The DOI matches its Crossref record; 8 of the 8 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct?
Abstract
Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between feeling what you believe others feel-often described as empathy-and caring about the welfare of others-often described as compassion or concern. Many propose that empathy is a prerequisite for concern and is therefore the ultimate motivator of prosocial actions. To assess this hypothesis, the authors developed the Empathy Index, which consists of 2 novel scales, and explored their relationship to a measure of concern as well as to measures of cooperative and altruistic behavior. A series of factor analyses reveal that empathy and concern consistently load on different factors. Furthermore, they show that empathy and concern motivate different behaviors: concern for others is a uniquely positive predictor of prosocial action whereas empathy is either not predictive or negatively predictive of prosocial actions. Together these studies suggest that empathy and concern are psychologically distinct and empathy plays a more limited role in our moral lives than many believe. (PsycINFO Database Record
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
Trivers, R. L. (1971) · The Quarterly Review of Biology · doi:10.1086/406755 · Cited by 11,010
Costello, A. B., & Osborne, J. (2005) · University of Massachusetts Amherst · doi:10.7275/jyj1-4868 · Cited by 10,297
Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach.
Davis, M. H. (1983) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113 · Cited by 10,272
Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases
Preston, S. D., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2002) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x02000018 · Cited by 4,126
Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004) · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · doi:10.1023/b:jadd.0000022607.19833.00 · Cited by 4,093
Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy
de Waal, F. B. M. (2008) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093625 · Cited by 2,483
Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054 · Cited by 1,254
Russell, D. W. (2002) · Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · doi:10.1177/014616702237645 · Cited by 954
Cited by
Beyond sacrificial harm: a two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology
Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2018) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/rev0000093 · Cited by 434
Bloom, P. (2017) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.11.004 · Cited by 420
Self-citationStrategic regulation of empathy
Weisz, E., & Cikara, M. (2021) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2020.12.002 · Cited by 217
Engel, Y., Ramesh, A., & Steiner, N. (2020) · Journal of Business Venturing · doi:10.1016/j.jbusvent.2019.105986 · Cited by 76
Paakkanen, M., Martela, F., Hakanen, J., Uusitalo, L., & Pessi, A. (2021) · Journal of Business and Psychology · doi:10.1007/s10869-020-09723-2 · Cited by 48
Metadata
- Authors
- Jordan, M. R., Amir, D., & Bloom, P.
- Venue
- Emotion
- Published
- 2016-12
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1107-1116
- ISSN
- 1528-3542 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-1516
- OpenAlex
- W2525230952
- Cited by
- 209
- References
- 8
- FWCI
- 23.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/emo0000228
- The paper
- Jordan, M. R., Amir, D., & Bloom, P. (2016). Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct? Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000228
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
