Modulation of empathy-related response towards profession of female rape victims

Abstract

Empathy plays a significant role in pervasive cooperation and prosocial behavior among heterogeneous groups of individuals in the animal kingdom. It modulates one's responses to the emotions and pain of others. It enables one to understand and share the feelings of others and then act accordingly and appropriately. The phenomenon of empathy has been researched in several areas such as philosophy, clinical, social and developmental psychology, social and neural sciences, etc. and still a mystery leading to interesting academic research. A plethora of factors have been found to modulate empathy. The aim of this study was to investigate how socioeconomic standing (in particular profession) of an individual (specifically women rape-victims) affects the empathic responses of the participant, both neuronally and behaviourally. This study focuses specifically on empathy towards pain as experienced by another. A three-part experimental study was conducted to explore the neural correlates of empathy in an individual when biased by the knowledge of the profession of the character (female rapevictim). The first part of this study focused on establishing if a bias existed and is reflected in behavioral responses in society towards different career professions opted by women. For this, we conducted an online survey with 21 professions (opted by women) and collected the respectability score. We observed a difference in the average respectability score for different professions thereby confirming the existence of a difference in attitudes towards different professions pursued by women. Progressing on the findings from the first part, the next stage focused on investigating the difference in empathic responses (behaviorally) of individuals towards the pain of others (female rape-victims). Towards this, a second survey was conducted where the participants were presented with the fictional incident of a rape incident narrated as post-incident trauma from the victim’s point of view. The narratives were designed to differ only in depictions of the profession of the victim. Standard questionnaires used to measure empathic responses were presented to participants in addition to the narrative specific questions. We found differences in empathic responses to perceived pain of victims as a function of the profession of the purported rape-victim.