Empathy And Social Competence

Empathy includes cognitive processes and emotional experiences, and implies a mainly cognitive response showing understanding of how another person feels as well as an emotional communion (Gallo, 1989). Haynes and Avery (1979) described empathy “as the ability to recognize and understand another person’s perceptions and feelings and to carefully express that understanding in an accepting response” (p. 527). The response may be either verbal or nonverbal, or pro-social behavior such as sharing or helping.

On the one hand, empathy can be defined cognitively in relation to perspective taking or understanding others. For example, Hogan (1969) described empathy as “the intellectual or imaginative apprehension of another’s condition or state of mind without actually experiencing that person’s feelings” (p. 308). On the other hand, empathy has also been defined as emotional arousal or sympathy in response to the feelings or experiences of others (Caruso & Mayer, 1998). For example, Mehrabian and Epstein (1972) defined empathy as “the heightened responsiveness to another’s emotional experience” (p. 526).

Feshbach (1982) found that aggressive and antisocial boys who are typically rated low in social competence tended to respond with excitement during a positive emotion-eliciting video; no relation between excitement and aggressive behavior was found with girls. Feshbach (1982) suggested that the aggressive boys responded with extremely high levels of vicarious joy because of their desire to heighten their own positive affect through sensation seeking. Children who respond with either slight or intense joy may be lower in social competence than children who respond with moderate happiness. Nevertheless, it is important to study a more normative group of children than the group used by Feshbach (1982) in order to understand the relation of positive empathy to social