn, was related to higher out‐group prosocial behaviors, both self‐report and concrete actions. Given that out‐group prosocial acts in a setting of intergroup conflict may serve as the antecedents for peacebuilding among children and adolescents, this study has intervention implications.     

Bullying Involvement and Empathy: Child and Target Characteristics

This study investigated how the bullying involvement of a child and a target peer are related to empathy. The role of gender was also considered. We hypothesized that empathy primarily varies depending on the bullying role of the target peer. Participants were 264 7–12‐year‐old children (M_age = 10.02, SD = 1.00; 50% girls) from 33 classrooms who had been selected based on their bullying involvement (bully, victim, bully/victim, noninvolved) in the classroom. Participants completed a cognitive and affective empathy measure for each selected target classmate. We found no differences in cognitive and affective empathy for all targets combined based on children's own bullying involvement. However, when incorporating the targets’ bullying involvement, bullies, victims, and bully/victims showed less empathy for each other than for noninvolved peers. Noninvolved children did not differentiate between bullies, victims and bully/victims. Girls reported more cognitive and affective empathy for girls than boys, whereas boys did not differentiate between girls and boys. The results indicated that children's empathy for peers depends primarily on the characteristics of the peer, such as the peer's bullying role and gender.     

End-of-Life Care and Social Work Education

Summary

Social workers are major service providers to people who are facing end-of-life issues including the terminally ill and their families. Yet, exemplary models for social work education and intervention methods are limited in rural states. A statewide survey conducted in Kentucky found only two social work courses dedicated to end-of-life care currently being offered by accredited undergraduate and graduate institutions. Another statewide survey found that many hospice social workers are relatively inexperienced and have a need and desire for more education on death, dying and loss. Also, unique cultural, economic and geographic areas, such as Appalachia are enigmas when it comes to the provision of end-of-life care. This partnership provides a varied perspective on delivery of end-of-life care services with an emphasis on social work interventions and education.     

Examining links between affective empathy,cognitive empathy,and peer relationships at the transition to school

The current study aimed to (i) examine associations across features of affective and cognitive empathy, and (ii) explore their independent role for children's peer relationships at the transition to school. Affective empathy was measured using both observations of children's facial affect during an empathy-eliciting event and dispositional affective empathy to peer distress via teacher report. Cognitive empathy was measured using an index of children's proclivity to engage in perspective taking when witnessing the distress of another. Children's theory of mind was also assessed given close links with cognitive empathy. Participants were 114 Australian children (M_age = 67 months, SD = 5 months) assessed across two sessions during their first year of formal schooling. Findings showed that features of children's affective and cognitive empathy were unrelated, but both showed independent associations with children's positive peer relationships (assessed via peer-reported social preference and teacher-rated peer social maturity). The current study provides support for the delineation between features of affective and cognitive empathy in early school-age children, and the importance of understanding both affective and cognitive empathy for children's peer relationships at the transition to school. These findings have implications how we understand both the nature of empathy in childhood and the role it plays in supporting children's positive peer relationships.     

Relational and Individual Resources as Predictors of Empathy in Early Childhood

The goal of this study was to examine children's cognitive and language development and social engagement of mother as mediators of the relationship between maternal emotional availability at 15 months and children's empathy at the ages of two and four. Participants were 661 low-income, ethnically diverse mother-child dyads participating in a trial of home visitation in the Denver area. Using home- and lab-based free-play episodes, mothers' emotional availability (15 months) and children's social engagement of mother (21 and 24 months) were assessed. Standardized measures were used to assess children's language development (21 months) and cognitive development (24 months). Empathy was assessed using a simulated injury paradigm at ages two (both 21 and 24 months) and four. The predictive models supported the hypothesis that the child's cognitive and social resources mediate the relationship between maternal emotional availability and children's empathy with respect to empathy at the age of two toward both mothers and an unfamiliar examiner. These results indicate that parental sensitive behavior is not the only important condition for predicting children's empathy, and that children's own internalized resources are a likely mechanism of transmission from parents caring for their children to children learning to care for others.     

Experiences of Caregivers in a Dementia Simulation Program

Abstract

Objectives: Simulation-based training has been used in health care to increase clinical knowledge and skills and understanding the experience of others. There is a lack of research in exploring experiences of caregivers of people with dementia in a dementia simulation program and its potential benefits on caregivers. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore experiences of caregivers of people with dementia who participated in a dementia simulation program, called Dementia Live?.

Methods: Fourteen caregivers were interviewed after participation in DL, and thematic analysis using NVivo 11 software was used.

Results: Three themes emerged, including: (i) the Dementia Live? as an eye-opening experience; (ii) the perceived benefits of the Dementia Live? on themselves; and (iii) recommendation of the Dementia Live? to other caregivers.

Conclusions: Dementia simulation programs such as the Dementia Live? may help caregivers to have more empathy, understand better about the behaviors and feelings of people with dementia, and to use strategies that can help when working with people with dementia. Further experimental research is needed to examine effectiveness of the dementia simulation program on caregivers and people with dementia.     

Ethical Dilemmas and Areas of Social Work Intervention in Spain

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the types of ethical dilemmas that Spanish social workers face in their respective areas of intervention. The intervention areas that have been studied are health, children, immigrants, women, family, marginalized persons, ethnic minorities, young people, prisoners, elderly people, refugees and asylum seekers, schools and social and employment-related integration, mental health, disability and drug addictions. A quantitative methodology was chosen using a version of the questionnaire prepared by Eileen J. Ain in a sample of 700 Spanish social workers. The statistical analysis shows the correlation between the different areas of intervention in Social Work and the most significant ethical dilemmas that such professionals have to solve. The most pertinent ethical dilemmas are found in the healthcare sector (confidentiality, disclosure of personal information and patient autonomy). The article is an important contribution for Social Work at the national level that emphasizes the importance of the ethics of Social Work in social interventions. It is proposed to deepen the investigation of each of the areas of intervention for future research, as well as to carry out comparative studies between different countries.     

Social Work Students’ Perceptions of Themselves and Others: Self-Esteem,Empathy, and Forgiveness

ABSTRACT

This study examined how 86 social work students attending a university in Florida viewed themselves and others in relation to self-esteem, empathy, and forgiveness. The study used a cross-sectional, self-administered survey. Results indicated female students reported a higher level of emotional empathy than that reported by male students. Significant relationships were also noted between forgiveness of others and the age of the respondent and ethnicity. Self-esteem was a significant predictor of forgiveness of self and forgiveness of others; and empathy is a significant predictor of forgiveness of others. The study identified the need for social work educators to help students develop a strong sense of self and an understanding of others. Future research is suggested to explore how the timing of a transgression affects forgiveness of self and others.     

不同心理治疗流派对移情的理解与运用

移情作为一个重要的心理学概念,已经被各个心理治疗流派接纳和运用.精神分析学派对移情进行了全面深入的研究,对其运用达到了登峰造极、炉火纯青的地步;认知行为学派越来越重视潜意识、领悟、早期经历和治疗关系,在实际治疗中已经利用移情来改变来访者的不合理图式,尽管他们更愿意使用行为术语来表达移情;人本主义学派不但重视真实的关系.也开始重视转移过来的移情关系,通过处理移情关系展开治疗,尽管他们并不认为移情比其他技术更重要.可见,移情的理论和技术已经成为各种心理治疗流派的共同工具,发挥了越来越大的作用,它不但促进了心理治疗理论和技术的发展,也促进了心理治疗流派的融合.     

Empathy and Emotional Responsiveness in Delinquent and Non-delinquent Adolescents

Two groups of male adolescents, incarcerated young offenders (N = 64, mean age = 16.3 years) and a comparison group of community youth (N = 60; mean age = 16.6 years), were administered the Empathy Continuum (measuring cognitive‐affective responses to persons in emotionally evocative videotaped vignettes) and questionnaire measures of empathy, emotional responsiveness, guilt, shame, and antisocial attitudes and behaviors. Although both groups endorsed general statements of empathy, young offenders responded with empathy less often to particular persons in particular situations, and reasoned regarding their empathic responses in more self‐referencing ways. They also described their emotional responses to stimulus persons as less intense. In addition to the expected group differences, responsive empathy was a stronger predictor of delinquency than self‐reported antisocial behavior, and correctly classified 69 percent of young offenders and comparison youths. Although guilt was consistently related to lower self‐reported antisocial attitudes and behaviors, guilt (and shame) only weakly differentiated the two groups, limiting the usefulness of the TOSCA‐A as a predictor of delinquency.     

Social Exclusion, Inequality and Social Work

This paper sets out the environment of inequality in which social work and the poor have recently operated. It explores pragmatic and idealist arguments concerning whether or not the poor need social work. Finally, policy solutions developed in consultation with social service users and carers are suggested in relation to poverty and social exclusion. Social exclusion can be linked to relative poverty as exclusion from economic and social norms. However, there is a wider brief in our own government’s publications and those of Europe, of examining how people are excluded from actions and policies of agencies who are there to support them. This paper will retain the concepts of poverty as lack of material income, and inequality as the gap between the rich and the poor, while being aware of the policy implications for social service users and carers of the more comprehensive process of being shut out partially or fully from social, economic, political and cultural systems. The debates around social work, social exclusion and inequality that follow establish: that some of the poor do need social work; that the poverty of social service users is related to policies that have restructured welfare in Britain; that the reason for individuals approaching or being referred to social services are complex but are likely to include financial deprivation as a key contributory factor; that if the poor do need social work, advocacy is essential rather than social work being seen as concerned only with social control—taking children into care, mentally ill people into hospitals, and advising the DSS on the suitability of claimants for benefits. Finally, the discussion turns to new policy agendas on social exclusion instigated by the Labour government. What positive difference can such policies make for social service users, their carers and social workers?.