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Conceptualizing and experiencing compassion.

Paul Condon1, Lisa Feldman Barrett

  • 1Department of Psychology, Northeastern University.

Emotion (Washington, D.C.)
|August 7, 2013
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Westerners view compassion as pleasant, but experiencing it, especially when witnessing suffering, can feel unpleasant. This study distinguishes between conceptualizing compassion and the actual emotional experience.

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Area of Science:

  • Psychology
  • Emotion Science
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Western cultures often categorize compassion as a positive emotion.
  • Laboratory inductions of compassion, involving exposure to suffering, may evoke negative affect.
  • A discrepancy may exist between the conceptual understanding and felt experience of compassion.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the conceptualization of compassion as pleasant differs from the subjective experience of compassion.
  • To examine the affective qualities associated with compassion inductions in a laboratory setting.

Main Methods:

  • Two studies were conducted using laboratory-based neutral and compassion inductions.
  • Participants provided abstract judgments of compassion against emotion-related adjectives to assess conceptualization.
  • Participants rated their affective states to measure the experience of compassion.

Main Results:

  • Conceptualizations of compassion remained pleasant regardless of induction type.
  • Compassion inductions led to increased compassion and unpleasant affect, but not pleasant affect.
  • Neutral inductions resulted in more pleasant than unpleasant affect, with moderate compassion.

Conclusions:

  • Prototypical conceptualizations of compassion are consistently pleasant.
  • The subjective experience of compassion can be either pleasant or unpleasant, depending on the context.
  • Findings have implications for general emotion theory and understanding affective responses to suffering.