Empathy and distress: Internal and external context dependency of emotion term selection

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between thought, emotion, and language in the case of empathy and distress within C.D. Batson’s Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis. The main hypothesis was that there would be significant differences in how emotion terms for empathy and distress would be processed by participants differentially conditioned to feel either empathy or distress. The secondary hypothesis was that only the emotion terms with high corpus frequency, high measures of familiarity within target population, and with manifest affective meaning component would differ significantly between the experimental conditions. The main hypothesis was partially confirmed. It was found that participants in the empathy condition processed distress terms with more accuracy and speed than they did empathy terms. Furthermore the rates of overall accuracy were significantly higher in the empathy condition than in the distress condition. The secondary hypothesis was confirmed. Items ranking high in frequency and familiarity, as well as conveying a clearly defined affective meaning component were processed significantly more accurately than the low-frequency, low-familiarity, not manifestly affective terms. The overall conclusions indicate that many contextual factors including both the external reality and the internal mental context influence the choice of emotion terms for specific feelings.