Abstract
Research has shown that feeling empathy sometimes leads to compassion fatigue and sometimes to compassion satisfaction. In three studies, participants recalled an instance when they felt empathy in order to assess the role time perspective plays in how empathizers perceive the consequences of empathy. Study 1 revealed that college students perceive empathy as having more negative consequences in the short term, but more positive consequences in the long term. Study 2 showed that service industry professionals perceive the consequences of feeling empathy for customers who felt bad as less negative, and the consequences of feeling empathy for people who felt good as less positive, in the long as opposed to the short term. Because Studies 1 and 2 confounded time perspective with event specificity a third study was conducted in which event specificity was held constant across time perspectives. The same pattern of results emerged. The results of these studies indicate that perceptions of the effects of feeling empathy, whether positive or negative, become less extreme over time. These findings shed light on the relation between empathy and compassion fatigue and satisfaction by suggesting that situations that initially are experienced as stressful can over time make the empathizer stronger.
Description
Copyright: © 2018 The Authors This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Publisher
Routledge/Taylor & Frances
Date of publication
Fall 10-15-2018
Language
english
Persistent identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4343
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Hansen, Eric M.; Eklund, Jakob Håkansson; Hallén, Anna; Bjurhager, Carmen Stockman; Norrstrom, Emil; Viman, Adam; and Stocks, Eric L., "Does Feeling Empathy Lead to Compassion Fatigue or Compassion Satisfaction? The Role of Time Perspective" (2018). Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 9.
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4343