Empathy In Social Relationships

Empathy is a fundamental aspect of the functioning of social relationships. The ability to accurately read nonverbal signals of others, participate in perspective-taking, identify emotional states in the self and others, and invest in other's emotions are all integral parts of the relationships between individuals. Deficits in any of these aspects of the empathic process can cause and signal various problems that can impact individuals and those around them. A condition such as autism involves deficits in the ability to decode nonverbal communication and affects the cognitive ability to engage in accurate perspective- taking, but does not itself involve a lack of concern for other's feelings when they are understood. Another condition- antisocial …show more content…
It includes different questions that are intended to help determine the degree of concern for the emotions of others, the ability to read nonverbal signals, and social predictive ability of the participants. It consists of 23 items total : 16 of them were scored positively and 7 of them were scored negatively. For scoring purposes the questions were separated into emotional and social-cognitive categories. Some items do not neatly fit into these categories, but nonetheless were included because of relevance otherwise to measurement of the …show more content…
All of the above may be implicated in empathetic processing. For example, yawning is used as an example of social contagion, and an individual's susceptibility to social yawning has been presumed by many researchers to reflect a type of involuntary mirroring related to empathetic ability (Shoults). For this reason it is used as a proxy for the study of empathy in both humans and nonhuman animals (Romero). It has been found in various studies that autistic individuals have less susceptibility to contagious yawning. The correlation demonstrated between susceptibility to contagious yawning and psychopathy is a negative one