Editorial

Abstract

When I was invited to prepare the introduction to this issue of JoSI, I was struck by the diversity of the papers to be included. After I had been reading for a while, I realized that these papers were all about empathy. They focused on vastly different types of social challenges, but they all posed an uncomfortable dilemma because they demonstrated the consequences of poor perspective-taking, a lack of compassion or an absence of altruism. They all showed how failure to respond can result in unnecessary and avoidable isolation, disability, inadequate treatment or even death. Further, these papers showed how solutions require empathically motivated actions, even if that action is attached to a cost or a loss in some other area. In simple terms, empathy might be defined as a cognitive, emotional and behavioural response to the negative (or positive) experience of another person or group of people. In reality, however, empathy is an extremely misused and misunderstood concept with multiple dimensions and complex relationships with prosocial behaviour and moral action (Decety & Cowell, 2014). The papers clearly demonstrate this complexity, but in each paper, there are good examples of three important constructs, namely understanding the experiences of others (i.e., perspective-taking), emotional connectedness (i.e., compassion) and motivation to act helpfully, sometimes at a cost to oneself or as a trade-off for other desired outcomes (i.e., altruism).