TY - JOUR
AU - BURLESON, BRANT R.
AB - Previous research has found that social‐cognitive abilities are important determinants of the competence to comfort affectively distressed others in a sensitive manner. However, being competent to comfort others sensitively does not necessarily imply that this competence will be exercised; presumably, persons must also be motivated to utilize their competencies if they are to produce highly sensitive comforting strategies. This study examined the collective contributions of a social‐cognitive variable (interpersonal construct abstractness) and a motivational variable (emotional empathy) to the production of sensitive comforting strategies. Subjects were 70 college students. It was hypothesized that construct abstractness and emotional empathy would both be positively related to sensitivity of comforting strategies and that these two variables would make a significant independent contribution to the prediction of comforting strategies. Correlational and multiple regression analyses confirmed these hypotheses: construct abstractness explained a large portion of the variance in sensitivity of comforting strategies, while emotional empathy explained a smaller, but significant, portion of the variance in comforting‐strategy sensitivity.
TI - SOCIAL COGNITION, EMPATHIC MOTIVATION, AND ADULTS' COMFORTING STRATEGIES
JF - Human Communication Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2958.1983.tb00019.x
DA - 1983-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/social-cognition-empathic-motivation-and-adults-comforting-strategies-AI0uCzgsQq
SP - 295
VL - 10
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -