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

同情心--一种激励人们关心和减轻他人痛苦的情感--可以导致慈善、合作和宽恕。然而，同情心容易受到一个令人惊讶的偏见的影响：人们通常对一个受害者比许多受害者更同情。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会和应该如何应对大规模痛苦相冲突，而在社会上，因为它突出了同情行动的障碍。为什么同情心会崩溃？根据达里尔卡梅隆（爱荷华州大学）及其同事开发的动机性情绪调节账户，同情心崩溃是由于预期成本而避免同情多个受害者的动机性选择的结果。例如，人们可能会担心，照顾多个受害者的痛苦会比照顾一个受害者的痛苦更让人情绪激动，因此主动下调同情心，以避免情绪枯竭。这项拟议中的研究将测试同情心崩溃的理论模型。第一系列的研究将研究预期的情感成本--即，害怕被同情心耗尽和压倒--可以激发情绪调节过程，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。这些结果将进一步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，慈善事业和政策决定，重要的是要了解为什么会发生这种影响以及如何减轻其影响。该研究小组以前的研究表明，有动机的情绪调节有助于同情心崩溃。在这项工作的基础上，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，以及这反过来如何导致危机中多个（与单个）受害者的同情心崩溃。这些实验将研究情绪调节在三个方面：就业的策略，以避免或限制暴露于信息的受害者;使用的心理生理措施的呼吸性窦性心律失常作为自主情绪调节的标志;并通过操纵情绪调节策略的重新评价。这项拟议中的研究还将测试旨在增加一个人感受同情心的动机的操纵，从而扭转同情心的崩溃。这将通过增加同情是健康的感知来实现;减少同情能力有限的感知;激活道德自我概念;增加自我同情。总之，这项研究可以通过揭示动机如何塑造情绪调节的使用来创造同情心崩溃，从而在同情心科学方面取得变革性的进展。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对真实的世界中具有挑战性的社会问题产生影响。

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.