Expanding the Limits of Compassion: A Motivated Emotion Regulation Account of Compassion Collapse

扩大同情心的限度：同情心崩溃的动机性情绪调节解释

• 批准号: 1450943
• 负责人: Christopher Cameron
• 金额: $ 33.68万
• 依托单位: University of Iowa
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-15 至 2017-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1450943&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Expanding; Limits; Compassion; Motivated; Emotion

Compassion -- an emotion that motivates people to care about and relieve the suffering of others -- can lead to charity, cooperation, and forgiveness. Yet compassion is susceptible to a surprising bias: people typically feel more compassion for one victim than many victims. This compassion collapse is compelling scientifically, because it conflicts with how people think they would and should respond to mass suffering, and socially, because it highlights barriers to compassionate action. Why does compassion collapse occur? According to the motivated emotion regulation account developed by Daryl Cameron (University of Iowa) and colleagues, compassion collapse results from motivated choices to avoid compassion for multiple victims because of anticipated costs. For example, people might worry that attending to the suffering of many victims will be more emotionally overwhelming than that of a single victim, and therefore proactively down-regulate compassion to avoid emotional exhaustion. The proposed research will test this theoretical model of compassion collapse. A first series of studies will examine how anticipated affective costs -- i.e., the fear of being emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed by compassion -- can motivate emotion regulation processes that create compassion collapse. A second set of studies will test whether shifting these motivations can reverse compassion collapse. These results would further our understanding of the motivational influences on moral outcomes. Given that compassion collapse may influence pro-social behavior, philanthropy and policy decisions, it is important to understand why this effect occurs and how to mitigate its effects.Previous research by this research team has shown that motivated emotion regulation contributes to compassion collapse. Building on this work, the proposed research will examine how the affective costs of compassion predict spontaneous use of emotion regulation processes, and how this in turn leads to increased compassion collapse for multiple (vs. single) victims of a crisis. These experiments will examine emotion regulation in three ways: employment of strategies to avoid or limit exposure to information about victims; use of the psychophysiological measure of respiratory sinus arrhythmia as a marker of autonomic emotion regulation; and through manipulation of the emotion regulation strategy of reappraisal. The proposed research will also test manipulations designed to increase one's motivation to feel compassion, and therefore reverse compassion collapse. This will be done by increasing the perception that compassion is healthy; decreasing the perception that compassion has a limited capacity; activating the moral self-concept; and increasing self-compassion. Together, this research can make transformative advances in the science of compassion by revealing how motivation shapes the use of emotion regulation to create compassion collapse. By testing strategies to reverse compassion collapse, this research may have implications for increasing compassion and philanthropy toward challenging social problems in the real world.

同情心--一种激励人们关心和减轻他人痛苦的情感--可以带来慈善、合作和宽恕。然而，同情容易受到一种令人惊讶的偏见的影响：人们对一个受害者的同情通常比对许多受害者的同情更多。这种同情心的崩溃在科学上是令人信服的，因为它与人们认为他们应该和应该对大规模苦难做出反应的方式相冲突，也与社会冲突，因为它突显了同情心行动的障碍。为什么会发生同情心崩溃？根据爱荷华大学的达里尔·卡梅隆和他的同事开发的动机情绪调节账户，同情心崩溃的原因是出于预期成本，为了避免对多个受害者抱有同情心而做出的动机选择。例如，人们可能担心，与单个受害者相比，照顾许多受害者的痛苦会在情感上更具压倒性，因此主动下调同情心，以避免情感枯竭。这项拟议的研究将检验这一同情崩溃的理论模型。第一系列研究将考察预期的情感成本--即对情绪疲惫和被同情心压垮的恐惧--如何激发情绪调节过程，从而导致同情心崩溃。第二组研究将测试改变这些动机是否可以扭转同情心的崩溃。这些结果将加深我们对动机对道德结果的影响的理解。考虑到同情心崩溃可能会影响亲社会行为、慈善和政策决策，理解这种效应发生的原因以及如何减轻其影响是很重要的。该研究小组之前的研究表明，动机情绪调节有助于同情心崩溃。在这项工作的基础上，这项拟议的研究将研究同情心的情感成本如何预测情绪调节过程的自发使用，以及这如何反过来导致危机中多个(而不是单个)受害者的同情心崩溃。这些实验将通过三种方式检查情绪调节：采用避免或限制接触受害者信息的策略；使用呼吸窦性心律失常的心理生理学测量作为自主情绪调节的标志；以及通过操纵重新评估的情绪调节策略。这项拟议的研究还将测试旨在增加一个人感受同情心的动机的操作，从而扭转同情心的崩溃。这将通过增加同情是健康的认知，减少同情能力有限的认知，激活道德自我概念，以及增加自我同情来实现。总而言之，这项研究可以通过揭示动机如何影响情绪调节的使用来造成同情心崩溃，从而在同情心科学方面取得革命性的进展。通过测试扭转同情心崩溃的策略，这项研究可能会对增加同情心和慈善事业、挑战现实世界中的社会问题产生影响。