Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 287

one more abstract and the other more clinically applied. At the most abstract
level, empathy was defined as “vicarious introspection” ( 1959 ). In a more applied
definition, Kohut ( 1984 ) stated that empathy “is the capacity to think and feel oneself
into the inner life of another person” (p. 82). 1
In sum, in psychology as in aesthetics, empathy has been seen as a way
of knowing and understanding another person or an object. However, unlike in
aesthetics, empathy as a psychological concept has been approached by researchers
with an empirical perspective.
Although since the contributions of Rogers and Kohut the concept of empathy
has been appreciated particularly in psychotherapy, in fact (cf. Barrett-Lennard
1981 ; Bohart and Greenberg 1997 ; Duan and Hill 1996 ; Gladstein 1977), it has
evolved in many ways during the last century, and a substantial body of research
has been generated in recent decades on how empathy relates to child cognitive
development (Hoffman 1977 ), altruism (Batson 1991 ), attribution (Regan and
Totten 1975 ), social judgment (Krulewitz 1982 ), intergroup relations (Finlay and
Stephan 2000 ; Stephan and Finlay 1999 ), and others. Such a broad interest supports
the claim that empathy forms the very basis of all human interaction and is
“an essential constituent” (Kohut 1959 , p. 462) of all psychological phenomena.
However, such a diversity of attention may have also contributed to the fact that the
study of empathy has been characterized by a large amount of theoretical positions
and inconsistent, even confusing, results about its nature , a dimension along which
empathy has been defined (Bonino et al. 1998 ; Duan and Hill 1996 ).
Centuries ago and a century apart, Smith (1759) and Spencer (1870) identified
two broad classes of responses: a cognitive , intellectual reaction on the one hand
(an ability to understand another person's perspective) and a more instinctive ,
emotional reaction on the other. In various forms, this fundamental distinction has
been maintained: psychological research on empathy, in fact, has typically been
based on one or the other of these general definitions, and in recent decades, the
psychological nature of empathy has become a central topic, including for social
psychologists.
In particular, already in the first half of the last century psychoanalysts and
social psychologists had highlighted the role of affective dimensions of empathy
in interpersonal relations, considering such a construct a process of emotional
activation, more or less voluntary, in some cases innate, involved in the sharing
of another's experiences. Theories on the nature of empathy were largely influenced
by the affective views of Lipps and Titchener until Kohler ( 1929 ), who was one
of the first researchers to take on the topic in a more cognitive vein. Rather
than continuing to focus on “feeling into” the experiences of another, in fact,
1 Kohut ( 1984 ) affirms that empathy is useful not only within the therapeutic context but also in
everyday life, especially within family relationships. The author gives the example of a mother
who must feel what her child is feeling to understand and reassure him or her. If we persistently
deny empathy to a child, his or her psychological development will be endangered.