Browsing by Subject "Cognitive Empathy"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    The Joy of Asking: An Analysis of Socioemotional Information in Fundraiser Contact Reports
    (2018-05) Bout, Maarten; Konrath, Sara H.; Tempel, Eugene R.; Shaker, Genevieve G.
    In this study we examined 381 interactions between Donors and Fundraisers from a large research university by analyzing their Contact Reports. Specifically, we examined whether we could extract measures of fundraiser empathy through the application of a coding scheme and linguistics analysis, and whether there are differences in the reports based on donor characteristics. We found evidence that there are significant differences between how fundraisers write reports and what they include in them, based on school of graduation and type of interaction, but little difference in their treatment by donor gender. We conclude that indeed measures of empathy can be extracted from Contact Reports, but that minimum standards of reporting should be adopted by fundraising organizations in order to support using Contact Reports as qualitative evaluation tools.
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    Social Cognitive and Affective Neural Substrates of Adolescent Transdiagnostic Symptoms
    (2020-04) Winters, Drew E.; Lay, Kathy; Cyders, Melissa; Damoiseaux, Jessica; Fukui, Sadaaki; Pierce, Barbara
    The social cognitive ability to identify another’s internal state and social affective ability to share another’s emotional experience, known as empathy, are integral to healthy social functioning. During tasks, neural systems active when adolescents empathize include cognitive (medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and affective (anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex) regions that are consistent with the adult task-based literature implicating the default mode, salience, and frontoparietal networks. However, task-based studies are limited to examining neural regions probed by the task; thus, do not capture broader patterns of information processing associated with complex processes, such as empathy. Methods of functional connectivity capture broader patterns of information processing at the level of network connectivity. Although it has clear advantages in identifying neural vulnerabilities to disorder, functional connectivity has yet to be used in adolescent investigations of empathy. Via parent- and self-report, deficits in either cognitive or affective processes central to empathy associate with the most widely agreed on classifications of behavioral disorders in adolescents – transdiagnostic symptoms of internalizing and externalizing. However, this evidence relies exclusively on self-report measures and research has yet to examine the neural connectivity underlying transdiagnostic symptoms in relation to cognitive and affective empathy. What has yet to be known is (1) how the social cognitive and affective processes of empathy are functionally connected across a heterogeneous sample of adolescents and (2) the association of cognitive, affective, and imbalanced empathy with transdiagnostic symptoms. Addressing these gaps in knowledge is an important incremental step for specifying vulnerabilities not fully captured via subjective report alone. This information can be used to improve prevention and intervention strategies. The present study will examine the functional connectivity of neural networks underlying empathy in early to mid-adolescents and their association with transdiagnostic symptoms.