Understanding Compassion: The construct, its measurement, its link with prosocial behavior
Alice Lucarini & Alberto Voci (University of Padova)
Compassion (i.e., the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help) is not a new concept. Indeed, Compassion has been discussed for centuries by ancient spiritual and religious traditions, however this construct became a subject of interest in science only recently. Over the last years, psychological research highlighted a number of benefits and positive outcomes related to Compassion. For instance, in the area of social psychology, Compassion was identified as a driver of positive social psychological outcomes, such as prosocial behavior.
In this talk, I will present my PhD project, which is focused on studying Compassion from a social psychological perspective. First, I will present two validation studies, aimed at developing reliable measures to assess dispositional compassion in the Italian population, which are currently missing in the literature. Second, I will present an experimental study investigating compassion experienced toward positively or negatively portrayed targets, with the aim of understanding whether compassion promotes positive emotional reactions toward a target, even when the target is judged negatively. Finally, potential future developments will be discussed.
Italiano 
English