Compassionate Emotions

People often have emotional reactions to others’ misfortune. One possible reaction is to feel compassionate: sympathetic, moved, tender, warm, softhearted, and the like.

Compassion of this sort is a social emotion.  Social emotions are those which have someone else as their object. Social emotions are evoked by and held ‘in relation to’ or ‘towards’ others. Example social emotions are anger (“You make me so cross!”), pride (“I’m so proud of you!”), and some forms of shame (“I’m ashamed of my country”). People feel compassion for others.

Compassionate emotions express people’s desires for things to be better than they appear to be for those they are compassionate towards. As such, they are altruistic social emotions (see previous post).

The “appear to be” clause is important in the previous paragraph. As Epictetus noted, “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.” Social emotions are evoked by and held in relation to our ideas or perceptions of others’ situations. As con men, beggars, and manipulative children know, we may feel sorry for others if we think that they are in a bad way.

 

Others do not need to be in distress for people to feel compassionate towards them. Others’ distress is merely a clue that they may be experiencing misfortune. Baby Rupa is a picture of contentment in the photograph below - but Mylene Klass is overwhelmed with compassion. Ms. Klass is not sharing Rupa’s feelings nor even responding to them. She is responding with dismay to her understanding of Rupa’s fate. Compassionate emotions express our dissatisfaction with others’ perceived situations and our desire for those perceived situations to be better.

As well as not being necessary to evoke compassion, others’ distress is also not in and of itself sufficient to do so. Sometimes others’ distress evokes indifference or even pleasure.

As well as sometimes wanting things to be better for apparently misfortunate others, we can feel upset that they are in the situation they appear to be in. For this reason it is common for compassion to be accompanied by various other emotions, such as sadness, anger, or guilt. Sometimes these other emotions are so strong that they suppress or overwhelm the experience of compassion. (It will be important to remember this when a later post explores the perhaps poorly-named phenomenon of “compassion-fatigue”. It may not be the compassion itself that is so fatiguing.)

Compassion is important because it is a key altruistic emotion. It is one expression of an interest in others’ positive welfare. Later posts will explore causes of and impediments to compassion. My next post will explore one possible consequence of it: altruistic helping behaviour.

Key points

Compassionate emotions are altruistic social emotions. They express people’s desires for things to be better than they appear to be for those they feel compassionate towards.

Others’ apparent distress is a clue that they are misfortunate but is neither necessary nor sufficient to evoke compassionate emotions.

Compassionate emotions are often accompanied by other emotions which can sometimes suppress or overwhelm the compassionate ones.

Final thoughts and further reading

As always, my focus is more on things than on names of things. Nevertheless, to be able to study and discuss things properly, a shared understanding of language is necessary. Anyone doing further reading needs to know that the phenomenon of feeling compassionate towards apparently misfortunate others is regularly called “sympathy”, “empathic concern”, or “empathy”. And, of course, each of these terms has been used on other occasions to label various different phenomena.

Many researchers differentiate compassionate feelings from feelings that are labelled “personal distress”. I am not a fan of the latter label. I think it inappropriately clumps together much that would be better kept separate. In particular, much of what is called “personal distress” in the research literature would be better labelled something like “compassionate distress”, “social distress”, “empathic distress” or “vicarious distress”. It seems obvious to me that much of the distress compassionate people feel is distress ‘for’ others, i.e., because they are suffering misfortune. This seems very different from distress which is purely self-focused. Feeling distressed that a baby is suffering is not the same thing as being irritated because it is crying.

I have taken pains to differentiate others’ apparent distress from others’ apparent misfortune. This is because the latter is the more crucial determinant of compassionate emotions. In many situations, of course, we feel that others are suffering misfortune because they appear to be distressed. And, of course, others often appear to be distressed because they are in fact distressed!

The importance of compassionate emotions should not blind us to the fact that people sometimes have altruistic feelings towards quite fortunate others. An obvious example is the desire that parents or teachers sometimes feel when thinking about their children’s or students’ futures.

Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Link to abstract

Epictetus (135).The Enchiridion (Translated by E. Carter). Link

Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136 (3), 351-374. Link

Pearce, D. (2012). If this baby doesn’t get help, she’ll die. The Sun. Feb 15. Link

Vitaglione, G. D., & Barnett, M. A. (2003). Assessing a new dimension of empathy: Empathic anger as a predictor of helping and punishing desires. Motivation and Emotion, 27, 301-325. Link to abstract

How to cite this blog post using APA Style

See: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/

T. Farsides. (2014, January 1). Compassionate emotions. Retrieved from http://tomfarsides.blogspot.com/2014/01/compassionate-emotions.html

Image Credits

Baby Rupa and Mylene Klass link

Crying toddler link

Sports fans link

Twins link

Wall-E link