Empathy and Compassion as the Radical Behaviorist Views it: A Conceptual Analysis

Compassionate care and therapeutic relationships have been the subject of applied behavior analytic (ABA) research over the last few years (Rohrer et al., 2021; LeBlanc et al., 2020; Taylor et al., 2019). Although these are foundational values within ABA, there has been a renewed focus on them and interest in how they can be effectively taught and trained. The majority of this work has introduced and topographically analyzed component skills that embody the definition of compassion and empathy (Rohrer et al., 2021; Taylor et al., 2019). These discussions have provided much needed introspection and evaluation into an area not previously researched in ABA and provides some additional social validity and growth to the field. However, compassion and empathy have yet to be conceptually analyzed from a radical behavioral framework. This article analyzed these constructs using the concept analysis framework (Mager, 1997) to form a radical behavioral conceptualization that outlines critical attributes comprising both compassion and empathy. From this, we offer a distinct view of empathy and compassion as separate, but often yoked, contingencies. This refinement has the potential to further guide teaching and supervision to shape behavior analysts' skill sets in compassionate care.