Research Paper on Empathy: A Critical Component of Communication and Society

The capability of understanding how peoples feel or experience in any interaction can be referred to empathy. It is a critical component of any communication and relationship. Through empathy, individual interaction is upheld as a mutual contribution in society is attained (Beard & Christine, 2019). Although empathy is a vital component, societies today suffer from its deficit and individuals no longer pay attention to what other individuals experience or feel in society. This paper attempts to examine the level of empathy among young (between 18 and 40), and old individuals (between 41 and 60) with an aim of understanding how the level fluctuates.

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Project Contribution

This project contributes to the creation of a positive attitude towards people and situations such as the ability to understand other people's perspectives. The results of this study help to clarify the cognitive processes of the participants such as how technology, like VR, can trigger empathy. It is interesting to determine if age is one of the factors that can make people feel more emotion towards others hence understanding relations in the societies.

Abstract

This feeling (empathy) is thought to originate from two basic components; compassion or the capacity related to the same feeling which is known as emotional empathy, and cognitive empathy referring to the perspective of other individuals in the mind to understand feelings and thoughts of others. In every subgroup of primary components of empathy, there exists a subdomain known to influence the response, behaviors, volunteerism, and donations towards different persons. Measurement of empathy is through the tendency of the individual in a general conversation (traits), the response in emotions at different moments (state), or through response to individual behavior. The occurrence of this feeling is through the effect of observing physical and emotional suffering on other individuals. The feeling and reaction that follows when seeing other individuals in a similar situation one have suffered or suffering is emotional empathy. An individual, in this case, shares the same feeling and suffering as the victim which later brings an empathetic concern a subdomain of emotional empathy. Accordingly, an individual may respond by failing to regulate these empathetic feelings resulting in distress, negative emotions, and overwhelming anxiety as a result of increased pain from observing others.

Introduction

Understanding the feeling and thoughts of others is a cognitive component in expressing empathy. It involves putting oneself in the situation the other suffering mentally to be able to understand the feeling and thoughts. Aging in empathy is significant as it determines the quality of relationships among individuals; a reduced level of empathy in individuals follows increased loneliness which is a concern to the interactions in the society. The feeling is critical at all levels of society be it old or young it is important to uphold it, for instance, old individuals assume the role of caregivers for their families which requires a considerable level of empathy to be able to attend the young ones. Apparently, there is more evidence that as one age, the level of empathy also changes depending with the domain - adults experience reduced cognitive empathy (understanding the feeling and thoughts of the victim) than young individuals while showing equal or more emotional empathy levels (having compassion and emotion feeling ability for similar to the individuals suffering). Age-related neural mechanism studies reveal empathy differences among various age brackets especially the emotional empathy domain. However, old adults have been known to share feelings and emotions as compared to young adults (Wiek and Kunzmann 2015). According to Wiek and Kuzma (2015), the work performed by individual persons whether adult or young determines the level of empathy expressed. Accordingly, they suggested that young adults are more empathetic than old individuals where they both do not take part in the task, however, if they both take part in the task, older adults empathetic feeling is more than the young ones.

Related Work (Literature Review)

According to the review by Preece (1999), the achievement of empathy felt by humans is difficult as people experience empathy as a result of similar experiences by the individual or in case the individual is well known to the person. Individual experiences empathy when related to the person or in within certain social class (Segal, Gerdes, Lietz, Wagaman, and Geiger 2017). According to them, empathy towards others will only occur when they share similar feelings or under the same conditions.

As a matter of age, Richter and Guzman (2011) suggested that old individuals are prone to sharing of feelings than young adults. Accordingly, young adults have less sympathy towards other people than the adult's individual; however, according to Wiek and Kuzmann (2015), empathy depends on the task done on the victim by either old or young. A cross-sectional analysis by Rebucal, Gruhn, Diehl, Lumley, & Labouvie (2008) suggested that older adults have lower empathy feelings as compared to young adults. Additionally, they realized that empathy tasks measuring mind theory are performed easily by young adults than by old individuals (Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Philip 2008).

According to the study by Diemer, Alpers, Peperkorn, Shiban, and Muhlberger, (2015), virtual reality is said to be the perfect tool in measuring and approximating emotional and empathetic characteristics of an individual. This measure is dependent on various stimuli including the auditory, visual, olfactory, and even haptic in emotional response determination. Virtual reality according to Milk (2015) is an ultimate empathy machine as it relates direct and indirect user experiences enabling the user to taste presence in an environment. The virtual environment is useful in enabling the individual to immerse themselves inexperience in an environment created by the researcher (Tettegah, Taylor, whang, Meistenikas & Chamot, 2006). This virtual reality is essential in measuring empathy between various classes of individuals in any research topic. They are real-time; hence the live experience of an individual is possible (Tellegah et al., 2006).

Richter and Kunzmann (2011) found that older adults can share their emotions better than younger adults. Older adults also tend to show greater sympathy for other people than younger adults; however, Wieck and Kunzmann (2015) found that the difference in feeling empathy between old and young groups depends on the task performed during the experiment. They determined that if the older age group could not relate to a task, then they did not feel empathetic; however, if they felt like they could relate to it, then their empathetic feelings would be higher than in younger people.

Additionally, older adults are also able to better perform with positive valence tasks than negative valence tasks because they have difficulties when faced with negative valence content (Blanke, Rauers, & Riediger, 2015). However, Gruhn, Rebucal, Diehl, Lumley, and Labouvie-Vief (2008) found different results in their research. The results from their cross-sectional analysis mentioned that older adults have lower empathy feelings than younger adults. Furthermore, it was also found that younger adults mostly do better than older adults in an empathy task that measures theory of mind (Henry, Philips, Ruffman, & Bailey, 2013) or emotion recognition (e.g., the ability to judge others' emotion) (Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Philips, 2008).

Virtual Reality (VR) has been shown to be one of the tools that can effectively approximate emotional experiences and promote empathetic behavior. It relies on different kinds of stimuli, such as the visual, auditory, haptic, and even olfactory senses, to trigger an emotional response (Diemer, Alpers, Peperkorn, Shiban, & Muhlberger, 2015). Milk (2015) mentioned that VR can be described as the "ultimate empathy machine" because it lets its users indirectly experience situations. Such emotional responses can happen when VR enables the user to feel a sense of presence in the virtual environment. The state of consciousness when the participants are inside the virtual environment is called presence (Slater & Wilbur, 1995, p. 14). It can allow the user to understand more about other people's perspectives, rather than just their own (De la Pena, 2010). The virtual environment (VE) can be useful for enabling users to immerse themselves in an experience. Therefore, VR simulations depend on the VE that the researchers create (Tettegah, Taylor, Whang, Meistninkas, & Chamot, 2006). VR simulations to measure empathy between two different groups represent an important topic of research that benefits both the researchers and the participants. VR narratives are an excellent format as they involve real-time storytelling (Tettegah et al., 2006). In this study, the participants will be able to observe a story based on someone's lived experience, and they will be given an opportunity to observe another person's life through the medium of VR. Based on previous problems, such as the deficit in empathy and the difference in the level of empathy between older and younger adults, the difference in the state of empathy between the two groups will be measured. The research question for this study is: Are there any differences between younger and older adults on their empathy feelings toward other people featured in virtual reality?

Experimental Setup

In this research, 60 participants were recruited. The participants consisted of two different age groups: 30 young adults (18-35 years old) and 30 older participants (36-55 years old). Both groups were recruited through convenience sampling. It was necessary for participants to have a good understanding of the English language. Additionally, participants who were under psychological treatment or had serious visual or hearing impairments were excluded. For participants who require corrective eyewear (e.g., glasses), they were asked to wear contact lenses during the experiment. There were four conditions for this experiment: 15 years older adults watch the video about a younger girl, 15 years older adults watch the video about an older woman, 15 years younger adults watch the video about a younger girl, and 15 years younger adults watch the video about an older woman. Each participant was randomly assigned to one condition; either the video about a younger girl or the video about an older woman. The level of empathy was then determined with eight items measuring perspective taking (PT) and empathetic concern (EC) from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index based on Davis (1983).

PT scale measured the participants' points of view of other people's lives, and the EC scale measured the tendency to be concerned about other people. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale in which the participants were asked to answer questions on a scale from 0 to 5 with 0 beings "did not describe me well" and 5 being "described me very well." Representative items included "I feel touched by this girl's situation" for EC and "I felt as if I was in this girl's shoes" for PT. Davis stated that all scales have an internal reliabilities from .71 to .77 (Davis, 1983). The virtual environment was created with Unity 2018. 2. 14f1. The environment created looked like an empty street with either a homeless girl or woman sitting on the side of the street. The avatar (i.e., a woman and a girl) was created with MakeHuman and Mixamo, and the street was made with the "The Wasteland" asset in Unity. The participants were allowed to read a life story that was adapted from "Homeless People - Story" in ord...