Empathy versus Offending, Aggression and Bullying

Advancing Knowledge using the Basic Empathy Scale

Darrick Jolliffe, David Farrington, Darrick Jolliffe, David P. Farrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000366686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Empathy versus Offending, Aggression, and Bullying advances knowledge about the measurement of empathy, using the Basic Empathy Scale (BES), and how empathy is related to offending, aggression, and bullying in community and incarcerated groups.

Empathy is widely accepted as one of the most important individual factors that are related to offending, aggression, and bullying, and it is common in many intervention projects to aim to improve empathy in order to reduce offending, aggression, and bullying. The BES was constructed by Jolliffe and Farrington (2006) and has been widely used in a number of countries. This book brings together chapters, from a broad range of contributors, which explore the application of BES in ten different countries (England, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, Croatia, Australia, Canada, and the USA). Each chapter reviews the use of the BES in that particular jurisdiction, its psychometric properties, and its importance in relation to offending, aggression, and bullying. The research includes samples from primary schools, secondary schools, and the community, as well as those who are justice-involved and on probation, in prisons and secure psychiatric hospitals. The book concludes with wider implications for intervention, policy, and practice.

This book will be valuable reading for students and scholars of criminology, psychology and sociology, as well as practitioners who are interested in developing their understanding of the complex link between empathy and a range of antisocial behaviours.

1 Measuring empathy using the Basic Empathy Scale

Darrick Jolliffe and David P. Farrington

Introduction

The main aim of this book is to examine the relationship between empathy, as measured by the Basic Empathy Scale, and offending, aggression, and bullying. The term empathy was first introduced to the English-speaking world by Edward Titchener in his 1909 publication ‘Lectures of the Experimental Psychology and Thought’. Titchener had translated the term “empathy” from the German word “einfühlung”, meaning “to feel into”, which was a concept that had been widely used in studying aesthetics and emotional responses to art by scholars such as Theodore Lipps (1897). Titchener’s doctoral training at the University of Leipzig, with Wilhelm Wundt – a pioneering introspective psychologist – as his supervisor, surely influenced Titchener’s conceptualisation of empathy as a personal introspective process about humanising objects, or of reading or “feeling oneself” into them. This interpretation maintained a close conceptual tie with empathy’s origins as a trait or ability related to experiencing perspectives and emotions elicited by inanimate objects, particularly artistic ones.

One of the first to propose that it might be useful to apply empathy to living people (and the first to use the term “empathise”) was the Harvard neuropsychologist Southard (1919). In Southard’s seminal publication, he specifically called for research into ‘the extent to which we can read ourselves into the frankly insane or psychopathic’ (p. 206), while also setting out 13 questions about empathy that psychiatrists might ask themselves about their patients. These included “items” such as ‘How far can you read or feel yourself into the patient?’ and, in reference to the patient’s behaviour, ‘Is this just what a child would do?’. For the latter point Southard argued that, if the psychiatrist felt that the behaviour was ‘what a child would do’, then the empathic “test” was positive, because each of us readily empathises with a child. While clearly not a psychometric measure of empathy, this is the first reference in the literature attempting to “test” or measure empathy.

In addition to Southard’s “Empathy Index”, his 1919 work made reference to a number of important issues about empathy. For example, he suggested that differences existed between individuals in their ability to read themselves into others (i.e. empathy as an individual difference), and also noted that this difference was related to one’s power of imagination. Southard also distinguished between empathy that was emotional and that which had intellectual components, while also drawing a clear distinction between empathy and sympathy. To his mind, sympathy had additional value judgements and “superiority” attached, which was not present in empathy. Empirical research over the last 100 years has subsequently provided support for many of Southard’s prescient assertions.

There is no universally agreed definition of empathy, but most definitions that have been proffered make reference to either the emotional component of empathy, where one actually experiences the emotions of another person (e.g. Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972), or the intellectual or cognitive component of empathy, where one understands the emotions of another (e.g. Hogan, 1969). More recent definitions, by Davis (1983) and Cohen and Strayer (1996), explicitly define empathy as including both these affective responses and these cognitive abilities.

Empathy and antisocial behaviour

With this conceptualisation, and indeed the origins of empathy as “feeling into”, it is perhaps not surprising that empathy, or more precisely a lack of empathy, is often cited as an explanation for antisocial, aggressive and criminal behaviour. Individuals who have lower levels of empathy are theorised to be more likely to act antisocially and commit offences because they are unburdened by the experience or knowledge of the emotional consequences of their actions on others. That is, the negative emotions elicited in others (or anticipated to be elicited), such as fear, distress, and sadness, as a result of one’s antisocial behaviour are not factored in advance as a possible cost or consequence of the antisocial act amongst those with low empathy. Thus, people with relatively low levels of empathy are missing a key “emergency handbrake” to moderate their behaviour. A number of more detailed models of the relationship between empathy and antisocial behaviour exist (e.g. Hanson, 2003; Hoffman, 1987), but in essence these models all have the same overall formula: low empathy increases the likelihood of committing criminal offences.

The concept of empathy has also found its way into influential theories of crime, such as Gottfredson and Hirschi’s General Theory of Crime (1990, pp. 89–90). A “lack of empathy” is a key, and possibly the, defining characteristic of the concept of psychopathy, which is a well-known constellation of psychological and behavioural traits associated with serious and violent offending (e.g. Blair, 2007; Hare, 1999). Arguably, of more practical importance, a lack of empathy is very often a key intervention target for psychological interventions delivered to offenders, particularly violent and sexual offenders, that are designed to reduce the likelihood of later reoffending (e.g. Mulloy, Smiley, & Mawson, 1991; Ward & Durrant, 2013).

Given the importance of empathy as a potential risk factor for offending, it is essential to have tools to measure this latent construct, and the Basic Empathy Scale (BES) developed by Jolliffe and Farrington (2006) has proven to be one of the most widely used and researched scales in the world. The items of the BES were specifically designed to address the limitations of previous measures of empathy which tended to measure sympathy (i.e. the extent to which one feels badly for another in an unfortunate situation), as opposed to affective empathy (i.e. the extent to which one shares the emotions of another), and general perspective taking (i.e. the ability to see another’s point of view), as opposed to cognitive empathy (i.e. the ability to understand another’s emotions).

A total of 40 items, which measured affective and cognitive empathy, were developed and these items were administered to 363 adolescents (194 males, 169 females, aged about 15). From this, exploratory factor analysis identified two cogent factors, one measuring affective empathy (11 items, e.g. ‘I usually feel calm when other people are scared’ – disagree), and one measuring cognitive empathy (9 items, e.g. ‘It is hard for me to understand when my friends are sad’ – disagree). This scale was then administered to an additional 357 adolescents along with a series of other measures to evaluate its convergent and divergent validity.

This book

The purpose of this book is to present new research on empathy, measured using the BES, and its relationship to offending, aggression, and bullying. Most of the chapters are revised and updated versions of papers given at a symposium titled ‘Measuring Empathy and Behavioural Outcomes: Advancing Knowledge with the Basic Empathy Scale’, held at the University of Greenwich’s historic Old Royal Naval College in October 2018.

In Chapter 2, Miguel Basto-Pereira and David P. Farrington describe the importance of having a theoretically and psychometrically solid measure of empathy, and the development of the BES. These authors then chart the use of this measure across the world and assess the psychometric properties of this scale as a result of this extensive research. In their review of the literature on the BES, these authors draw attention to some key strengths of this measure, but also to some key issues that require additional research.

In Chapter 3, Evelyn Heynen and colleagues undertake a comprehensive review of the literature to identify research studies which examine the association between parental empathy and the quality of the parent-child attachment. Theoretically, parents with higher levels of empathy would be expected to be more attuned to the emotional experiences of their children, thus facilitating a stronger and more emotionally warm relationship between parents and children. Two of the five studies that were identified used versions of the BES to measure parental empathy. The results point to the potential importance of parental empathy for the strength of the relationship between parents and children.

In Chapter 4, Evelyn Heynen and colleagues use a similar systematic approach to search the literature to identify primary research studies which examined the relationship between parenting styles (i.e. authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting) and the empathy of youth. The authors were able to identify 14 studies which assessed both parenting styles and the empathy of their children (age from 10 to 20), measured in various ways including questionnaires and observations. The results of this study reveal an important relationship between certain forms of parenting and the level of empathy in youth, but also note that the estimate of the magnitude of these relationships varies depending on a number of factors.

In Chapter 5, Peer van der Helm presents a theoretical model of the potential link between low empathy and aggression and, further, discusses the importance of understanding the development of empathy in young people. van der Helm also explores the evidence which highlights the interactions between certain biological, psychological, and social risk factors and how these can negatively impact on the healthy development of empathy. This chapter concludes with an empirically informed integrated bio-psycho-social model linking adverse childhood experiences through cognitive, socio-emotional, and personality development to aggression.

Farrington and Jolliffe, in Chapter 6, examine the relationship between low empathy, measured using the BES, and both self-reported and official offending by a large sample of males and females (aged about 25) in England. This study is one of very few that have examined the relationship between empathy and offending in a community sample, as opposed to a case-control study in which the empathy level of “offenders” and a comparison group are compared. The results show that low empathy and offending are linked, but somewhat counterintuitively, that the relationship between low empathy and both self-reported and official offending was much more straightforward for females as opposed to males.

In Chapter 7, Jolliffe and Farrington use the BES to measure the cognitive and affective empathy of 299 men (aged about 32) serving a community sentence for a criminal offence in England, and compare these measures to both past offending and later reoffending. Interestingly, the results show that low empathy was associated with serious current and past offending, such as having an index offence of serious theft or having previous convictions for serious violence. The results were far less consistent when low empathy was compared to later measures of reoffending. The authors present a number of potential explanations for this unexpected finding.

The relationship between psychopathy, a constellation of psychological and behavioural traits associated with serious offending, and empathy is explored in Chapter 8 by Bergstrom, Jolliffe, and Farrington. This study uses a community sample of males and females aged about 25 years and assesses their levels of psychopathy using the PCL:SV (Hart, Cox, & Hare, 1995) and their levels of empathy using the BES. The results show that the level of psychopathy in this sample was relatively low, which would be expected in a community sample, but there is also an indication that certain dimensions of psychopathy are related to lower levels of empathy.

Chapter 9 examines the correlates of empathy amongst a sample of incarcerated young males and females in Portugal. Pedro Pechorro and colleagues use the BES and identify significant gender differences in the levels of affective and cognitive empathy in their sample. They also show that the profile of the correlates between low empathy and a number of related factors shows similarities for incarcerated young males and females, but also a range of important differences, particularly related to social anxiety. The authors reflect on how these gender differences might be usefully incorporated into gender-sensitive interventions.

The BES has also been used to assess empathy in a prison in Canada, as described by Christopher Koegl in Chapter 10. This study is one of the first to examine changes in the BES as a result of a therapeutic ethos or intervention, and the first to compare these changes in empathy to later reoffending. The results highlight the importance that empathy development may have for reducing reoffending, particularly for certain types of offenders.

In England and Wales, those who commit serious offences and are suffering from mental illness are held in secure psychiatric facilities. In Chapter 11, Compton-Dickinson and Jolliffe describe a study in which the BES was used to evaluate the impact of a unique form of music therapy delivered to adult males serving a sentence in a high-security psychiatric hospital. The results provide some evidence of empathy development over time for those who receive music therapy, and also for those for those who receive more typical therapeutic support. The benefits of music therapy for the empathy development for this challenging population are critically discussed.

Chapter 12 presents the results of a study in which a modified version of the BES, based on parental rep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Measuring empathy using the Basic Empathy Scale
• Part I The Basic Empathy Scale and parenting
• Part II Empathy and offending
• Part III Aggression and bullying
• Part IV Conclusions
• Index