Empathy as “Feelingly Grasping” Perhaps the central question concerning empathy is if and if so how it combines aspects of thinking and feeling. Indeed, the intellectual tradition of the past centuries has been marked by a dualism. Roughly speaking, there have been two pathways when it comes to understanding each other: 1) thinking or mind reading and 2) feeling or empathy. Nonetheless, one of the ongoing debates in psychology and philosophy concerns the question whether these two abilities, namely, understanding what (...) the other is thinking and “understanding” what the other is feeling, are separate or not. Most of the authors in this volume consider the cognitive and affective dimensions at work within empathy. Each author does this within and beyond their own field. Coming from the humanities, we propose the following definition for empathy: Empathy is a social feeling that consists in feelingly grasping or retracing the present, future, or past emotional state of the other; thus empathy is also called a vicarious emotion. We would like to highlight two aspects of this definition in particular: 1.) the peculiar position of “grasping” which involves a cognitive dimension and 2.) the social dimensions of relating to the emotions of another human being. (shrink)

American History X (hereafter AHX) has been accused by numerous critics of a morally dangerous cinematic seduction: using stylish cinematography, editing, and sound, the film manipulates the viewer through glamorizing an immoral and hate-filled neo-nazi protagonist. In addition, there’s the disturbing fact that the film seems to accomplish this manipulation through methods commonly grouped under the category of “fascist aesthetics.” More specifically, AHX promotes its neo-nazi hero through the use of several filmic techniques made famous by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. (...) Now most critics admit that, in the end, the film claims to denounce racism and attempts to show us the conversion of the protagonist to the path of righteousness, but they complain that nonetheless the film (perhaps unintentionally) ends up implicitly promoting the immoral worldview it rather superficially professes to reject in its final act. This charge of hypocrisy is connected to another worry: the moral conversion in the film is said to fall flat because the intellectual resources on display to support the character’s racism are not counterbalanced by equally explicit (but superior) arguments for the anti-racist position ultimately embraced by the character. In other words, just as the devil is said to get all the good lines in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in AHX the racists get all the arguments. This has been taken to be a morally problematic flaw of the film. Critics lament that Derek’s conversion seems to result not from relevant logical inferences and valid rational argumentation but from overly simplistic and arguably egoistic insights (e.g., “has anything you've done made your life better?”) combined, perhaps, with a hackneyed cliché (in prison, one of his best friends is a black person!) In this paper I’ll attempt to rebut these charges and defend the film as a powerful, and powerfully moral, work of art. I’ll be suggesting that the seductive techniques employed allow for many viewers a degree of sympathy towards the protagonist that is crucial, both for making that character’s more horrific actions especially unsettling, and also for making his eventual conversion plausible and ultimately compelling. I’ll also argue that the manner in which his conversion is presented is in fact subtler than many critics have allowed: Derek’s transformation is not artificial or implausible but is depicted as resulting from a cumulative series of emotionally powerful life events and personal engagements. It is certainly true that it is not represented in the way some would seemingly have preferred, i.e. as straightforwardly resulting from a process of gradual intellectual improvement in Derek’s reasoning on questions of race and politics. However, I’ll argue that the decidedly emotional basis of his moral evolution is both refreshingly realistic and no hindrance to accepting his conversion as rational. Finally, properly understanding the legitimacy of the emotional foundations of much moral thought will also allow us to appreciate the ways in which our initial worries about this film’s (not insignificant) ability to persuade viewers through the engagement of emotions need not, in itself, be seen as a barrier to endorsing the film as a morally praiseworthy work. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary theory defending the view that engagement with literature promotes readers’ empathy. Until the last century, few of the empirical claims adduced in that tradition were investigated experimentally. Recent work in psychology and neuropsychology has now shed new light on the interplay of empathy and literature. This article surveys the experimental findings, addressing three central questions: What is it to read empathically? Does reading make us more empathic? What characteristics of literature, if (...) any, affect readers’ empathy? While experimental studies have delivered no conclusive answers to these questions, it has exposed their psychological complexity and constructed a more nuanced picture of the diverse ways in which literature interacts with our empathic capacities. (shrink)

With its minimalist narrative and long durational recordings of a family living on the margins of modern society and drifting around deserted urban spaces in Taiwan, Stray Dogs ( Jiaoyou, Tsai Ming-liang, 2013) provides a productive reading of cinematic slowness and a critique of the globalising domination of capitalism and neoliberalism in a locally and culturally specific context. This article examines how the representation of cinematic slowness in Stray Dogs encompasses both a narrative that requires the audience’s sympathetic and intellectual (...) understanding and a durational perception of time that calls for empathy and intuition. Moreover, this article aims to reveal how the film’s temporal illegibility, resulting from its radical use of long takes and unresolved differentiation between the past and the present, transforms a prolonged hesitant moment into an act of resistance against the ongoing capitalist and neoliberal standardisation, rationalisation and homogenisation of time’s, or more specifically duration’s, heterogenous nature. By exploring the potential of ethical hesitation and political resistance, underscored by slow aesthetics such as the use of long takes, this article aims to make the case for a specific and unique understanding of slowness as a philosophical signifier of empathy. (shrink)

Critics of empathy argue that empathy is exhausting, easily manipulated, exacerbates rather than relieves conflict, and is too focused on individual experiences. Apparently, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts like sadism, bullying, and terrorism, it motivates and promotes such acts. These scholars argue that empathy will not save us from partisanship and division. In fact, it might make us worse off. I will argue that empathy exhibits bias in the ways critics describe because empathy is motivated. Conceiving of (...) empathy as motivated leads to surprising conclusions about our tools for moral decision‐making. (shrink)

Most analytical philosophers consider that we cannot identify with fictional characters in a literal sense. Specifically, Carroll and Gaut argue that doing so would imply a high degree of irrationality. In this paper I stand for the claim that we can identify with fictional characters thanks to a suspension of disbelief. First, I rely on narrative theories of personal identity to propose a model of how the process of identification might happen in real life. Then, I explain how this model (...) can be adapted to account for the suspension of disbelief that occurs in the special case of identification with fictional characters. (shrink)

Patricia Highsmith’s stated reason for writing The Talented Mr. Ripley was to see if she could elicit empathetic engagement for her immoral protagonist Tom Ripley. Amongst other factors, she achieves her goal by allowing readers to align affectively with the protagonist’s road to self-discovery. Her experiment culminates with Tom’s fruition into an aggressive consumer, thus resolving his and the readers’ apprehensions. On the other hand, Anthony Minghella’s Ripley leaves more room for interpretation. In his interviews, the filmmaker states that he (...) does not aim for his protagonist to remain the sociopath from Highsmith’s novel. Instead, his story explores the absence of a father figure and how it affects his main characters. Consequently, he frames Tom as an underprivileged youth whose emotional instability brings about his demise. To this end, he employs victimization scenes, as well as moral disengagement cues. I argue that, amongst other factors, such an application of an industry-tested design of emphatic concern elicitation obscures the filmmaker’s initial intent. As a result, Minghella’s Tom can be seen as a manipulative sociopath, as well as a victimized tragic hero. (shrink)

The article investigates the autobiographical aspects of Ryszard Kapuściński’s reportage pieces. The journalist’s complete works provide the material for this study. Autobiographism is understood here broadly, not only as the presence of a selfnarrative in the documentary accounts, but also as the implicit influence of the foreign correspondent’s life experiences on his interpretation of the events he reports. Kapuściński’s work early was primarily influenced by the experiences of poverty during the Second World War and the post-war period, the post-war loss (...) of his little homeland as Poland entered the orbit of the Soviet Union’s influence, as well as his involvement in a socialist youth organization. These personal experiences constitute an important context for the interpretation of his works, which is shown using examples from his reports. (shrink)

This paper presents a new, third-personal account of empathy that characterizes empathy as being sensitive to others’ concerns as opposed to remaining stuck in one’s egocentric perspective on the world. The paper also demonstrates why this account is preferable to its two main rivals, namely the simulation theory of empathy, and the direct perception theory of empathy.

This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the most semantically distinctive feature of (...) the sentences of fiction is that they are unambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and isn't in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition. (shrink)

This essay tries to categorize the range of artistic options that filmmakers currently have at hand to evoke bodily disgust. It asks: If we examine the variety of disgusting scenes at the movies, how can we usefully distinguish them? I present five categorical distinctions indicating choices filmmakers often implicitly make when disgust comes into play. (1) Temporality: Does the filmmaker confront us with the disgusting object suddenly or anticipatorily ? (2) Presence: Does the director allow us to perceive or imagine (...) the source of disgust? (3) Character engagement: Are we affected via empathy or sympathy ? (4) Synaesthetic audiovision: What other senses – apart from seeing and hearing – does the scene address? (5) Affective co-occurrence: What other emotions come into play during the disgusting scene? It will turn out that cinematic disgust is not as simple as it might seem at first sight. In fact, we might even attest to its unforeseen complexity. This unorthodox finding, in turn, complements an insight recent studies on affective responses at the movies have yielded more generally: the more we know about cinematic emotions, the more we have to conclude that we still know very little. (shrink)

Les théoriciens sémantistes de la fiction cherchent typiquement à expliquer nos relations sémantiques au fictionnel dans le contexte plus général des théories de la référence, privilégiant une explication de la sémantique sur le psychologique. Dans cet article, nous défendons une dépendance inverse. Par l’éclaircissement de nos relations psychologiques au fictionnel, nous trouverons un guide pour savoir comment développer une sémantique de la fiction. S’ensuivra une esquisse de la sémantique.

How good are we at imagining what it is like to be someone else? Clearly, we sometimes get it right. Proponents of empathy suggest that it is an important and useful tool in our interactions with other people. But, also clearly, there are many inauspicious instances where we badly misimagine what it is like to be someone else. In this paper, I consider the epistemic utility of empathic imagination. I argue that most views fail to explain the distinctive patterns of (...) success and failure of empathic imagination, and I put forward a view that seems to offer the best explanation of those patterns. (shrink)

Sympathy (empathic concern) is mainly understood as a feeling for another and is often contrasted with empathy—a feeling with another. However, it is not clear what feeling for another means and what emotions sympathy involves. Since empirical data suggests that sympathy plays an important role in our social lives and is more closely connected to helping behavior than empathy, we need a more detailed account. In this paper, I argue that sympathy is not a particular emotion but a type of (...) emotional experience: those that have another person as focus. I explain what this means and show that this sheds light on why sympathy, rather than empathy, directly motivates altruistic actions. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss some differences between empathy with real persons and empathy with fictional characters. Philosophers who have thought about th.

Good actors appear to become their characters, making them come alive, as if they were real. Is this because they have succeeded in merging themselves with their character? Are there any positive or negative psychological effects of this experience? We examined the role of three characteristics that may make this kind of merging possible: dissociation, flow, and empathy. We also examined the relation of these characteristics to acting quality. Acting students and non-acting students completed a dissociation measure, and then performed (...) a monologue that was recorded and rated on the dimensions of acting. Participants were then reassessed on dissociation to determine whether it increased as a function of performance. They were also then assessed on flow and empathy. Actors did not differ from non-actors on dissociation, but did score significantly higher than non-actors on some flow and empathy subscales, indicating a positive psychological experience and outcome. While non-actors’ dissociation marginally increased post-performance, actors’ dissociation rose significantly, which could indicate a negative psychological experience. Surprisingly, acting ratings were unrelated to the levels of dissociation, flow, or empathy. We concluded that, while these are tools used by actors to immerse themselves fully in their characters, they may not be necessary to create the illusion of an imaginary character come to life on stage. (shrink)

In contemporary discourses, it has become common sense to acknowledge that humans and some species of animals, from their very inception, are embedded in social and intersubjective contexts. As social beings, we live, interact, communicate, and cooperate with others for a range of different reasons: sometimes we do so for strategic and instrumental reasons, while at other times it is purely for its own sake. Moreover, in one way or another, we encounter others not only as rational but also as (...) sentient beings; our interactions with others are shaped by reason, though not exclusively so. They are also affected by our emotions, feelings, moods, and environments. In this way, we seek understanding both for and by others. We are able to recognize, interpret, and categorize others’ expression and behavior; in turn, we express our emotions, desires, and motivations to act towards others and hope that others will react adequately and appropriately. Empathy is usually understood as the capacity to apprehend others’ mental states—especially emotions. In recent decades, it has become one of the most widely discussed concepts, especially in the philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. Although there is a vast array of publications on the topic of empathy, a number of controversies have persisted, particularly in relation to how the process, outcome, and value of empathy should be understood. One recent debate concerns the question of whether we directly perceive others’ mental states or whether we rather imagine their perspective. Another central discussion is ongoing regarding empathy in respect of narratives and fictional characters. The aim of this Special Issue is to interrelate these two branches—fiction and imagination—and to examine the role of imagination in the empathic process, especially in relation to the thesis of direct perception of others’ mental states. Despite the wealth of recent research into empathy that has emerged from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, there is still no consensus about the nature and role of imagination and whether empathizing with fictions should be categorically or just gradually distinguished from empathizing with real persons. (shrink)

Drawing on what we know about priming effects, informational encapsulation, lucid dreaming, imaginative practice, and the “mirror box” illusion, this article argues that self-reflexive fictions may enhance our capacity for simultaneous belief and disbelief, a capacity of surprising importance for human flourishing.

When individuals read literary fiction, contemplate philosophical arguments, view art, or listen to music, they experience emotions that vary in both valence and intensity. Engagement with the humanities can enhance individual emotional intelligence (EI) and well-being. This narrative review proposes links between engagement with literary fiction, moral philosophy, visual art, and music with EI and well-being. The work details the mechanisms by which (i) literary fiction increases the ability to perceive emotions, (ii) moral philosophy improves the use of emotions for (...) ethical decision-making, (iii) visual art elevates the ability to understand emotion, and (iv) music enhances the ability to manage emotions. The concluding section presents theoretical implications and practical suggestions for designing interventions that promote EI and flourishing. (shrink)

How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an (...) intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing. (shrink)

Are horror films immoral? Gianluca Di Muzio argues that horror films of a certain kind are immoral because they undermine the reactive attitudes that are responsible for human agents being disposed to respond compassionately to instances of victimization. I begin with this argument as one instance of what I call the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA), and I argue that Di Muzio’s attempt to identify what is morally suspect about horror films must be revised to provide the most persuasive interpretation (...) of the ARA. I then argue that the ARA provides a compelling standard for evaluating the moral permissibility of creating and viewing horror films, yet I note that it is an exceedingly difficult practical task evaluating the risk that these films create for our reactive attitudes. My conclusion is that the ARA provides a useful way or orienting ourselves to the complicated details of evaluating the moral status of horror films. (shrink)

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the (...) idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)

Mindreading, simulation, empathy and central imagining are often used interchangeably in current analytic philosophy, and typically defined as imagining what the other wants and believes – to run these states “off-line.” By imagining the other’s beliefs and desires, one will come to understand and predict his emotional and behavioural reactions. Many have suggested that films may trigger engagement in the characters’ perspectives, and one finds similar use of these terms in film theory. Imagining the characters’ states – with emphasis on (...) mental states – has for example been labelled as central imagining (Choi 2005; Smith 1995), imagining from the inside (Smith 1997), and empathetic reenactment (Currie 1995). In a similar vein, understanding the meaning of a narrative event for a character is understood as empathy (Tan 1996). These accounts all point to ways in which the spectator understands the character and the situation the character is in. Nevertheless, one also finds a different use of the term empathy in film theory, namely as a matching feeling with the character. The emphasis here is not on understanding the character and the narrative situation, but on the emotional output of the process. Often automatic, hardwired affective matching mechanisms are emphasized. This matching feeling with the character has also been discussed as empathy (Grodal 1997; Plantinga 1999; Smith 1995). While all these authors discuss what makes a spectator experience aspects of a character’s state, they point to different kinds of character engagement, and discuss it using varying terms. There also seems to be disagreement as to how film may cue the spectator to engage in these different ways. Here I offer an integrative account of empathy, where all these processes are labelled as empathic. The differences and similarities between them are explored. I argue that, broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of film, each of which elicits its own kind of empathy. Nevertheless, the common core to these kinds of engagement in a character justifies us in calling them empathy. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

How do participating in a work of fiction and imagining a fictional world intertwine with the reader’s life? I develop an account that explores the relation between fiction reading and the reader’s narrative identity. Starting with an investigation of Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity and of Kendall Walton’s account of the nature of representations, I develop my own model of fiction reading. My account is based on two starting assumptions: first, that human beings are entangled in stories, and second, (...) that emotions are complex and have a narrative structure. I argue that during the reading process, the fiction reader creates her own narratives which contain not only the story provided by the work of fiction, but also event sequences from their own experiential memories. I investigate the creation and the influence of self-conscious emotions which are generated during the reading process, especially when a reader identifies with a fictional character from within. I consider how and why these fiction-induced emotions can continue after the reading is finished, and how these emotions can motivate the reader to engage in self-reflection and to refigure her self-narrative. My account examines a new topic: the interactive influence of fiction reading and the fiction reader’s narrative identity. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to argue that empathy is an intellectual virtue. Empathy enables agents to gain insight into other people’s emotions and beliefs. The agent who possesses this trait is: (i) driven to engage in acts of empathy by her epistemic desires; (ii) takes pleasure in doing so; (iii) is competent at the activity characteristic of empathy; and, (iv) has good judgment as to when it is epistemically appropriate to engage in empathy. After establishing that empathy meets (...) all the necessary conditions to be classified as an intellectual virtue, we proceed to discuss Battaly’s argument according to which empathy is a skill rather than a virtue. We contend, contra Battaly, that the agent who possesses the virtue of empathy: (a) sometimes foregoes opportunities to engage in the activity characteristic of empathy because it is the virtuous thing to do, (b) does not make deliberate errors, and (c) her actions are always ultimately aiming at epistemic goods. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse whether empathy with future generations is feasible and whether it is a potentially useful instrument in effectively providing resources for future generations. I argue that empathy with future generations is possible, that it likely leads to a form of minimal concern, and that it can help in solving the relevant motivational problem. The most significant hurdle is not so much to do with achieving the required normative recognition of future generations, but with epistemic problems regarding (...) the right actions in protecting future interests and needs. Empathy can again be of help in this regard, but it would need to be successfully trained and supported. We need to stretch our empathy to non-existing people and we need to constrain our imagination in adequate ways to achieve a sufficient understanding of the perspectives of future people. (shrink)

Summary The term empathy has become a linguistic commonplace in everyday communication as well as in interdisciplinary research. The results of the research questions, raised in the last hundred (and more) years, coming from different areas, such as aesthetics, psychology, neurosciences and literary theory, lack in fact a clear concept of empathy. Not surprisingly, a recent paper has identified up to 43 distinct definitions of empathy in academic publications. By reconstructing the main research lines on empathy, our paper highlights the (...) reasons for this conceptual inadequacy and the deficiencies in the theorization of empathy that create misleading interpretations thereof. Along the line connecting Plato’s insights on empathic experiences to the present neuroscientific experiments, a broad spectrum of issues is deployed for which “empathy” functions as an umbrella term covering a net of categorical relationships – projection, transfer, association, expression, animation, anthropomorphization, vivification, fusion, and sympathy – that only partially overlap. Our paper therefore recommends that “empathy” should not be assumed as a self-evident notion but instead preliminarily clarified in its definition every time we decide to have recourse to it. (shrink)

It is commonly presupposed that there are no decisive differences between empathy with fictional characters on one hand and empathy with real persons on the other. I distinguish two types of processes of affect recognition "Perceptual Affect Recognition" and "Affective Affect Recognition". The consensus view about empathy with fictional characters has to be challenged if "empathy" refers to the former or the latter process because of the significant differences between the fictional and the non-fictional scenario: firstly, readers as "empathizers" cannot (...) perceive the fictional target person directly but only the literary text. This is especially problematic for Affective State Recognition. Secondly, fictional characters do not exist, at least not in the sense that they are real people or entities with mental states which leads to relevant differences of the accuracy conditions of Affective Affect Recognition in the fictional and the nonfictional scenario. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that identification and self-referencing can both function as mechanisms of narrative persuasion. However, it is not yet clear whether they are compatible and can work together in bringing about persuasive effects of narratives, or not. Therefore, this study examines both identification and self-referencing and studies their relation and effects. A 2x2 between-subjects experiment was conducted among 185 student participants, with the factors ‘perspective’ (1st vs. 3rd person) to influence identification and ‘similarity’ (young student protagonist vs. older (...) working protagonist) to influence self-referencing. Results showed that identification mediated indirect effects of perspective on story-consistent belief and self-referencing mediated indirect effects of similarity on story-consistent belief. Moreover, identification and self-referencing serially mediated indirect effects on story-consistent belief. These results indicate that identification and self-referencing are compatible processes which can work together as mechanisms of narrative persuasion. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art on the question of whether we can acquire knowledge about the world from works of art. However, little has been written on the effects that art has on cultivating self-knowledge and self-development. While, for most of us, it seems obvious that art has these effects, little is known about how and why these effects occur. Addressing this issue is the main aim of this paper. The gist of (...) the argument is that narrative art provides a unique opportunity to adopt a dual (first- and third-personal) perspective on the self, which is argued recently by psychologists and philosophers of mind to be necessary for obtaining the kind of self-knowledge that leads to self-development and self-change, that is, therapeutic self-knowledge. (shrink)