Empathy in Life-Course-Persistent Offenders, Adolescent-Limited Offenders, and Non-offending Adolescence
Date Issued
2004
Date
2004
Author(s)
Huang, Mei-Yueh
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
The study aims to understand the empathetic reactions in delinquent juveniles. We analyzed and integrated, by literature review, the articles on empathy and proposed a model of “Progressive- Empathetic-Response Process”: (a) “Perspective Taking” would induce “Empathetic Distress”, “Sympathetic Distress”, and “Personal Distress”; (b) “Empathetic Distress”, “Sympathetic Distress”, and “Personal Distress” would increase “Helping Behavior”, with “Empathetic Distress” and “Sympathetic Distress” being the most important contributor of “Helping Behavior”. We also reviewed Moffitt’s (1993) hypothesis regarding the developmental taxonomy of criminal offenders and integrated it into our discussion of the probable differences of life-course-persistent offenders and adolescent-limited offenders in “Progressive- Empathetic-Response Process”. We proposed that the empathetic ability of life- course-persistent offenders is evidently lower than the non-offending adolescences’. In addition, we proposed that the empathetic ability of adolescent-limited offenders is either no different from the non-offending adolescents’ or right in the middle of the empathetic ability of non-offending adolescents and life-course-persistent offenders. In study 1, high school students were first asked to watch films that were suppose to induce empathetic responses. Next, in order to understand participants’ emotions and behavior responses, the participants were interviewed by researchers. The “Perspective Taking” of the participants was experimentally increased or decreased by the instruction of the experiment. We expected that the differences in the amount of “Perspective Taking” would engender different empathetic emotions as well as empathetic behavioral responses. The results of study 1 partially supported our “Progressive-Empathetic-Response Process” model. Specifically, “Perspective Taking” was found to predict “Empathetic Distress”, “Sympathetic Distress”, and “Personal Distress, but only the variable “Empathetic Distress” was a predictor of “Helping Behavior” . In study 2, we recruited four groups of participants: high school students, vocational high school students, adolescent-limited offenders, and life-course-persistent offenders. The procedure of study 2 was identical to the experimental group in study 1. The purpose of study 2 is to evaluate the hypothesis that life-course-persistent offenders and adolescent-limited offenders differ in their level of empathy. The data from study 2 suggested that the empathetic responses in life-course-persistent offenders were not evidently different from that of non-offending adolescents. Moreover, the results demonstrated that the “Empathetic Distress” and “Sympathetic Distress” observed in adolescent-limited offenders is evidently lower than that of non-offending adolescents. These results were inconsistent with our hypotheses and we believed that this could be attributed to the exclusion of a variable called “Emotion Recognition”. Further discussion on study’s results as well as a possible follow-up research is provided in the discussion section.
Subjects
終生持續型犯罪者
青少年限期型犯罪者
同理心
歷程性同理反應模式
青少年犯罪
Adolescent-limited offenders
Life-course-persistent offenders
Empathy
Juvenile delinquency
Progressive-empathetic-response process model
SDGs
Type
other
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