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On Empathy: Much Ado about Something

In 1949, Sociologist Leonard Cottrell and Clinical Psychologist Rosalind Diamond published in this journal an article titled: The Empathic Responses: A Neglected Field for Research. Their complaint and call to action was that interactional theorists, including Harry Stack Sullivan, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, had failed “to make explicit the problems posed by the empathic processes . . . ” (357) with empirical research. Cottrell and Diamond considered the empathic responses to be fundamental “in all communicative processes.” They argued that empathic processes have been “overlooked” and “taken for granted” perhaps because they are “extremely difficult to study.” (356) Cottrell and Diamond then launched pilot research to assess methods, concepts, and findings relevant to empathic processes. Their small exploratory study of empathy centered on the ability to assume the attitudes of others when engaged in a task, and insight into how others would rate the personal traits and attitudes of the primary subject and themselves. They used the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception, the California Ethnocentrism, and the WechslerBellevue Intelligence tests to characterize their subjects and to explore underlying personality traits associated with the empathy scores. High and low empathy groups were identified based on the findings of those tests. High empathy people were “expressive, outgoing, optimistic, and warm . . . with a strong interest in others.” (359) Low empathy people were “rather rigid, introverted people whose emotional life appears inhibited . . . subject at times to poorly controlled outbursts of emotional behavior.” (359) As an aside, they reported that on the whole, “females in our sample seemed to average slightly higher in empathic scores than males.” (385) This finding has been replicated in subsequent studies, and underscores the influence of sociocultural context. Sex and gender roles and norms are socioculturally and historically constructed, and enacted in expressive processes in everyday interactions, clinical practices and environments. Sex linked neural networks are also thought to contribute to observed differences in the cognitive foundations and affective interactions at issue. (Gleichgerrcht & Decety, 2013; Tracy & Giummarra, 2017).