THE EFFECT OF RECALLING ONE'S OWN SIMILAR

EXPERIENCES ON EMPATHIC UNDERSTANDING OF THE FEEHNG OF ANOTHER PERSON

Abstract

Understanding empathetically how another person feels is defined here as the making of his/her “psychological world” being i nfluenced by his/her affect. It is also assuming an inclusion predicting his/her behavior, sympathizing with him/her, and imaging an effective way of interaction with him/ her.
The purposes of this study are (1) to test the hypothesis that recalling one's own experience as similar to another person's in terms of its events and internal responses facilitating an empathic understanding of how he/she feels, and (2) if recalling similar experiences facilitate in fact the empathic understanding, to examine what kind of components are cansing such an effect; one component may be arousing the same valent (positive or negative) emotion, while another retrieving similar concrete individual episodes.
To accomplish these purposes, we set up three conditions: first, Gr. S, subjects were asked to remember their own experiences similar to another person's emotional experience in terms of its and internal responses; second, Gr. E, subjects were asked to remember their own experiences that were not similar to another person's in its events and internal responses, but that aroused the same valent emotion. In the third condition, Gr. G, subjects were not instructed to remember any experiences, but they were taught how to grasp gists of a story. After receiving manipulations, subjects had to Iisten to the story of a child having lost his/her littlebird1; then, subjects had to answer a questionnalre.
In the first experiment, 74 third graders (40 boys and 34 girls) were divided into three groups homogeneous by made according to their intellectual ability by their teachers. Each group received manipulations collectively. The empathic understanding score of Gr. S was significantly higher than that of Gr. E and Gr. G. This result confirmed the hypothesis; still, which component caused the effect conld not be examined, because a considerable number of subjects in Gr. E and Gr. G spontaneously remembered similar experiences.
In the second experiment, 77 third graders (38 boys and 39 girls) were divided into three homogeneous groups on the basis of vocabulary test scores and reading ability scores rated by teachers. They received more stringent manipulations in small groups consisting of five to seven subjects. As a result, the rates of subjects in Gr. E and Gr. G who spontaneously remembered similar experiences showed a decrease of about 30 per cent. The empathic understanding score of Gr. S was significantly higher than that of Gr. E and Gr. G. The result of the first experiment was confirmed. When Gr. S were compared with modified Gr. E and Gr. G where subjects who spontaneously remembered similar experiences were excluded, the empathic understanding of Gr. S scored the highest of all three groups while that of modified Gr. E proved significantly higher than that of Gr. G.
Overall results confirmed the hypothesis that recalling experiences similar to another person's facilitates the empathic understanding of how he/ she feels. Moreover such results suggest that the effect of recalling similar experiences is caused not only by an arousing of the same valent emotion but also by retrieving similar concrete and individual episodes.