Empathy features a tension between automaticity and context dependency. On the one hand, people often take on each other's internal states reflexively and outside of awareness. On the other hand, empathy shifts with characteristics of empathizers and situations. These 2 characteristics of empathy can be reconciled by acknowledging the key role of motivation in driving people to avoid or approach engagement with others' emotions. In particular, at least 3 phenomena-suffering, material costs, and interference with competition-motivate people to avoid empathy, and at least 3 phenomena-positive affect, affiliation, and social desirability-motivate them to approach empathy. Would-be empathizers carry out these motives through regulatory strategies including situation selection, attentional modulation, and appraisal, which alter the course of empathic episodes. Interdisciplinary evidence highlights the motivated nature of empathy, and a motivated model holds wide-ranging implications for basic theory, models of psychiatric illness, and intervention efforts to maximize empathy.

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Empathy: a motivated account.

Publisher Summary The vicarious-learning experiences and response-guidance procedures involving both symbolic and live models are utilized extensively in social learning to short-circuit the acquisition process, and to prevent one-trial extinction of the organism in potentially hazardous situations. This chapter is mainly concerned with the theoretical analysis of the process of no-trial learning, and behavioral effects of exposure to modeling stimuli. While, the perceptual and cognitive aspects of vicarious learning are given emphasis, the motivational and reinforcement variables may influence indirectly the level of response acquisition by augmenting or reducing the occurrence of requisite observing responses and facilitative covert rehearsal. Further to response learning, witnessing the reinforcement contingencies of a model is highly influential in modifying the extent to which similar existing patterns of social behavior can be exhibited by observers. The strength of inhibitory responses may likewise be significantly altered, and emotional responses may be vicariously conditioned and extinguished as a function of observing the reinforcing consequences to a model and his attendant affective reactions. The chapter identifies some of the social-learning variables determining the diverse behavioral effects on observers of exposure to socially modeled stimulus events.

Vicarious Processes: A Case of No-Trial Learning1

The influence of the posterior and inter-mediate lobe of the pituitary and pituitary peptides on the maintenance of a conditioned avoidance response in rats

Nobuya Ogawa

Papers

The effect of adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) on avoidance conditioning in the adrenalectomized rat.

Role of facial expression in "cooperative-avoidance conditioning" in monkeys.

The Development of Discriminated Autonomic and Instrumental Responses during Avoidance Conditioning in the Rhesus Monkey