2009/10/29 by Sara D. Hodges, Kristi J. Kiel, Adam Kramer +2 · 1 citation
Medicine · Psychology · #Empathy and Medical Education #Communication in Education and Healthcare #Emotional Intelligence and Performance #Empathy #Psychology #Social psychology #Empathic concern #Perspective-taking #Developmental psychology
paper · doi:10.1177/0146167209350326
openalex publication_date 2009/10/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
This study examined how having had a similar experience to a target person's experience affected three facets of empathy: empathic concern, empathic accuracy, and perceived empathy. Women who had never been mothers, who were pregnant with their first child, or who had just given birth to their first child (20 in each group) served as perceivers, watching videotapes of new-mother targets (N = 20) and providing measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. When perceivers had experienced the same life events as the targets, they expressed greater empathic concern and reported greater understanding of targets. However, experience had a much smaller effect on empathic accuracy, limited to comparisons between new-mother and never-pregnant perceivers and only for accuracy at guessing stereotypic attitudes, not individual thoughts. Perceived empathy, in contrast, appeared to be influenced by targets' knowledge of whether perceivers had experienced similar events.