Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 289

In the same vein, different components of empathy have been measured through
different tools, such as self-reports, and physiological measures 2 (e.g., Eisenberg

et al. 1987 ; Krebs 1975 ).
Daniel Batson, in particular, who described empathy as “feeling a vicarious
emotion that is congruent with but not necessarily identical to the emotion of
another”, 3 analyzes participants' reactions to an (emotionally involving stimulus sit-
uation by means of a 24-item scale, namely, the Emotional Response Questionnaire.
These stimulus situations can be represented by written narratives or audiotape
recordings, followed by ratings scales. This method has the advantage of being easy
to administer and makes it possible to focus on a large range of “vicarious emotions”
(Batson et al. 1997b ).
Batson, who focused most of his 20-year research program on empathy, altruism,
and prosocial behavior, also proposes that “a distinction should be made between
different emotional reactions” to seeing another person in need. In different studies,
in fact (Batson et al. 1997a , b ), factor analyses of participants' emotional responses
revealed a consistent tendency for the different sets of emotions to separate
orthogonal factors. According to Batson et al. 2012 , these distinct emotional
responses can lead to qualitatively different kinds of motivation to help: personal
distress produces an egoistic desire to reduce one's own distress, while empathy is
related to an altruistic desire to reduce the distress of a person in need. The assertion
that feeling empathic emotions for someone in need evokes altruistic motivation to
relieve that need has been called by Batson the empathy-altruism hypothesis (Coke
et al. 1978; Batson et al. 1997b ). More recently, other components of empathy have
been individuated, namely, parallel empathy, which refers to one's ability to feel the
same emotions as another person, and pure empathy, which is a generic feeling of
concern for another's plight (Batson 2012 ; Serino and Marzano 2007).

2 Often, researchers interested in empathy refer to the use of physiological indexes, based on
changes in the reactions of the autonomic nervous system, such as perspiration, vasoconstriction,
heartbeat, and so on. Those procedures are usually used for the study of emotions in general and
are useful because they are free from biases related to social desirability and self-presentation
strategies.
Another interesting field of research that is gaining popularity is the one proposed by Gallese
et al. ( 2004 ). The authors have discovered a class of neurons, called mirror neurons , situated in the
F5 area, that are activated when monkeys perform a specific action and when they observe another
individual (monkey or human) performing the same action. This system seems to exist also in
human beings, and a corpus of study is dedicated to analyzing whether those neurons are somehow
implicated in the capacity of comprehending or sharing another person's emotional states.
Even though the study of mirror neurons has achieved (in a short time) very interesting results,
those studies are still far from providing an exhaustive explanation of how empathy develops.
In fact, this perspective does not explain how those neurons act in relation to so-called social
emotions, such as, for example, shame or jealousy. Moreover, they do not explain how these
involuntary and automatic levels interact with more complex processes, such as the cognitive
attribution that occurs in role playing. In this sense, alternative approaches need to be developed,
especially those considering the integrative use of those measures and self-reports or self-ratings.
3 In another paper, Batson defined empathy as “an other oriented emotional response elicited by
and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone else” (Batson et al. 2002 , p. 486).