Researchers at James Cook University who studied men’s empathy towards animals found higher levels in men who own pets compared to farmers and non-pet owners.
The study was published on Animal Welfare.
Different levels of empathy towards animals
Dr Jessica Oliva is a senior lecturer in psychology at JCU. You said that it is well known that women have more animal empathic (AE) feelings than men.
“Impairing the ability to experience empathic feelings in humans can have devastating effects on both animals and humans. According to studies conducted in a US population, animal abuse was committed by nearly half of all male perpetrators of intimate partner violence.
“So increasing our understanding of the role human-animal interactions play in the development of EA has far-reaching implications, particularly in males,” said Dr. Olive.
The team analyzed 91 responses from three groups of adult men: farmers, pet owners and non-pet owners.
Dr Oliva said levels of empathic feelings towards animals differed significantly between the groups, with those in the group with experience of pet ownership showing higher levels of adverse events than the other two groups.
He said the men were asked what they thought influenced their beliefs about how animals think and feel.
“Although most farmers had a college education, textbook knowledge of animal biology, sentience, and/or cognition was endorsed less by this group, suggesting they rely more on their own personal experiences,” said Dr. Oliva.
He said all three groups showed evidence that interactions with animals in adulthood were most influential in shaping their beliefs about how animals think and feel.
“Our findings support the idea that not all experiences are equal, as the responsibility and sacrifice of adults involved in caring for animals, without the expectation of financial gain, appears to be more influential on the development of empathic feelings towards animal,” said Doctor Oliva.
Are people more willing to empathize with animals or with other humans?
Stories about animals like Harambe the gorilla and Cecil the lion often captivate the media while tugging at people’s heartstrings. But are people more likely to have empathetic feelings for animals than humans?
A Penn State study led by Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and senior research fellow at the Rock Ethics Institute, found that the answer is complicated. The findings could have implications for how public communication is structured on issues such as new environmental policies, among others.
The researchers found that when people were asked to choose between empathizing with a foreign human or with an animal – in this study, a koala – participants were more likely to choose empathic feelings with another human.
In a second pair of studies, the researchers asked participants to take part in two separate tasks: one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with a person, and one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with a person. person. empathize with an animal. This time, people were more likely to choose empathetic feelings when faced with an animal than when faced with a person.
Cameron said the findings – recently published in a special issue in the Journal of Social Psychology – suggest that when people decide whether to engage in empathy, context matters.
“It’s possible that if people see humans and animals competing, that might lead them to prefer to empathize with other humans,” Cameron said. “But if you don’t see that competition, and the situation is simply deciding whether to empathize with an animal one day and a human another, it seems like people don’t want to engage in human empathy, but they’re a little a little more interested in animals.”
According to researchers, empathy is the process of thinking about another living being’s suffering and experiences as if they were your own. For example, not only feel compassion for someone who is sad after an argument with a friend, but also imagine and share what that person is feeling.
While there are many examples of people feeling empathy and compassion for animals, Cameron said there is also a theory that it may be harder for people to feel true empathy for animals because their minds are different from humans.
In the first study, researchers recruited 193 people to participate in an experiment in which they were asked to make a series of choices between empathizing with a human or an animal. If they chose a human, they were shown a photo of a college-aged adult and asked to mentally share their experience.
If they chose an animal, they were shown a photo of a koala and asked to do the same. The experiment was based on a new empathy selection task developed in Cameron’s Empathy and Moral Psychology Laboratory.
Cameron said that when participants had to choose between empathizing with a person or an animal in the first study, it’s possible that they thought it would be easier to empathize with another human.
“Participants indicated that empathizing with animals seemed more challenging, and that the belief that empathy was more difficult made them choose empathizing with animals less,” Cameron said. “It is possible that people felt that empathizing with a mind other than our own was more challenging than imagining the experience of another human being.”
In the second pair of studies, the researchers recruited an additional 192 and 197 participants, respectively, who completed a pair of choice tasks.
In the first task, participants were given the choice between empathizing with a person or not engaging in empathy and simply describing the person. Then, in a separate task, participants were given the same choice but with an animal.
“Once humans and animals were no longer competing, history changed,” Cameron said. “When people had the option to empathize or remain detached from an unfamiliar human, they avoided empathy, which replicates previous studies we have conducted. For animals, however, they did not show this pattern of avoidance. And actually, when we decoupled humans from animals, people were actually more likely to choose to empathize with an animal than with a human.”
While further studies will be needed to see whether these findings extend to other animals, Cameron said the findings could have interesting implications. For example, if it’s true that people feel less empathy for animals if animal interests are pitted against human interests, this could influence how people perceive environmental policies.
“If people perceive choices about empathy in a way that makes it seem like we must choose between humans or animals without compromise – for example, choosing between using a plot of land or preserving it for animals – they might be more likely to take sides with humans,” Cameron said. “But there may be ways in which these conversations could be modified to shape how people think about managing their empathy.”
Exploring empathy in everyday life
Researchers at the University of Toronto are studying our capacity for empathy, or our ability to sense and understand someone else’s emotions, and are debunking some common misconceptions along the way.
Their work, published in the journal Psychological Science, is potentially important because empathy is critical to maintaining meaningful and healthy relationships, making it an important part of our daily lives.
“We want to get a description of empathy by looking at it in everyday life, across different emotions and social contexts,” says Greg Depow, a Ph.D. student studying social psychology at U of T Scarborough.
“We want to study empathy more in settings closer to how it is actually experienced in real life.”
The study, co-authored by Professor Michael Inzlicht, examined perceptions of empathy in 246 American adults. Depow says one goal of the research is to fill in the gaps of previous work to offer a deeper, more authentic view of empathy. This was done by examining who is most likely to be empathetic and how often we take the opportunity to empathize every day. The research also examined the impact of empathy on subjective well-being, which is the scientific term for happiness and a sense of purpose in life.
Opportunities to empathize with others occur when observing the emotions of another person or stranger. This can be done in person or even on social media, such as when you notice a friend’s emotional state or posts.
Researchers have found that people empathize when they recognize the opportunity to do so, but they often notice the emotions of others without flagging them as opportunities for empathy.
“People saw these emotional experiences of other people, but they didn’t report them as opportunities for empathy,” Depow says. “If you dig into the numbers a little, it appears that a third of the emotions people see in everyday life are not seen as opportunities for empathy.”
Learning what differentiates missed opportunities from reported ones may be the key to learning to recognize and provide empathetic opportunities more successfully, Depow says.
“One thing I’m interested in is differentiating the missed opportunities from the ones people notice. This is important because people may miss opportunities to connect with others and promote happiness for both parties.”
While previous studies have focused on how empathy is measured based on the suffering of strangers and its effects on the empath, it turns out that people are three times more likely to empathize with positive emotions than negative ones.
“If I just look at the negative emotions that people empathize with, these are actually associated with reduced subjective well-being,” says Depow. “[Ma] because people empathize with positive emotions three times more often, overall empathy is associated with increased subjective well-being.”
Who we empathize with is also an important factor. Most studies tend to focus on how people empathize with strangers, but Depow says evidence shows that people are more likely to support those who are close to them.
He adds that trust seems to influence our experience with empathy. People who are confident in their experiences appear to experience greater levels of well-being.
“People find empathy more or less difficult in different situations and this seems to change their experience of empathy and the extent to which they feel empathy.”
Researchers have also found that feeling empathy ourselves can make us more receptive to empathizing with others. In contrast, those who empathized with others were no more or less likely to notice another opportunity to empathize with someone else.
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