Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- List of contributors
- Part I ‘Dysempathy’ in psychiatric samples
- 1 Empathic dysfunction in psychopathic individuals
- 2 Empathy deficits in schizophrenia
- 3 Empathy, antisocial behaviour and personality pathology
- 4 Empathy and depression: the moral system on overdrive
- 5 Empathy, social intelligence and aggression in adolescent boys and girls
- 6 Impaired empathy following ventromedial prefrontal brain damage
- 7 Non-autism childhood empathy disorders
- 8 Empathy and autism
- Part II Empathy and related concepts in health
- Part III Empathy models, regulation and measurement of empathy
- Index
3 - Empathy, antisocial behaviour and personality pathology
from Part I - ‘Dysempathy’ in psychiatric samples
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- List of contributors
- Part I ‘Dysempathy’ in psychiatric samples
- 1 Empathic dysfunction in psychopathic individuals
- 2 Empathy deficits in schizophrenia
- 3 Empathy, antisocial behaviour and personality pathology
- 4 Empathy and depression: the moral system on overdrive
- 5 Empathy, social intelligence and aggression in adolescent boys and girls
- 6 Impaired empathy following ventromedial prefrontal brain damage
- 7 Non-autism childhood empathy disorders
- 8 Empathy and autism
- Part II Empathy and related concepts in health
- Part III Empathy models, regulation and measurement of empathy
- Index
Summary
Introduction
This chapter will briefly explore the current definitions of empathy and report on studies looking at empathic deficits in antisocial and personality-disordered groups. To date, the literature on empathy, emotional-information-processing deficits and mentalizing ability is largely limited to studies in sex offenders or aggressive samples. There are few studies of empathy in DSM-IV personality-disordered samples although both antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders highlight empathy deficits in their criteria (see Tables 3.1 and 3.2).
Definitions of empathy
The experimental and theoretical literature on empathy has failed to agree on a single definition (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987); however, most theories about empathy have been based in trait psychology and empathy is seen as a fixed disposition evident over time and across situations and persons.
Empathy and sympathy have often been used interchangeably. Ohbuchi (1988) described the affective component of empathy as sympathy. Hogan (1969) used both terms when describing his empathy scale and Feshbach (1978) used the terms synonymously. By contrast, Miller and Eisenberg (1988) make a distinction between these concepts suggesting that empathy is the emotional response to another's distress while sympathy reflects feelings of concern.
Sympathy (e.g. Cooley, 1956) and empathy (e.g. Hogan, 1969) have both been defined as the ability to identify others' emotional states, i.e. to achieve a cognitive understanding of others' feelings. Others, however, have defined empathy (Feshbach, 1978; Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972) and sympathy (McDougall, 1950) primarily in affective terms.
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- Empathy in Mental Illness , pp. 33 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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