Browsing by Subject "empathy"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Bystanders to College Bullying: An Application of the Bystander Intervention Model
    (2019-07) Danielson, Carly
    College bullying is a damaging health problem. Many campuses have bullying prevention efforts, yet few are tailored to bystanders. This is unfortunate, as peer bystanders are present in most bullying situations and know about incidents before campus officials. However, many bystanders fail to intervene due to fear and uncertainty about how to safely and effectively help. This dissertation utilized mixed methods research to pursue three goals. First, informed by the bystander intervention model (BIM; Latané & Darley, 1970), focus groups were conducted to explore how college students: 1) notice bullying, 2) interpret harm, 3) feel motivation to help, 4) know how to help, and 5) implement intervention decisions. These results uncover how bystanders communicatively construct their bullying experiences, as well as the range of possibilities and difficulties encountered when making intervention choices. The second goal of this project was to analyze whether participation in long-term focus groups serve as a bullying intervention in and of itself. A pre- and post-test design revealed that participants in the intervention group had higher bystander intervention scores. Initiatives that involve education and group-dialogue sessions have great potential to improve bystanders’ attitudes and behaviors that support bullied peers. Last, students evaluated 28 bystander responses to bullying that varied along three dimensions: 1) helpful to unhelpful, 2) safe to unsafe, and 3) direct to indirect. These evaluations illustrate the range of intervention options as a mechanism to reduce passive and avoidant bystander roles. This study’s findings encourage campuses to adopt bystander intervention campaigns to curtail bullying.
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    Empathic Imagination: Performing Interracial Intimacy in Contemporary Women's Drama
    (2016-06) Na, Eunha
    “Empathic Imagination: Performing Interracial Intimacy in Contemporary Women’s Theatre” interrogates the centrality of emotion in the representation of race and gender relations, focusing on contemporary drama. It investigates American women’s theatre from the 1980s to the present as key sites by which to examine empathy, a social feeling often seen as a necessary basis for liberal multicultural communities. Through examination of works by writers including Velina Hasu Houston, Suzan-Lori Parks, Diana Son, and Lynn Nottage, the dissertation argues that these plays reveal the fractured and illusory nature of an empathic community, where the desire for interracial affinities is intertwined with failures and anxieties that these plays make palpable through various performance strategies.
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    Empathy at the Intersection
    (2015-09) Rodriguez, Tanya
    One of the ways that art contributes to society is by preventing anesthesia of the heart. The aesthetic experience characteristically makes us more alive, vibrant, and open to possibilities. Aesthetic experience need not be limited to the “fine arts,” of course. In this project, I consider a broad variety of media, including jokes, modernist poetry, Greek tragedy, literature, film, and conversation. What these forms of aesthetic communication have in common is their ability to tell stories. I will argue certain features of narrative that (typically set aside as ethical considerations) have aesthetic relevance insofar as they affect our engagement with the story. I do not intend to minimize the differences between racist jokes and Anna Karenina nor blur the distinction mundane conversation and the poetry of Robert Frost. I invite the reader to indulge my choice of examples, as I am mainly interested in a particular aspect these art forms share—narrative structure and aesthetic affect. My terminology (empathy/sympathy/etc) is not constructed as an end, but only as a means; insofar as they clarify these shared aspects for my defense of ethicism. There are three ways one might understand ethicism with respect to jokes: 1. Moral defects detract from aesthetic value (humor). 2. Aesthetic defects have moral impact. 3. Certain moral defects have a structure that is aesthetically flawed. Although, I do not disagree with the first two claims, it is my intent to argue for the third claim.
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    Interactive Narratives: Evaluating the Impact of Agency and Immersion on Empathy and Attitude Change Toward Marginalized Groups
    (2024-06) O'Dowd, Ian
    Interactive narratives provide the reader with a sense of agency and immersion by giving readers the ability to effect change in the story through choice. In this dissertation, I conducted a series of three empirical studies that aimed to bridge the gap between existing work on interactive narratives in the realm of computer-human interaction and the body of work on empathy in the field of social psychology. I developed interactive narratives based on the lived experiences of two marginalized social groups often subject to physical or social exclusion from public spaces. Specifically, I looked at accessibility in public bathrooms through the lens of physically disabled people and transgender people.In Study 1, I demonstrated the effectiveness of interactive narratives in promoting participants’ sense of agency or control, which, in turn, led to a variety of prosocial outcomes. I also aimed to induce a sense of immersion through these narratives, which shows great promise for yielding positive prosocial outcomes. In Study 1, I found that immersion seems more difficult to induce for participants who hold high levels of prejudice against the target group—especially for people in the transgender protagonist condition. In Study 2, I leveraged work on intergroup contact to encourage participants to individuate the protagonist. To do so, I manipulated the time point at which I told participants that the protagonist of the story was transgender. My findings ran counter to hypotheses—withholding the protagonist’s trans identity until the end of the story (which, theoretically, should have led to greater individuation of the protagonist) decreased immersion and, therefore, led to less empathetic outcomes in highly prejudiced individuals. In Study 3, I had participants take a measure of political ideology and told them whether they were ideologically similar to the story's protagonist. I found that although the results of Study 1 and Study 2 replicated, highly prejudiced participants did not report being more immersed in the narrative when I told them the protagonist was similar to them. With this line of research, I used several theoretical levers to attempt to immerse participants in the experience of another individual. In doing so, I demonstrate that certain factors (i.e., immersion) appear useful for promoting empathy. However, an effective one-size-fits-all intervention remains elusive when promoting empathy toward specific groups.
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    Relationship between Women's Empathy and Their Experience of Violent Intimate Relationships: An Exploratory Study
    (2016-05) Duffy, Cortney
    Relationship violence is a problem that may affect up to 80% of the United States population. Understanding the victim/survivor’s experience may be key to providing effective prevention and intervention. The present study was designed to explore the relationship between women’s empathy and their experience of violent intimate relationships. Participants were 279 women who completed online self-report measures: the Conflict Tactics Scale-2 to measure psychological, physical, and sexual relationship aggression; the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to measure four empathy subscales (Fantasy, Personal Distress, Perspective Taking, and Empathic Concern); and demographic questions. Responses were analyzed using Ward’s method of hierarchical cluster analysis, an exploratory analysis that can provide nuanced information about groups of people. Participants were clustered using the IRI subscale scores and a three cluster solution was determined to best fit the data. The empathy profiles that emerged showed 2 clusters with high scores in Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern, and Fantasy, and diverging on Personal Distress scores (cluster 1 was low, cluster 2 was high). The third cluster had relatively low scores in Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern, and Fantasy, and average Personal Distress scores. Descriptive statistics were calculated to compare clusters on abuse and demographic variables. Members of cluster 1 reported the highest rates of severe abuse, members of cluster 2 reported the lowest rates of severe abuse, and members of cluster 3 reported mid-range rates of severe abuse. Clusters were compared using ANOVA and chi-square and no significant differences were found between clusters on abuse or demographic variables.