Exploring the Phenomenon of Empathy

This thesis presents three studies on empathy based on qualitative and quantitative data. In Study 1, narrative accounts of empathy situations were collected to identify constituents that exist in both empathizers' and targets' experiences of empathy. From both perspectives, the constituents of empathy included the empathizer understanding the target, the target experiencing emotion, the empathizer perceiving a similarity with something the empathizer has experienced earlier, and the empathizer being concerned for the target's well-being. Study 2 consisted of experiments exploring the role of a person's actions in how empathetic the person is perceived as being. In the experiments participants read different versions of a story. The results suggested that action is crucial in the experience of empathy from both empathizer's and target's perspectives, as well as from the perspective of an unspecified observer. Study 3 explored in experiments how empathy is related to viewing another individual as a subject/object. The results revealed that subject view and perceived difficulty of the situation together explain a considerable part of differences in empathy.