Can Empathy and Compassion Activation Affect Adolescents’ Empathic Responses, Compassion, and Behavioral Intentions When Witnessing Bullying?

Abstract

AbstractBullying remains a significant social problem among youth and many school interventions focus on increasing bystander defending in order to reduce bullying. In this study, we employed a between-groups experimental design to examine the differential effects of brief empathy and compassion activation on different bystander responses to bullying, including (1) empathic distress, empathic anger, compassion, and (2) intended bystander behaviors (i.e., passive bystanding, aggressive defending, and prosocial defending). Participants were 110 adolescents (Mage = 13.99, SD = 0.88, age range = 13–16 years; 49.1% females), randomly assigned to an experimental group that involved a 10-min visualization exercise that focused on increasing empathy [EM] or compassion [CM], or to an active control condition [FI]. Following the visualization exercise, students viewed four short bullying videos, followed by completing self-report measures of empathy-related responses and intended bystander behaviors. Analysis of variance [ANOVAs] revealed that adolescents in the CM condition reported less empathic distress and empathic anger in response to the bullying videos than the EM and FI groups. Yet, there were no further differential effects between the three conditions on responses to the bullying videos, which emphasizes the need for future research to assess more comprehensive interventions for increasing adolescents’ compassion and prosocial defending.