Digital Commons Network^™

Empathy Through Inquiry: The Weaving Of (Post) Qualitative Inquiry Into Design, Preston Tyler Kelly

Wayne State University Dissertations

Learning design is moving toward more human-centered design methodologies. One key component of human-centered design is empathy. To have empathy, designers must understand their learners as people and “how they show up as learners” within our learning experiences. To do this, designers need to do learner research. One way to do this inquiry work might be to take up post qualitative inquiry because so many of the key tenets of design thinking and post qualitative methodologies are similar.

Through interviews within a post qualitative framework, this project looks at how designers go about this design research to understand their learners. …

Empathy As A Moderator Of Adolescent Bullying Behavior And Moral Disengagement After Controlling For Social Desirability, Amy Zelidman

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to assess the moderating influence empathy has on the associations between adolescent bullying behavior and moral disengagement after controlling for social desirability (e.g., response bias). 676 students in 7th and 8th grade from a suburban middle school in Southeast Michigan participated in this study in the fall of 2012.

Results showed male respondents were more likely than female respondents to (a) report engaging in all forms of traditional bullying behavior overall, including physical, verbal, and social bullying and (b) report higher rates of physical victimization and moral disengagement. Female respondents were more likely to …

Social Cognitive Factors Associated With Verbal Bullying And Defending, Heather L. Carroll

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to examine defending and verbal bullying and the role of social cognitive variables, including empathy, values, moral disengagement, and efficacy among middle school students. Middle school students (n=282) in grades 6 through 8 in an urban public school district in Michigan participated in the study. Data were collected using a self-report survey format during the 2013-2014 school year. Social cognitive variables were analyzed by grade and gender. Results indicated a statistically significant main effect for gender. Female students reported significantly higher scores for empathy, self-transcendence values and openness to change values, in comparison to …

Does Empathy Promote Emotion Regulation In The Context Of Pain? An Experimental Investigation, Laura E. M. Leong

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which a perspective-taking instruction would promote empathic behaviors in couples, resulting in better emotion regulation and greater pain tolerance during a cold pressor task. Based on empathy and intimacy theories, it was expected that observers who were instructed to take the perspective of their partner would feel and express more empathy, and that their partners would have better pain and pain tolerance compared to a control group. A sample of 128 undergraduate romantic couples participated where one partner was randomly assigned to complete the cold pressor task while the …

A Bioecological Approach To Empathy, Altruism, And Intent To Help: Developmental, Dispositional And Contextual Factors Influence Prosocial Motivations And Intentions, Michelle Provenzano Beechler

Wayne State University Dissertations

Whether one helps due to altruistic empathy or egoistic motivators has been debated in the social psychological literature most recently with the Felt-Oneness (Cialdini et al., 1997) and the Empathy-Altruism (Batson 1991) hypotheses. For strangers, it appears that helping intentions are predicted by felt-oneness, except in circumstances in which a bystander feels nurturance toward a target, in which case empathy is found to predict helping. For close relationships, however, empathy predicts helping, particularly in high need situations. Antipathy has been presented as a possible confound as well (Batson et al., 1997), but has not been tested. The present study took …