essay on compassion

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The impact of helping others – a deep dive into the benefits of providing support to those in need.

Compassion is a virtue that ignites the flames of kindness and empathy in our hearts. It is an innate human quality that has the power to bring light into the lives of those in need. When we extend a helping hand to others, we not only uplift their spirits but also nourish our own souls. The act of kindness and compassion resonates in the depths of our being, reminding us of the interconnectedness and shared humanity we all possess.

In a world that can sometimes be filled with hardships and struggles, the power of compassion shines like a beacon of hope. It is through offering a listening ear, a comforting embrace, or a simple gesture of kindness that we can make a profound impact on someone else’s life. The ripple effect of compassion is endless, as the seeds of love and understanding we sow in others’ hearts continue to grow and flourish, spreading positivity and light wherever they go.

The Significance of Compassionate Acts

Compassionate acts have a profound impact on both the giver and the receiver. When we extend a helping hand to others in need, we not only alleviate their suffering but also experience a sense of fulfillment and purpose. Compassion fosters a sense of connection and empathy, strengthening our bonds with others and creating a more caring and supportive community.

Moreover, compassionate acts have a ripple effect, inspiring others to pay it forward and perpetuate kindness. One small act of compassion can set off a chain reaction of positive deeds, influencing the world in ways we may never fully realize. By showing compassion to others, we contribute to a more compassionate and understanding society, one that values empathy and kindness above all else.

Understanding the Impact

Helping others can have a profound impact not only on those receiving assistance but also on the individuals providing help. When we lend a hand to someone in need, we are not just offering material support; we are also showing compassion and empathy . This act of kindness can strengthen bonds between individuals and foster a sense of community .

Furthermore, helping others can boost our own well-being . Studies have shown that acts of kindness and generosity can reduce stress , improve mood , and enhance overall happiness . By giving back , we not only make a positive impact on the lives of others but also nourish our own souls .

Benefits of Helping Others

There are numerous benefits to helping others, both for the recipient and for the giver. Here are some of the key advantages:

Increased feelings of happiness and fulfilment
Improved mental health and well-being
Building stronger connections and relationships with others
Reduced stress levels and improved self-esteem
Promoting a sense of purpose and meaning in life
Contributing to a more compassionate and caring society

By helping others, we not only make a positive impact on the world around us but also experience personal growth and benefits that can enhance our overall happiness and well-being.

Empathy and Connection

Empathy plays a crucial role in our ability to connect with others and understand their experiences. When we practice empathy, we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and try to see the world from their perspective. This act of compassion allows us to build a connection based on understanding and mutual respect.

By cultivating empathy, we can bridge the gap between different individuals and communities, fostering a sense of unity and solidarity. Empathy helps us recognize the humanity in others, regardless of their background or circumstances, and promotes a culture of kindness and inclusivity.

Through empathy, we not only show compassion towards those in need but also create a supportive environment where everyone feels valued and understood. It is through empathy that we can truly make a difference in the lives of others and build a more compassionate society.

Spreading Positivity Through Kindness

One of the most powerful ways to help others is by spreading positivity through acts of kindness. Kindness has the remarkable ability to brighten someone’s day, lift their spirits, and create a ripple effect of happiness in the world.

Simple gestures like giving a compliment, lending a helping hand, or sharing a smile can make a significant impact on someone’s life. These acts of kindness not only benefit the recipient but also bring a sense of fulfillment and joy to the giver.

When we choose to spread positivity through kindness, we contribute to building a more compassionate and caring society. By showing empathy and understanding towards others, we create a supportive environment where people feel valued and respected.

Kindness is contagious and has the power to inspire others to pay it forward, creating a chain reaction of goodwill and compassion. By incorporating acts of kindness into our daily lives, we can make a positive difference and help create a better world for all.

Creating a Ripple Effect

When we extend a helping hand to others, we set off a chain reaction that can have a profound impact on the world around us. Just like a stone thrown into a calm pond creates ripples that spread outward, our acts of compassion can touch the lives of many, inspiring them to do the same.

By showing kindness and empathy, we not only make a difference in the lives of those we help but also create a ripple effect that can lead to positive change in our communities and beyond. A small gesture of kindness can ignite a spark of hope in someone’s heart, motivating them to pay it forward and spread compassion to others.

Each act of generosity and care has the power to create a ripple effect that can ripple outwards, reaching far beyond our immediate circles. As more and more people join in this chain of kindness, the impact multiplies, creating a wave of positivity that can transform the world one small act of kindness at a time.

Building a Stronger Community

One of the key benefits of helping others is the positive impact it can have on building a stronger community. When individuals come together to support one another, whether it’s through acts of kindness, volunteering, or simply being there for someone in need, it fosters a sense of unity and connection. This sense of community helps to create a supportive and caring environment where people feel valued and respected.

By helping others, we also set an example for those around us, inspiring others to also lend a hand and contribute to the well-being of the community. This ripple effect can lead to a chain reaction of kindness and generosity that can ultimately make the community a better place for everyone.

Furthermore, when people feel supported and cared for by their community, they are more likely to be happier and healthier, both mentally and physically. This sense of belonging and connection can help to reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness, and can improve overall well-being.

In conclusion, building a stronger community through helping others is essential for creating a more positive and caring society. By coming together and supporting one another, we can create a community that is resilient, compassionate, and unified.

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What Is Compassion?

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

Kevin Dodge/Getty

Signs of Compassion

Types of compassion, how to practice compassion, impact of compassion, how to be more compassionate, potential pitfalls of compassion.

Compassion involves feeling another person's pain and wanting to take steps to help relieve their suffering. The word compassion itself derives from Latin and means "to suffer together."

It is related to other emotions such as sympathy, empathy , and altruism , although the concepts have some key differences. Empathy refers more to the general ability to take another person's perspective and feel the emotions of others. Compassion, on the other hand, is what happens when those feelings of empathy are accompanied by the desire to help.

This article discusses the definition of compassion and how to recognize this emotion. It also covers some of the benefits of compassion and what you can do to become a more compassionate person.

Some signs that you have compassion for others include:

Feeling like you have a great deal in common with other people, even if you are very different in many ways.
Being able to understand what other people are going through and feeling their pain.
Being mindful of other people's emotions, thoughts, and experiences.
Taking action when you see that someone else is suffering.
Having a high level of emotional intelligence so that you are able to understand, manage, and act on your own emotions as well as the emotions of others.
Feeling gratitude when other people express compassion for your own hardships.

Compassion often comes in one of two forms, which vary depending on where these feelings are directed. Your experience of compassion may be either directed toward other people, or it may be directed inwardly toward yourself:

Compassion for others : When you experience compassion for other people, you feel their pain and want to find a way to relieve their suffering. These feelings compel you to take action to do what you can to make the situation better.
Self-compassion : This involves treating yourself with the same compassion and kindness that you would show to others. Rather than beating yourself up over mistakes you may have made in the past, you feel understanding, mindful, and accepting of yourself and your imperfections.

There are a number of different steps you can take to show compassion to others.

Speak with kindness
Apologize when you've made a mistake
Listen carefully and without judgment
Encourage other people
Offer to help someone with a task
Be happy for someone else's success
Accept people for who they are
Forgive people for making mistakes
Show respect
Express gratitude and appreciation

When you practice compassion, you start by empathizing with another person's situation. You look at what they are going through without judgment and imagine how you might feel in their situation.

Compassion and empathy share common elements, but compassion goes a step beyond. Rather than just imagining yourself in their shoes, compassion drives you to take action to help that person. Because you are able to feel those emotions so keenly—almost as if it is happening to you—there is a strong motivation to find a way to change the situation or ease the other person's pain.

Compassion can have a positive impact on your life, ranging from improving your relationships to boosting your overall happiness. Some of the positive effects of compassion:

Giving feels good : One of the reasons why compassion can be so effective is that both giving and receiving can improve your psychological well-being. Being the recipient of compassion can help you get the support you need to carry you through a difficult time. But giving compassion to others can be just as rewarding. For example, researchers have found that giving money to others who need it actually produces greater happiness rewards than spending it on ourselves.
Compassionate people live longer : Engaging in activities such as volunteering to help those you feel compassion for can improve your longevity. One study found that people who volunteer out of concern for others tend to live longer than people who do not volunteer.
Compassion contributes to a life of purpose : One study found that the happiness that comes from living a life of purpose and meaning—one that is fueled by kindness and compassion—can play a role in better health. In the study, participants who experience what is known as eudaimonic happiness—or the kind of happiness that comes from living a meaningful life that involves helping others—experienced lower levels of depression, stronger immunity, and less inflammation.
Compassion improves relationships : Compassion can also help you build the social support and connections that are important for mental well-being. It can also protect your interpersonal relationships . Research suggests that compassion is a key predictor of the success and satisfaction of relationships.

According to one study published in the journal Emotion , compassion is the single most important predictor of a happy relationship. Interestingly, the study found that while people tend to gain the greatest benefits when their partner notices their acts of kindness, they actually experience benefits whether their partner notices or not. These findings suggest that compassion itself can be its own reward.

Compassion is good for both your physical and mental health. Not only that, it feels good to help others and can contribute to a greater sense of purpose and meaning in your life.

While some people tend to be more compassionate by nature, experts also suggest that there are steps you can take to cultivate a greater sense of compassion for both yourself and others:

Bring your attention to the situation : The first component of compassion is to become more aware of what other people are experiencing. Imagine yourself in their shoes. Being able to see things from another person’s perspective can help you gain a sense of compassion for their situation. Practice putting yourself in someone else’s place and imagine how you might feel. Focus on feeling how they might be feeling.
Let go of judgment : Accepting people as they are and avoiding judgment is important. Focus on accepting people for who they are without criticizing or blaming the victim .
Practice mindfulness : Mindfulness is a practice of focusing on the present, becoming more aware of your own thoughts, and observing these thoughts without judging them. Research suggests that mindfulness-based interventions can be effective for improving self-compassion.
Try loving-kindness meditation : This form of meditation, also known as compassion meditation, involves meditating while directing kind, compassionate thoughts toward yourself or others. Research suggests that this form of meditation can help people improve their connection to others and boost well-being.

One potential pitfall of compassion is that constant exposure to the distress of others may contribute to what is known as compassion fatigue.

What Is Compassion Fatigue?

Compassion fatigue involves feelings of physical and emotional exhaustion as well as a mental withdrawal from traumatized individuals. It can reduce feelings of empathy and compassion for people who are in need of help.

People who work in helping or caregiving roles (such as nurses, doctors, or emergency care workers) often experience an extreme state of tension as well as a preoccupation with those they are helping. Because of this, helpers can experience symptoms of trauma themselves, and this can potentially dampen their feelings of compassion.

Finding ways to combat compassion fatigue is particularly important in healthcare and other helping professions. Research suggests that interventions that involve mindfulness meditation can help people in these roles experience greater compassion for others, improve positive feelings, and reduce distress.

While it's good to have compassion for others, it's also crucial that you take the time you need for self-care.

A Word From Verywell

Compassion allows you to feel what others are feeling and motivates prosocial behaviors that can improve the well-being of others as well as improve your own physical and mental wellness. While some people experience compassion more often by nature, there are things that you can do to help improve your own ability to feel compassion for others.

Learning this ability takes some time and practice, but it's worth it to keep working on flexing your compassion skills. Being open to feeling what others are feeling can help you create deeper, more meaningful connections. Acting on these feelings of compassion can benefit others, but as the research suggests, sometimes compassion is its own reward.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

20 Reasons Why Compassion Is So Important in Psychology

Imagine a world without Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., St. Francis of Assisi, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and so many others.

Imagine a world without the countless individuals who risked their own lives to save others during wartime (i.e., the thousands of Holocaust martyrs listed as the Righteous Among Nations). Imagine a world without those who’ve run into burning buildings or executed other heroic feats of rescue during times of trauma. It’s unthinkable.

And what about the concept of compassion in modern everyday life? After all, if this quality has the power to inspire courageous deeds, it must also encourage all sorts of positive behaviors that have both individual and societal benefits.

This article will address these ideas by looking closely at the concept of compassion; such as its meaning, value, psychological and other benefits, and relationship to qualities that promote coping (i.e., resilience).

Empirical research examining the impact and correlates of compassion will also be included. If compassion may be perceived as a requisite for a meaningful existence and civilized society, it is indeed a concept worthy of continued discovery. So, let’s begin our inquiry into this precious quality that is compassion.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Self-Compassion Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you increase the compassion and kindness you show yourself and will also give you the tools to help your clients, students, or employees show more compassion to themselves.

This Article Contains

The concept of compassion in psychology, compassion and positive psychology, research and studies, why is compassion important and necessary, the value and power of compassion, 20 proven benefits of compassion, is compassion linked to resilience, does compassion help to deal with stress, why is compassion important in society, other common questions, 12 psychology journals on compassion, a take-home message.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

The Dalai Lama’s words are instructive because they refer to the emotional benefits of compassion to both the giver and recipient. In other words, the rewards of practicing compassion work both ways.

But what exactly is meant by ‘compassion?’ Various definitions of compassion have been proposed by researchers and philosophers. For example, in his detailed review, Cassell (2009) reported the following three requirements for compassion:

1) “That the troubles that evoke our feelings are serious;”

2) “that the sufferers’ troubles not be self-inflicted— that they be the result of an unjust fate;” and

3) “we must be able to picture ourselves in the same predicament” (p. 3).

As such, compassion is not an automatic response to another’s plight; it is a response that occurs only when the situation is perceived as serious, unjust and relatable. It requires a certain level of awareness, concern and empathy.

Consistent with the above definition, seeing a homeless man on the sidewalk will register differently depending upon how this situation is uniquely perceived by passersby. The amount of compassion elicited by others will be dependent upon how serious his situation is deemed, as well as the perceived degree of fault attributed to him for his predicament.

This example is pertinent to a quote that is prevalent in studies of compassion: “ Make no judgments where you have no compassion ” (Anne McCaffrey, goodreads.com). Judging a person’s predicament in the absence of compassion amounts to little more than judgment. Compassion can be painful to feel because it requires empathy for others, but it is also necessary because it evokes positive action.

A Look at Self-Compassion

Psychologists are also interested in the role of compassion towards oneself. When individuals view their own behaviors and shortcomings without compassion, they may ruminate about their faults and inadequacies in such a way that erodes self-esteem and happiness.

Because of the importance of self-kindness and -forgiveness to mental health, the concept of ‘ self-compassion ’ is occurring more often in the psychological literature.

Self-compassion has been defined as involving “self-kindness versus self-judgment; a sense of common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus overidentification” (Neff, 2003, p. 212). It is a way of recognizing one’s inability to be perfect and to see oneself from a comforting rather than critical perspective (Neff, 2003).

Self-compassion is gaining popularity in psychology because of its reported relationships with reduced feelings of anxiety, depression, and rumination (Neff, Kirkpatrick, & Rude, 2007), as well as increased psychological wellbeing and connections with others (Neff et al., 2007; Zessin, Dickhäuser, & Garbade, 2015).

As research emerges suggesting that self-compassion represents an important protective mechanism, increased numbers of psychological interventions are including self-compassion as a key treatment component.

The field of positive psychology “ is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulﬁlling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play ” (International Positive Psychology Association in Donaldson, Dollwet, & Rao, 2014, p. 2).

It is a field that encompasses an array of positive experiences such as contentment, optimism, and happiness which cover past, present and future timepoints; as well as individual (i.e., forgiveness) and group (i.e., civility) level traits (Kashdan, & Ciarrochi, 2013).

Considering positive psychology’s focus on the promotion of positive emotions, traits, and behaviors that ultimately foster positive wellbeing (Donaldson et al., 2014); the study of compassion fits in well with the interests of positive psychologists. The role of compassion in positive psychology is being increasingly supported by science.

In their comprehensive review of empirical studies within the positive psychology field between 1999 and 2013, Donaldson and colleagues (2014) identified 771 articles across 46 countries addressing the aims of positive psychology.

Wellbeing was the most prevalent topic studied. The researchers reported a number of studies indicating that compassion and gratitude were predictors of increased wellbeing (Donaldson et al., 2014).

Additionally, mindfulness was the most frequently researched intervention, and intensive mindfulness training was related to increases in several positive outcomes, including self-compassion. There is little doubt that compassion will continue to maintain its place in positive psychology as a quality meriting continued attention and research.

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There are a growing number of research studies examining the benefits and correlates of compassion.

The following table provides a list of 14 examples:

Increased compassion is related to increased happiness and decreased depressionShapira & Mongrain, 2010

Since Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) originally set the groundwork for the positive psychology movement 15 years ago, many exciting research studies have emerged within the field. Included within this research is the aim of increasing the understanding of important predictors of prosocial outcomes, such as compassion.

But why compassion? Seppala, Rossomando and James (2013) describe social connection as an underlying drive of human behavior, even at the physiological level. As we are a highly social species, fostering meaningful relationships is an essential aspect of healthy human adjustment.

Establishing such connections requires the ability to express care and concern for other people, as well as to identify with them. This latter concept has been termed ‘perspective taking’ (Kashdan, & Ciarrochi, 2013) and is an area of importance in relationship-building because being able to identify with another person’s feelings is strongly related to empathy.

Compassion and empathy are fundamental aspects of quality relationships as they enable kind and loving behavior. Compassionate behavior such as volunteer work also has been associated with positive outcomes such as increased academic aspirations and self-esteem among adolescents (Kirkpatrick, Johnson, & Beebe, et al., 1998), as well as improved mortality rates among older volunteers (Yum & Lightfoot, 2005).

Not only does showing compassion for others make us feel better about ourselves, but self-compassion also serves an important function for wellbeing. Unfortunately, people often disparage themselves over mistakes for which they would readily forgive others. Yet, when we look beyond our flaws and treat ourselves with forgiveness and understanding, we increase our psychological health and wellbeing.

In fact, self-compassion has been reported as more beneficial than self-esteem because it strongly enhances emotional resilience without also fostering some of the negative correlates that have been associated with self-esteem (i.e., ego-defensiveness; Neff, 2011).

The reported relationships between both compassion and self-compassion with various positive outcomes represent exciting findings for both researchers and psychologists alike.

According to the Dalai Lama:

Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people’s hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human ‘brain’ with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human ‘heart’ with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.

(Quotegarden.com).

This quote is pertinent to the field of medicine, wherein medical school training places a strong emphasis on the attainment of knowledge— with minimal attention given to the teaching of compassion.

This lack of attention to compassion in the medical field has been reported by patients, with one survey indicating that only 53% of hospitalized patients reported experiencing compassionate care (Lown, Rosen, & Marttila, 2011).

However, for those experiencing serious or traumatic healthcare issues, bedside manner makes a huge difference in terms of the patient’s emotional and physical health. Moreover, it only takes one uncaring medical professional to discourage future trips to the doctor.

Clearly, the value and power of compassion are essential within the medical field. As patients face their pain, anxiety and fear; nurturing of the soul takes on a vital role in both healing and coping.

For example, in a 17-year longitudinal study of HIV patients, researchers found that greater giving of compassionate love and compassionate love towards oneself were predictive of longer survival (Ironson, Kremer, & Lucette, 2018). This finding is a true testament to the power of compassion.

While the value of compassion in healthcare has gained increased attention among researchers, especially in the field of nursing— it remains a neglected focus of training.

In a poignant story recently posted on Facebook (Treasureside.com), the value of compassion in the nursing field is beautifully articulated. This article chronicles a woman who lost her baby during delivery; it’s a raw and gut-wrenching description of her experience. Despite her despair, the mother used social media to convey her experience as a way of honoring the compassion of nurses.

In her ‘thank you’ letter, she expressed her gratitude to her nurses by noting the many loving and compassionate acts they displayed during her trauma. Here are a few of her expressions of appreciation toward the nurses:

“ Thank you for being my advocate when I couldn’t speak up because I was too busy fighting for my life. ”
“ Thank you for holding me as I wept at the burden [breast milk] I could not release. Your embrace did nothing to lighten the heaviness in my breasts, but you brought a glimmer of light into my very dark world. ”
“ Thank you to the nurse in the ICU who came in to clean me up after my daughter died. Thank you for taking the time to help me wash my face and brush my hair. ”
“ Thank you to the nurse who dressed my baby and took her picture. Thank you for making sure her hat didn’t cover her eyes and that her hands were positioned gracefully. ” (Treasureside.com).

This beautiful letter says everything about the necessity and power of compassion among nurses, who – especially in situations such as this one— often represent the healthcare professionals who nurture patients through their worst nightmares.

The article portrays, not just one or two compassionate nurses; but a full team of caring individuals who seemed to work together in fully embracing a devastated family’s emotional, psychological, and physical needs. These skills go well beyond medical training; they reflect a depth of understanding and sensitivity that is the epitome of kindness, generosity, and love.

Compassion has been described as the “essence of nursing” (Chambers & Ryder 2009), as it requires the ability to perceive the patient’s experience while promoting healing and alleviating suffering. Training healthcare workers in compassion becomes complex because everyone expresses and receives compassion differently.

In their qualitative study of hospital patients in the United Kingdom, Bramley and Matiti (2014) explored patients’ experiences of compassion during their nursing care.

Patients defined nursing compassion in the following ways:

1) Compassion was reported as strongly connected to care, involving encouragement, plenty of time dedicated to patients, and individualized, personal care;

2) Empathy was also considered important and included the desire for nurses to understand how the lack of compassion might feel to a patient; and

3) While the value of compassion did not waver among patients, they disagreed about whether it represents a teachable quality versus an innate trait.

The authors suggest that clinical practice emphasize the importance of nursing compassion by using compassionate care activities (i.e., hearing patient stories, role-playing compassionate behavior, etc.; Bramley and Matiti, 2014). Therapeutic materials based on Mutzel’s therapeutic relationship model have also been designed to teach student nurses how to be more compassionate and empathetic toward patients (Richardson, Percy, & Hughes, 2015).

Of course, there is no reason for compassion within healthcare to be a requirement only for nurses; doctors also have a responsibility to respond to patients in a way that reduces anxiety and promotes wellness and coping— especially for patients dealing with serious illness.

One study found that physicians significantly reduced anxiety among cancer patients by simply providing a 40-second compassion video to patients (Fogarty, Curbow, & Wingard, et al., 1999). Moreover, among patients who viewed this short video, doctors were rated as higher in caring, compassion, and warmth.

If 40-seconds of compassion can make a meaningful difference in reducing patient anxiety, why not ensure that it is consistently applied during patient-doctor conversations?

We are all familiar with the flight video instructing parents to provide oxygen for themselves before their children. This is because we can only help others if we take care of ourselves first; otherwise we have nothing to offer.

Along these lines, the notion of self-compassion is gaining increased attention in healthcare research. Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals may work long hours doing highly stressful work. Self-compassion is an important way for such healthcare professionals to practice self-care and -kindness in order to prevent burnout.

Compassion fatigue (to be subsequently described) and burnout are significant nursing stressors (Neville & Cole, 2013), with research reporting moderate to high levels of burnout among 82% of ER nurses (Hooper, Craig, Janvrin, Wetsel, & Reimels, 2010).

Visualize, for example, a nurse or physician who works a 12-hour shift in a busy emergency room. There are times when he/she may be exhausted with little time to eat; all the while experiencing the stress and sense of personal responsibility that comes with life or death situations.

By emotionally restructuring cognitions in a way that is consistent with self-compassion (i.e., by understanding that some events are beyond one’s control), the medical professional will be better able to cope with highly stressful situations.

Despite the logical justification for increased self-compassion among healthcare workers (including benefits to patients), there isn’t a great deal of research or medical training emphasis on self-compassion.

Consequently, physicians tend to instead value personal qualities such as perfectionism (Mills & Chapman, 2016), which is an important omission. After all, self-compassion predicts reduced anxiety and increased psychological wellbeing (Neff et al., 2007)— qualities that will only serve to enhance the ability of medical personnel to perform quality work.

Read more about compassion training here .

Even though self-compassion and compassion toward others are still burgeoning areas of research, many proven benefits have already been identified.

Here are 20:

Compassion promotes social connection among adults and children. Social connection is important to adaptive human functioning, as it is related to increased self-esteem, empathy, wellbeing; and higher interpersonal orientation (Seppala et al., 2013).
Compassion is related to increased happiness (Shapira & Mongrain, 2010).
Compassion is related to higher levels of wellbeing (Zessin et al., 2015).
Compassionate love is associated with higher patient survival rates, even after adjusting for social support and substance use effects (Ironson et al., 2017).
Patient-reported clinician empathy and compassion is related to increased patient satisfaction and lower distress (Lelorain, Brédart, Dolbeault, & Sultan, 2012).
Brief expressions of compassion expressed by doctors are related to decreased patient anxiety (Fogarty, et al., 1999).
Compassion has a mediating effect on the link between religion and aggression among adolescents. Stated another way, a relationship between religion and aggression was diminished among youths rated higher in compassion and self-control (Shepperd, Miller, Tucker, & Smith, 2015).
Compassion-focused therapy is reported as a promising therapeutic approach for individuals with affective disorders characterized by high self-criticism (Leaviss & Uttley, 2012).
Compassion promotes positive parenting by improving parent-child relationships (i.e., more affection and less negative affect; Duncan, Coatsworth, & Greenberg, 2009). Consequently, there are various mindfulness-based parent training approaches and parenting books with a specific focus on compassionate parenting (i.e., Parenting From Your Heart: Sharing the Gifts of Compassion, Connection, and Choice , Kashtan, 2004; and Raising Children Compassionately: Parenting the Nonviolent Communication Way , Rosenberg, 2004).
Compassion within classrooms is related to increased cooperation and better learning (Hart & Kindle Hodson, 2004).
Compassion for teachers as expressed by colleagues is linked to increased teacher job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and sense of emotional vigor (Eldor & Shoshani, 2016).
Compassion expressed as a function of service work is related to improved health and wellbeing among volunteers (Black & Living, 2004; Yum & Lightfoot, 2005).
Self-compassion has a number of proven psychological benefits, such as reduced PTSD symptom severity (Thompson & Waltz, 2008), and lower levels of psychopathology in general (MacBeth & Gumley, 2012).
Self-compassion is linked to more positive aging (Phillips & Ferguson, 2013).
The combination of self-compassion and optimism is beneficial for depression-vulnerable people (Shapira & Mongrain, 2010).
Self-compassion during smoking cessation training is associated with reduced smoking among participants with low readiness to change, high self-criticism, and vivid imagery during the treatment program (Kelly, Zuroff, Foa, & Gilbert, 2010).
Low habitual self-compassion and high self-criticism are related to a higher risk of depression (Ehret, Joorman, & Berking, 2014).
Self-compassion can be linked to various aspects of general wellbeing, such as happiness, optimism, positive affect, wisdom, personal initiative, curiosity and exploration (Neff et al., 2007).
Self-compassion reduces burnout and fosters important adaptive qualities among medical professionals (Mills & Chapman, 2016).
Self-compassion buffers the negative impact of stress (Allen & Leary, 2010).

Resilience is defined as “the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances” (Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990). It is a type of mental armor that protects individuals from the impact of adversity. Along with promoting wellbeing and social connectedness, there is reason to believe that compassion also fosters resilience.

In their review article, Peters and Calvo (2014) describe compassion as the act of being sensitive to the suffering of others. The authors further note that compassion represents a form of affiliation that motivates us to help those in need. It is in this way that “ compassion triggers positive affect in the face of suffering and therefore contributes to resilience and wellbeing ” (Peters and Calvo, 2014, p. 48).

Resilience has also been proposed as important for reducing the likelihood of ‘compassion fatigue’ – which occurs among workers who deal with high trauma patients (i.e., social workers, hospice nurses, oncologists, rape victim counselors, etc.).

Compassion fatigue has also been referred to as secondary stress that occurs when compassion decreases over time for individuals in roles demanding a high level of compassion. As compassion fatigue is a precursor to burnout, it essential to take steps toward avoiding it.

Interestingly, Mother Theresa was proactive when it came to compassion fatigue , as she required her nuns to restore themselves emotionally by taking leave for a full year every 4-5 years.

Others have suggested that occupational resilience that inhibits compassion fatigue is supported by a work environment with sufficient support for self-care, self-protection, professional development, safety measures, personal experiences, and education (Kapoulitsas & Corcoran, 2014).

These findings suggest that, while compassion plays a role in promoting resilience; there is a line at which a constant need for high levels of compassion can produce burnout. Fortunately, supervisors of those with high stress helping occupations have begun to take some necessary steps toward promoting emotional health and resilience among these invaluable workers.

Several research studies have suggested that there are stress-buffering benefits of compassion. For example, one study by Pace, Tenzin Negi and Adame (2009) investigated the impact of compassion meditation— which consists of meditation that goes beyond soothing the mind by also adding a compassion-enhancement component.

More specifically, following a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training approach, the goal of compassion meditation is to challenge unexamined cognitions toward others in order to promote altruistic feelings (Pace et al., 2009).

Study participants attended twice-weekly 50-minute compassion meditation sessions for a total of six weeks, as well as additional sessions that were completed at home. The researchers found that compassion meditation participation was associated with innate immune responses to psychosocial stress (Pace et al., 2009).

A similar study examined mindfulness-based stress reduction training that consisted of sensory awareness exercises, yoga, loving-kindness meditation; as well as education regarding stress symptoms and consequences (Birnie, Speca, & Carlson, 2010). Research findings indicated that self-compassion was related to reduced stress symptoms (Birnie et al., 2010).

Laboratory studies also have reported stress-related benefits of compassion. For example, in an ego-threat experiment, self-compassion was found to protect participants from anxiety (Neff et al., 2007).

And finally, compassion was assessed among participants who completed a high-stress task. Those who were higher in compassion reported a greater degree of liking for supportive evaluators.

Compassion also interacted with social support such that those participants who were higher in compassion and received social support as part of the experiment showed less physiological stress reactivity as measured by blood pressure, HF-HRV, and cortisol reactivity (Cosley, McCoy, Saslow, & Epel, 2010).

The above studies support the notion that individuals who are high in self-compassion or compassion for others respond to stress in a healthier way than those who are lower in such constructs.

With respect to self-compassion, psychologists argue that self-compassionate individuals buffer themselves from stress by using self-kindness and positive cognitive restructuring as a way of coping with stressful situations (Allen, & Leary, 2010). More research is needed examining the link between compassion and stress, but evidence thus far provides promising support for the stress inoculating power of compassion.

The 14th Dalai Lama, known as Gyalwa Rinpoche, once said,

“ We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves .”

The inner peace this quote illustrates regards the concept of self-compassion. Self-compassion consists of three distinct constructs (Hollis-Walker & Colosimo, 2011):

showing ourselves warmth and kindness, rather than harsh self-criticism or judgment;
accepting that imperfection, failure, and suffering are an unavoidable part of the human condition;
mindfully paying attention to one’s suffering in the present moment with clarity and balance.

Self-compassionate behavior has been linked to increased optimism, emotional intelligence, coping, and several physical health benefits (Neff, 2003). The 12 self-compassion techniques can be implemented to start or develop your journey to self-compassion.

In his classic song “Imagine,” John Lennon envisioned a world in which people lived peacefully without greed or hunger. He was singing about his dream for a compassionate world.

Philosophers have also shared many thoughts on compassion, such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who believed that “ Compassion is the basis of all morality ” (thinkexist.com). In a compassion-based society, historical atrocities such as genocide, war, and acts of terrorism would not have happened.

Fortunately, as history is a window to the future, we can learn a great deal from it. History needs to be considered with a compassionate mindset, which includes an understanding of ongoing historical trauma. And with the hypervigilance to notice and act upon current wrongdoings such that they do not escalate, and negative historical events are not repeated.

More poignantly stated in Deuteronomy 4:9, “ Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children and to your children’s children ” (Deuteronomy 4:9). This is living with compassion both for the past and the present.

Compassion is suggested as an integral component of evolution by serving to protect vulnerable offspring, promote cooperative behavior between non-family members, and encourage adaptive mate selection (Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010). Stated another way, compassion has served to enhance the survival of the human species.

Being moved by the suffering of another has always been necessary for the betterment of society and there is a multitude of modern examples where an ounce of compassion makes a world of difference. Unfortunately, research indicates modern society is showing an alarming decline in social connectedness (Seppala et al., 2013), which is a likely byproduct of the reliance on technology versus face-to-face contact.

Another area in society where increased compassion is sorely needed is driving. Road rage represents a worldwide epidemic that is responsible for millions of injuries per year (James, 2000). If compassionate driving was societally reinforced, as well as a key priority of driving schools, drivers would be less likely to berate other drivers.

Rather, they would be more inclined to understand that drivers are simply human beings who make mistakes. After all, a person who is driving too slowly or fails to signal might simply be having a really bad day. Lives would be saved, injuries avoided, and anger both expressed and modeled for children would be reduced if people would practice compassion behind the wheel.

There are numerous other areas where the suffering of others is too often viewed with an eye of judgment, rather than compassion. For example, homelessness and drug use have reached epidemic proportions in some cities, leaving politicians and citizens at a loss for what to do. There are, however, compassionate approaches that DO work.

In Seattle, WA, the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) project took a novel approach toward chronic drug-users who habitually cycle through the criminal justice system.

The LEAD philosophy is based on research indicating that continued prosecution and jail time for drug addicts fail to deter recidivism. And most importantly, the revolving door in and out of jail leaves individuals dealing with a large sequelae of serious risk factors and problems (i.e., child and/or domestic abuse, poverty, homelessness, mental illness, lack of family support, racial and cultural disparities, medical problems, lack of educational opportunities, etc.) worse off than before.

By taking both a compassionate and research-based approach, the LEAD program offered repeat offending drug users (the majority of whom were also chronically homeless) the opportunity to avoid arrest and jail time by enrolling in a cooperative effort between Seattle police officers and case managers assigned to participants.

Participants received compassion, rather than judgment; as well as the dignity to make their own treatment-related choices. The program was highly individualized and comprehensive, with each participant receiving extensive case management and supportive services specific to their own needs, and for as long as necessary.

Relative to controls, LEAD participants experienced 60% lower odds of arrest and felony charges (Collins, Lonczak, & Clifasefi, 2017), as well as a significantly greater likelihood of obtaining housing, employment and legitimate income at follow-up (Clifasefi, Lonczak, & Collins, 2016). The LEAD program— which has since been replicated in other states and countries, represents a community of compassion that works.

One of the beautiful aspects of the LEAD program is that the police offers became compassionate adversaries for many individuals who had experienced law enforcement in a very different way for much of their lives.

In their essay on “ Mindfulness, Compassion, and the Police in America ,” DeValve and Adkinson (2008) provide an argument for a new paradigm of organizational mindfulness among police.

The authors propose that police officers “ deepen their practices sufﬁciently to exude compassion” and institute problem-orienting policing as a way to address “economic inequality, mental illness, individual suffering, and substandard education… [while moving away from] their traditional order-maintenance worldview, and re-empower themselves to act in different (e.g., policy) spheres as well as in areas of public safety ” (DeValve & Adkinson, 2008, pgs. 100 & 102).

In line with the notion of community justice, it is proposed that Buddhist philosophy is an instructive model for law enforcement by applying mindful action toward the reduction of suffering. Not only would a compassionate-based way of policing reduce racial tensions between police and the community, but it also would “ predicate a relationship of trust, a reservoir of goodwill, to help salve the wounds of the community ” (DeValve & Adkinson, 2008, pgs. 103).

Compassion clearly holds an invaluable place in many aspects of society, such as among police officers, medical professionals, teachers, and social workers. Role models of compassion among those in power (i.e., politicians), have the capacity to dampen motivation toward hateful acts; while instead bolstering kindness, love, and understanding. Moreover, by recognizing human fallibility while considering the suffering of others with an eye toward compassion, individuals can make a difference in creating a more peaceful society.

Here is a list of frequently asked questions and answers about compassion.

1. Can compassion be learned?

Absolutely. While some of us behave more consistently compassionate than others due to upbringing and various other factors, interventions promoting compassion indicate that compassion is teachable. Moreover, such interventions have found increases in various positive factors such as social connection.

Naturally, teaching compassion should begin with young children in order to foster a trajectory toward empathy, compassion, and kindness at a time when personalities and beliefs are still developing.

2. Do other animal species have compassion?

Yes, compassion is evident among other animal species, such as monkeys, whales, elephants, and so many more. And of course, dogs and cats have been known to show endless amounts of unconditional love and compassion for humans.

3. What can I do to be more compassionate?

Be altruistic . We can be more compassionate by moving beyond our comfort zones and helping individuals or engaging in service work as a way of helping people, animals, and our communities. Altruistic behaviors also improve the self-esteem and wellbeing of those who offer them.
Avoid judgment. It is impossible to know the factors that have led a person toward their current predicament; nor how we would fare in the same situation. Considering our own similarities to others in need will help to promote empathy and compassion.
Practice gratitude . Reflecting on the things in your life that you appreciate will foster a sense of compassion for those less fortunate.
Consider Buddhism. The objective of Buddhism is to enhance one’s own wisdom, kindness and compassion; and ultimately to achieve unconditional happiness and enlightenment.
Be kind to yourself. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. Remember that all human beings are flawed and will make mistakes; ongoing rumination and self-loathing serves no benefit to you or anyone around you. Instead, practice self-forgiveness and coping tools that will help you to move forward in a more positive way.

4. How can I be a more compassionate parent?

Compassionate parenting is an essential component of positive parenting. Positive parents show compassion by:

Avoiding labeling children (i.e., “the smart one,” “the athlete,” “the naughty one,” etc.), as doing so is hurtful and promotes both sibling rivalry and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Be sensitive to your child’s developmental stage.
Practice regular, open communication.
Provide affection and emotional warmth.
Empathize with your child’s feelings.
Empower autonomy in order to support creativity, empowerment, and self-determination.
Teach respect for other living creatures by teaching him/her how to care for and show kindness to animals.
Practice positive discipline, which is warm and democratic, and never violent.
Guide and teach your child by role modeling kind and compassionate behavior.
Show optimism and help your child to believe in him/herself and the future.
Provide unconditional love.

17 Exercises To Foster Self-Acceptance and Compassion

Help your clients develop a kinder, more accepting relationship with themselves using these 17 Self-Compassion Exercises [PDF] that promote self-care and self-compassion.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Readers interested in finding academic articles focused on compassion might check-out the following psychological journals:

Current Directions in Psychological Science
Human Architecture : Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge
Human Development
International Journal of Human Caring
Cognition and Emotion
Journal of Happiness Studies
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The Journal of Positive Psychology
Journal of Research in Personality
Journal of Traumatic Stress
Mindfulness
Motivation and Emotion

Along with psychology journals, medical (especially nursing) and social work journals are also excellent resources for learning about compassion.

Here are 10 examples:

Ethics and Social Welfare
The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
Journal of Clinical Nursing
Journal of Emergency Nursing
Nursing Inquiry
Palliative Medicine
Qualitative Social Work
Self and Identity
Social Work
Stress and Health

The biggest take-home message of this article is that compassion matters. There are numerous proven benefits of both self-compassion and compassion toward others, such as increased happiness, improved medical outcomes, reduced stress, reduced psychopathology, and increased social connectedness.

Compassion plays a vital role in the medical field, as well as those where workers consistently aid the suffering. Among patients, compassion has the power to increase coping and healing; and self-compassion is highly beneficial to healthcare workers. In high compassion-demanding occupations, it is essential that workers be supported such that the likelihood of compassion fatigue (e.g., burn-out) is reduced.

While some people are more compassionate than others, it is a quality that can be learned as evidenced by research interventions that have shown significant increases in compassion and related qualities.

Compassion is an essential element in society and is vital to the survival of the human race. Individuals and groups with power (i.e., police, policymakers, politicians, etc.) have an opportunity to contribute to more healthy, peaceful communities by practicing and promoting compassion. Serious societal problems (i.e., homelessness and recidivism) have been significantly reduced following compassionate, research-based interventions.

There are many ways in which individuals can practice compassion such as by being altruistic, avoiding judgment, being grateful, and by applying positive parenting techniques.

By remembering history— including where compassion was both lacking and in abundance— human beings will be more empowered to make compassionate and meaningful life choices. This is the first step toward creating the loving and peaceful society imagined by so many of us.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Self Compassion Exercises for free .

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What our readers think.

You know articles like this are a dime a dozen and always state the obvious and can actually work with relatively normal people. Compassion can be a good thing and everyone knows it. But sometimes compassion is not a good thing and can even make things worse. For example, one may give a gift out of compassion to someone may misread the intent. And, sometimes when you show compassion by helping someone, and not especially expecting a thank you, it can hurt if the help goes unrecognized. If it happens once its not too bad and you can get over it. But, if the situation continues to happen, it can make you not want to share anymore with some people.

Steve, these are great challenging reflections. Such articles can feel trite, but it’s when we really sit and examine compassion in our inner life and in our relationships, and how it works, that they become meaningful. Your described situations in which compassion leads to ‘bad’ outcomes maybe are situations where people’s expectations are unrealistic that they know best what will be helpful to others or that they are able to control others’ response. Compassion is not the problem in these situations. The trouble is a lack of discernment about what will actually be of help to the other person. Truthfully, we can never know for sure how to help, but it doesn’t mean that compassion is any less valuable as a motivation. In fact, the not knowing may make compassion all the more important. If compassion is strong, we are more likely to keep trying to figure out how to be of help, even when we fail or have our efforts ignored. Maybe we even see that we have helped, and that feels good even though our efforts are ignored by others. That we we are rewarded intrinsically, even if no one notices from the outside. Maybe we realize that the part of us that wants to be thanked is actually self-centered, so we really were not acting entirely out of compassion after all? The intrinsic desire to help is what compassion is referring to, and it need not be impacted by whether or not we are acknowledged for helping or whether we are able to help. The desire is there, and it can be cultivated and sustained, and it can be extended to be more inclusive. over time. This great article explains why this is beneficial to ourselves, not just others! To learn more about compassion experientially, perhaps see The Compassion Shift at Emory University, a training program to make sense of these things on a practical, on-the-ground level.

An exceptionally good article addressing the most urgent need of society today. Compassion to others and self will enable practitioners (anyone including parents) to view their roles and life in a balance way. Compassion to others and self are equally important for the ministers of religions and their team/associates. I personally found this article very useful because I am a parent and I work with people who have autism and severe learning disabilities.

compassion is a valuable human quality for all ( most of all those in the helping professions) As an executive coach and church counselor I am often perplexed as to the dividing line between identifying with the client and /or keeping a professional distance; such that the client has the ownership of the issue and YOU the coach/counselor is the objective observer or solution provider.

Thank you so much for your article on compassion, highlighting it’s importance in today’s COVID-19 context and how sick the world would be without compassionate people around. It is due to lack of compassion that so much of stigma is created around COVID 19. Very true. Compassion promotes personal as well as Society’s well being. Thank you again.

Hi Sr. Mary, Thank you for your kind words. Indeed, the world would do well if we all worked hard to show one another that little bit more compassion in the wake of this crisis. I hope you are keeping safe and well. – Nicole | Community Manager

Your writing on compassion is spot on. Thank you for doing this article. I am sharing it with Compassionate Pomona and Compassionate California so that others can benefit from your research. You are right that what the world needs now is compassion in action everywhere.

Hi Diana, Couldn’t agree more. We’re glad to hear that this post resonated with you, and thank you for sharing it. – Nicole | Community Manager

Is this peer reviwed journal

Its informative article thanks.

Thanks, Heather, for this great overview. Some people fear that self-compassion leads to being too lazy. While being hard on oneself is certainly no good recipe for well-being, it has worked for many to be successful. Or so it seems. Do you know of any scientific research shedding light on this issue?

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What Is Compassion and Why Should We Care?

It's not whether pain will show up; it’s how we'll respond when it does..

Posted April 3, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

What Does "Self Help" Mean?
Find a therapist near me
Our instinct is to avoid our pain and side-step other people’s suffering.
Being there for ourselves will help us better be there for others, and giving and receiving care from others will strengthen us.
Emerging psychological research suggests that we evolved to be kind, caregiving, and collaborative.

When my son was two, he burned both his palms on an oven door I had left open while making cookies. As I cooled his hands under running water, my first thought was, “It was my fault. I am a bad mom.” But then I caught myself. What my son needed was a loving mom right now. If I was in my head beating myself up, I was only partially there for him. I took a breath and rubbed his back with compassion. To be there for my son, I needed to be there for myself, too. We are connected.

Caring is fundamental to our human nature. Caring for ourselves helps us navigate the little pains like minor parenting mistakes and the big ones like break-ups, illness, trauma , and loss. Caring for others connects us, motivates us to reach out and help, and gives our life purpose and meaning.

When you open your heart to life’s challenges and offer care, you are engaging in compassion.

Even though our brains evolved to care for our own well-being and that of others, many of us find it difficult to stay present and loving when faced with discomfort. Compassion is a skill set, and most of us still need to learn how to better be there for ourselves and care for each other.

We all do things we regret, face sudden bad news, and feel the stress of life’s uncertainty. Compassion is a value that can anchor you and be an active force to help you stay present, engaged, and open-hearted as you move through the challenges of living a human life.

The question isn’t whether pain will show up; it’s how you will respond to yourself and others when it does.

Compassion can feel foreign or challenging for many of us. Our instinct is to avoid our pain and side-step other people’s suffering. For example, do you

Distract yourself or check out from uncomfortable feelings?
Criticize yourself when you make a mistake?
Want to avoid feeling anxious , sad, or angry?
Look away when others are hurting?
Have a hard time accepting help?
Feel disconnected from your body?
Have difficulty forgiving yourself or others?

Instead of withdrawing from what is painful, with compassion, you turn toward challenges and offer yourself and others your attention and support.

Compassion is a flow. Being there for yourself will help you better be there for others, and giving and receiving care from others will strengthen you, energize you, and offer you a sense of purpose.

Compassion is not a “should” or “ought” but an intrinsic desire to care for others and yourself. With compassion, you have the wisdom to see and understand things as they are and feel motivated to do something about it (Gilbert and Choden, 2014).

Definitions of Compassion

The word compassion comes from “com,” meaning with, and “passion,” meaning suffer . It literally means to suffer together, but compassion moves beyond just suffering. Practicing compassion involves confronting suffering and being motivated to help. Paul Gilbert describes compassion as having two parts:

Engagement: Turning toward pain and suffering.
Alleviation: Taking action to relieve pain and suffering.

Gilbert writes,

Compassion calls upon us to engage with suffering by being sensitive and open to it, while also generating the feelings of kindness, affiliative connection and warmth that can soothe and alleviate suffering. (Gilbert and Choden, p. 156, 2014)

For many of us, the word compassion may conjure up images of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Goodall, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Desmond Tutu—incredible people who devoted their lives to the selfless care and commitment to others' well-being. But there are compassionate people everywhere who are tuned in to the needs of others and taking daily action to be of service. And that includes you!

Consider these for yourself. Have you experienced

An encouraging teacher or coach who believed in you?
A friend who offered support when you faced loss?
A health care provider who stayed calm when you were in crisis?
A pet that offered a soft snuggle when you were sick?
You, when you showed up with an open heart for yourself and others?

Although some may dismiss compassion as “touchy–feely” or occurring only rarely, emerging psychological research suggests that we evolved to be kind, caregiving, and collaborative. It’s what makes us human and allows us to be there for each other. As my favorite guitarist and climate activist Jack Johnson sings, we’re "Better Together."

Insight meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal translates the Pali term for compassion, which is Anukampa , to mean “caring.” He says he likes the word "care" because of its double meanings. It means to care for others, to value and appreciate them. But it also means to actively do something for them—to help and support them. Be a caregiver.

Compassion is a simple and basic way of relating to the world. You value caring and you take action to express that care. Compassion is actively protecting, supporting, teaching, and being generous toward yourself and the world around you. It’s a way of showing heartfelt concern for the welfare of all beings.

Compassion looks like this:

Asking yourself, “What do I really need in this moment?”
Being sensitive to the suffering of others.
Offering help because deep down you really care.
Reminding yourself that everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Turning toward difficult emotions with kindness.
Setting boundaries .
Speaking up against injustice.
Being of service to something bigger than you.

Compassion is also a value that emerges as we grow more psychologically flexible. When you are open, willing, and engaged with your values, you may just find compassion is a natural outgrowth of committed action. Your brain and heart evolved to be caring. How can you act on compassion today?

To learn more about compassion and process-based approaches for living well, listen to Diana Hills's podcast Your Life in Process .

Diana Hill, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, co-author of ACT Daily Journal , and the host of the podcast Your Life in Process.

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

The Compassionate Instinct

Humans are selfish. It’s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good.

These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the emotions are the horses. Life is a continual struggle to keep the emotions under control.

Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being’s welfare, has been treated with downright derision. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: “Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings,” he said of compassion. Many question whether true compassion exists at all—or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest.

Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive—a view which has its origins in Darwin ’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals . Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good. The biological basis of compassion

First consider the recent study of the biological basis of compassion. If such a basis exists, we should be wired up, so to speak, to respond to others in need. Recent evidence supports this point convincingly. University of Wisconsin psychologist Jack Nitschke found in an experiment that when mothers looked at pictures of their babies, they not only reported feeling more compassionate love than when they saw other babies; they also demonstrated unique activity in a region of their brains associated with the positive emotions. Nitschke’s finding suggests that this region of the brain is attuned to the first objects of our compassion—our offspring.

But this compassionate instinct isn’t limited to parents’ brains. In a different set of studies, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University found that when subjects contemplated harm being done to others, a similar network of regions in their brains lit up. Our children and victims of violence—two very different subjects, yet united by the similar neurological reactions they provoke. This consistency strongly suggests that compassion isn’t simply a fickle or irrational emotion, but rather an innate human response embedded into the folds of our brains.

In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns , participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desire.

The brain, then, seems wired up to respond to others’ suffering—indeed, it makes us feel good when we can alleviate that suffering. But do other parts of the body also suggest a biological basis for compassion?

It seems so. Take the loose association of glands, organs, and cardiovascular and respiratory systems known as the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS plays a primary role in regulating our blood flow and breathing patterns for different kinds of actions. For example, when we feel threatened, our heart and breathing rates usually increase, preparing us either to confront or flee from the threat—the so-called “fight or flight” response. What is the ANS profile of compassion? As it turns out, when young children and adults feel compassion for others, this emotion is reflected in very real physiological changes: Their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which prepares them not to fight or flee, but to approach and sooth.

Then there’s oxytocin, a hormone that floats through the bloodstream. Research performed on the small, stocky rodents known as prairie voles indicates that oxytocin promotes long-term bonds and commitments, as well as the kind of nurturing behavior—like care for offspring—that lies at the heart of compassion. It may account for that overwhelming feeling of warmth and connection we feel toward our offspring or loved ones. Indeed, breastfeeding and massages elevate oxytocin levels in the blood (as does eating chocolate). In some recent studies I’ve conducted, we have found that when people perform behaviors associated with compassionate love—warm smiles, friendly hand gestures, affirmative forward leans—their bodies produce more oxytocin. This suggests compassion may be self-perpetuating: Being compassionate causes a chemical reaction in the body that motivates us to be even more compassionate.

Signs of compassion

According to evolutionary theory, if compassion is truly vital to human survival, it would manifest itself through nonverbal signals. Such signals would serve many adaptive functions. Most importantly, a distinct signal of compassion would soothe others in distress, allow people to identify the good-natured individuals with whom they’d want long-term relationships, and help forge bonds between strangers and friends.

Research by Nancy Eisenberg , perhaps the world’s expert on the development of compassion in children, has found that there is a particular facial expression of compassion, characterized by oblique eyebrows and a concerned gaze. When someone shows this expression, they are then more likely to help others. My work has examined another nonverbal cue: touch.

Previous research has already documented the important functions of touch. Primates such as great apes spend hours a day grooming each other, even when there are no lice in their physical environment. They use grooming to resolve conflicts, to reward each other’s generosity, and to form alliances. Human skin has special receptors that transform patterns of tactile stimulation—a mother’s caress or a friend’s pat on the back—into indelible sensations as lasting as childhood smells. Certain touches can trigger the release of oxytocin, bringing feelings of warmth and pleasure. The handling of neglected rat pups can reverse the effects of their previous social isolation, going as far as enhancing their immune systems.

My work set out to document, for the first time, whether compassion can be communicated via touch. Such a finding would have several important implications. It would show that we can communicate this positive emotion with nonverbal displays, whereas previous research has mostly documented the nonverbal expression of negative emotions such as anger and fear. This finding would also shed light on the social functions of compassion—how people might rely on touch to soothe, reward, and bond in daily life.

In my experiment, I put two strangers in a room where they were separated by a barrier. They could not see one another, but they could reach each other through a hole. One person touched the other on the forearm several times, each time trying to convey one of 12 emotions, including love, gratitude, and compassion. After each touch, the person touched had to describe the emotion they thought the toucher was communicating.

Imagine yourself in this experiment. How do you suppose you might do? Remarkably, people in these experiments reliably identified compassion, as well as love and the other ten emotions, from the touches to their forearm. This strongly suggests that compassion is an evolved part of human nature—something we’re universally capable of expressing and understanding. Motivating altruism

Feeling compassion is one thing; acting on it is another. We still must confront a vital question: Does compassion promote altruistic behavior? In an important line of research, Daniel Batson has made the persuasive case that it does. According to Batson, when we encounter people in need or distress, we often imagine what their experience is like. This is a great developmental milestone—to take the perspective of another. It is not only one of the most human of capacities; it is one of the most important aspects of our ability to make moral judgments and fulfill the social contract. When we take the other’s perspective, we feel an empathic state of concern and are motivated to address that person’s needs and enhance that person’s welfare, sometimes even at our own expense.

In a compelling series of studies, Batson exposed participants to another’s suffering. He then had some participants imagine that person’s pain, but he allowed those participants to act in a self-serving fashion—for example, by leaving the experiment.

Within this series, one study had participants watch another person receive shocks when he failed a memory task. Then they were asked to take shocks on behalf of the participant, who, they were told, had experienced a shock trauma as a child. Those participants who had reported that they felt compassion for the other individual volunteered to take several shocks for that person, even when they were free to leave the experiment.

In another experiment, Batson and colleagues examined whether people feeling compassion would help someone in distress, even when their acts were completely anonymous. In this study female participants exchanged written notes with another person, who quickly expressed feeling lonely and an interest in spending time with the participant. Those participants feeling compassion volunteered to spend significant time with the other person, even when no one else would know about their act of kindness.

Taken together, our strands of evidence suggest the following. Compassion is deeply rooted in human nature; it has a biological basis in the brain and body. Humans can communicate compassion through facial gesture and touch, and these displays of compassion can serve vital social functions, strongly suggesting an evolutionary basis of compassion. And when experienced, compassion overwhelms selfish concerns and motivates altruistic behavior.

Cultivating compassion

We can thus see the great human propensity for compassion and the effects compassion can have on behavior. But can we actually cultivate compassion, or is it all determined by our genes?

Loving-Kindness Meditation

Strengthen feelings of kindness and connection toward others.

Recent neuroscience studies suggest that positive emotions are less heritable—that is, less determined by our DNA—than the negative emotions. Other studies indicate that the brain structures involved in positive emotions like compassion are more “plastic”—subject to changes brought about by environmental input. So we might think about compassion as a biologically based skill or virtue, but not one that we either have or don’t have. Instead, it’s a trait that we can develop in an appropriate context. What might that context look like? For children, we are learning some answers.

Some researchers have observed a group of children as they grew up, looking for family dynamics that might make the children more empathetic, compassionate, or likely to help others. This research points to several key factors.

First, children securely attached to their parents, compared to insecurely attached children, tend to be sympathetic to their peers as early as age three and a half, according to the research of Everett Waters , Judith Wippman , and Alan Sroufe . In contrast, researchers Mary Main and Carol George found that abusive parents who resort to physical violence have less empathetic children.

Developmental psychologists have also been interested in comparing two specific parenting styles. Parents who rely on induction engage their children in reasoning when they have done harm, prompting their child to think about the consequences of their actions and how these actions have harmed others. Parents who rely on power assertion simply declare what is right and wrong, and resort more often to physical punishment or strong emotional responses of anger. Nancy Eisenberg , Richard Fabes , and Martin Hoffman have found that parents who use induction and reasoning raise children who are better adjusted and more likely to help their peers. This style of parenting seems to nurture the basic tools of compassion: an appreciation of others’ suffering and a desire to remedy that suffering.

Parents can also teach compassion by example. A landmark study of altruism by Pearl and Samuel Oliner found that children who have compassionate parents tend to be more altruistic. In the Oliners’ study of Germans who helped rescue Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, one of the strongest predictors of this inspiring behavior was the individual’s memory of growing up in a family that prioritized compassion and altruism.

A more compassionate world

Human communities are only as healthy as our conceptions of human nature. It has long been assumed that selfishness, greed, and competitiveness lie at the core of human behavior, the products of our evolution. It takes little imagination to see how these assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policy making to media portrayals of social life.

But clearly, recent scientific findings forcefully challenge this view of human nature. We see that compassion is deeply rooted in our brains, our bodies, and in the most basic ways we communicate. What’s more, a sense of compassion fosters compassionate behavior and helps shape the lessons we teach our children.

Of course, simply realizing this is not enough; we must also make room for our compassionate impulses to flourish. In Greater Good magazine, we feature articles that can help us do just that. Our contributors provide ample evidence to show what we can gain from more compassionate marriages, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and other institutions. They do more than make us reconsider our assumptions about human nature. They offer a blueprint for a more compassionate world.

About the Author

Dacher Keltner

Uc berkeley.

Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. , is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence and Born to Be Good , and a co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct .

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Lovely, important discussion. The reality is that while we all innately have an instinct for compassion, we also have a much stronger instinct for survival. The two don’t compete when a threat to our survival is present. Survival instincts win out; unless we are trained to recognize what is happening and respond differently. This is what we teach at the Compassion Movement. http://compassionmovement.org Great blog, I will add it to my blogroll!

Melody Brooke | 5:26 pm, June 30, 2010 | Link

This is an important article because increasing compassion can truly change the world. It can not only lead to altruistic behavior that changes the world for the better but leads to happier individuals regardless of circumstances.

It’s also important to note that it’s important to develop self compassion as well as compassion for others.

In this blog post I explain why it’s so important and how increasing self compassion can change our lives.

http://www.selfinfluence.net/a-trait-more-powerful-than-self-esteem/

Rodney Daut | 11:07 pm, August 2, 2010 | Link

great article!it is very meaningful and informative..we should have compassion in our lives.greed is we have if compassion does not evolve on us.compassionate is love.so if we have compassion love will be on us. thanks a lot

Jonh Clemms | 2:15 pm, August 11, 2010 | Link

We are biologically set up to be compassionate, but it needs to be practiced to acquire compassion. Just like we are biologically set up to walk and talk, but it takes experience with either to get that ability.

Scientists again find evidence supporting the Biblical view of humanity, and how we ought to live: we have to practice compassion to fully realize our potential for compassion, and take care of each other, or we end up guided by the parts of our nature that are more selfish, a reaility noted in the beginning of the article.

MeToo | 6:41 am, November 9, 2010 | Link

great article!

i also find interesting shelley taylor’s research, which builds a case for natural human instincts of “tend & befriend”—as opposed to “flight or fright” : http://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu

gary gach | 4:09 pm, November 12, 2010 | Link

Thank you for this informative articles on compassion. I used it on my radio show Mastering the Shift Living Your Noetic Reality. The blog link is above. Blessings in the shift

Rebecca Skeele | 12:24 pm, March 22, 2011 | Link

“Compassion is the beginning of being; without it everything is chaos. Everything has come into existence through compassion and by compassion it continues to exist in harmony. Every thing speaks of compassion and promises compassion. Because of this, the universe can be considered a symphony of compassion. All kinds of voices proclaim compassion so that it is impossible not to be aware of it, and impossible not to feel the wide mercy encircling everything. How unfortunate are the souls who don’t perceive this Man has a responsibility to show compassion to all living beings, as a requirement of being human. The more he displays compassion, the more exalted he becomes, while the more he resorts to wrongdoing, oppression and cruelty, the more he is disgraced and humiliated, becoming a shame to humanity.” (Fethullah Gulen) Fethullah Gulen Fethullah Gulen News

Dr. McClay | 6:47 am, January 13, 2012 | Link

also find interesting shelley taylor’s research, which builds a case for natural human instincts of “tend & befriend

tarjetas de visita | 7:23 am, January 22, 2012 | Link

Wow. This post is an eye-opener for those who think that people are selfish. We may be sometimes, but we also have our compassionate side and no one can deny that. This post of yours is really inspiring. Thank you.

Life Quotes | 2:42 am, May 4, 2012 | Link

I’m so grateful for having found The Greater Good and Dacher Keltner’s article, The Compassionate Instinct. Knowing that we humans vary in compassion all the way from that of the psychopath to people like Mother Teresa, I’m looking for the reasons for this variance as well as what changes will occur in the decrease of confict in the world and the increase in contentment and joy as our compassion for all others is realized. Greater Good and Keltner’s article have given me a great path for answers.

Dean Hinmon | 8:54 am, August 8, 2012 | Link

REVIEW article

Ways of knowing compassion: how do we come to know, understand, and measure compassion when we see it.

$\r\nJennifer S. Mascaro*$

1 Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, United States
2 Graduate Division of Religion, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States
3 Department of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States
4 Department of Spiritual Health, Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States
5 Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States
6 Department of Psychology, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, OR, United States
7 School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, United States

Over the last decade, empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from the abundance of multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies. Naturally, the diversity of research methods and theoretical frameworks employed presents a significant challenge to consensus and synthesis of this knowledge. To bring the empirical findings of separate and sometimes siloed disciplines into conversation with one another requires an examination of their disparate assumptions about what compassion is and how it can be known. Here, we present an integrated theoretical review of methodologies used in the empirical study of compassion. Our goal is to highlight the distinguishing features of each of these ways of knowing compassion, as well as the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives (methods matching), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines (methods mixing), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be missing.

Introduction

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in the empirical study of compassion. Programs of research investigate the phylogenetic continuity and evolutionary history of compassion ( Goetz et al., 2010 ; Preston and Hofelich, 2012 ; Gilbert and Mascaro, 2017 ; Marsh, 2019 ), the physiological systems supporting compassion ( Gilbert, 2014a ; Kemper et al., 2015 ; Wang et al., 2019 ), and the impact of compassion on psychological and physical health ( Galante et al., 2014 ; Neff et al., 2016 ). Along with this more foundational research, applied and translational studies examine the role and optimal manifestation of compassion in healthcare and educational settings, and test the efficacy of interventions and training programs aimed at expanding compassion toward self and others in a variety of contexts ( McCaffrey and McConnell, 2015 ; Bibeau et al., 2016 ; Sinclair et al., 2016b ; van Berkhout and Malouff, 2016 ; Luberto et al., 2018 ). Each of these domains of research has advanced in large part due to the development of measurement tools for identifying, describing, and quantifying compassion, as well as for empirically evaluating theoretical models of compassion. While this abundance of multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research has advanced what is known about compassion, the diversity of methods, assumptions, and theoretical frameworks makes it challenging to draw conclusions across studies and/or to incorporate compassion research into new fields, especially fields in which compassion may already be partially or implicitly operationalized.

While not without contention, large bodies of literature have generally cohered around a definition of compassion as a benevolent emotional response toward another who is suffering, coupled with the motivation to alleviate their suffering and promote their well-being ( Dalai Lama, 2002 ; Goetz et al., 2010 ; Halifax, 2012 ; Klimecki et al., 2013 ; Post et al., 2014 ; Singer and Klimecki, 2014 ; Strauss et al., 2016 ; Sinclair et al., 2017c ; Gilbert, 2019 ). From this starting point, we will survey research conducted on compassion and related constructs that share or resemble some or all of the basic criteria that characterize compassion. These are (1) an awareness of another’s suffering, (2) a benevolent emotional or affective response, and (3) the motivation to help or act ( Strauss et al., 2016 ).

This theoretical review of empirical methods used to study compassion has the broad aim of promoting communication, collaboration, and convergence across disciplines. Our goal as a team of interdisciplinary scholars trained in foundational and applied areas of public health (K.P., M.A., and T.F.), social psychology (P.C.), biological anthropology (J.M. and T.F.), psychiatry (C.R.), and religious studies (M.F.) is twofold. First, we provide an integrated and interdisciplinary theoretical review of methods currently used in the empirical study of compassion. Second, we examine the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives ( methods matching ), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines ( methods mixing ), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be absent or non-operationalized ( methods missing ) (for an overview of key terminology used in this article, see glossary in Table 1 ).

Table 1. A glossary of terms and their associated definitions used in this paper.

Within the scope of this review, we have deliberately set aside a number of worthwhile goals. First, we do not intend to critique alternate definitions or ways of operationalizing compassion. Constructive critiques are ongoing to refine and validate the construct of compassion, but this is not our project ( Singer and Klimecki, 2014 ; Gu et al., 2017 ). Neither do we intend to privilege any empirical method or set of methods over others. For our purposes here, the suitability of a method is principally driven by research objectives. In addition, while many studies helpfully review and evaluate the impact of compassion ( Eisenberg et al., 2010 ; Perrone-McGovern et al., 2014 ), these are too numerous and wide-ranging to adequately evaluate here. Moreover, this will not be a systematic or meta-analytic review of any one method. Our goal, instead, is to forge connections between disparate areas of compassion research in order to generate an overview of the current state of available methods for studying compassion. Lastly, we do not seek to prescribe directions for future research. Rather, we will conclude with recommendations for selecting and combining methods to advance understandings of compassion and maximize knowledge transfer across domains.

Research indicates that compassion has immediate health benefits for both the giver and receiver ( Fogarty et al., 1999 ; Steffen and Masters, 2005 ; Galante et al., 2014 ), positively impacts relationship outcomes ( Neff and Beretvas, 2013 ; Perrone-McGovern et al., 2014 ), and improves resilience in the context of adversity threat ( Cosley et al., 2010 ; Neff and McGehee, 2010 ; Lim and DeSteno, 2016 ; Presnell, 2018 ). In medical care, compassion is linked with improved patient satisfaction, compliance, and clinical outcomes ( Patel et al., 2019 ). In the workplace, compassion is associated with improved employee resilience and retention, as well as overall organizational health ( Kanov et al., 2004 ; Spreitzer et al., 2013 ). In educational settings, compassion is associated with emotional well-being among children and adolescents ( Neff and Pittman, 2010 ; Roeser and Eccles, 2015 ), and cultivating compassion during adolescence may lay the foundation for well-being during this sensitive period of social development and beyond ( Játiva and Cerezo, 2014 ; Roeser and Pinela, 2014 ; Bach and Guse, 2015 ). Compassion also stands at the center of some third-wave psychotherapeutic interventions, which emphasize the relationship between thoughts and emotions ( Gilbert, 2010 , 2014b ; Hayes and Hofmann, 2017 ). For example, compassion-focused therapy is an evolutionarily and neurophysiologically informed approach to psychotherapy that aims to improve mental health by understanding and promoting a compassionate motivational system ( Gilbert, 2014b ).

In many contexts, compassion is thought to be trainable either as a skill in itself or as an emergent gestalt of underlying skills that can be cultivated ( Kanov et al., 2004 ; Klimecki et al., 2014 ). Motivated by this assumption, evidence-based training programs have proliferated for cultivating compassion for social and emotional health ( Pace et al., 2009 ; Germer and Neff, 2013 ; Jazaieri et al., 2013 ; Roeser et al., 2018 ; Schuling et al., 2018 ; Borden, 2019 ; Condon and Makransky, 2020 ). Compassion has also emerged as a core value and “active ingredient” of diverse helping professions and professional environments, especially in medical care. At least 25 interventions have been developed to cultivate compassionate nursing care ( McCaffrey and McConnell, 2015 ; Blomberg et al., 2016 ), and compassion training has become a more explicit goal of medical training and practice and is a key component of the American Medical Association’s first principle of medical ethics ( Shih et al., 2013 ; American Medical Association, 2016 ; Rao and Kemper, 2017 ). In addition, in 2013, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services implemented a value-based purchasing system that tied hospital reimbursement to patient satisfaction surveys, making patient-rated compassion critical to healthcare systems’ bottom line ( Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), HHS, 2011 ).

While this breadth and depth of research on compassion and compassion training has arguably advanced scientific understanding and improved clinical, educational, and professional outcomes, there are several inherent issues complicating the study of compassion. First, because compassion includes both an affective and motivational component, there is a lack of consensus about how to compare and draw inferences from studies employing disparate units of measurement or levels of analysis. For example, recurring questions arise about relationships between behavioral and physiological observations on the one hand, and indicators of compassionate affect and motivation on the other: Can researchers intuit a compassionate state in the absence of physiological or behavioral data? Can researchers intuit a compassionate state from physiology or behavior alone ?

Second, prominent models of compassion implicitly or explicitly assume that compassion emerges from discrete competencies, which can, in turn, be differentially facilitated or inhibited ( Halifax, 2012 ; Lown, 2016 ; Gu et al., 2017 ). One influential evolutionary account theorizes that compassion is a suite of universal physiological and experiential responses that emerges because of situation-dependent cognitive appraisals. Besides the basic perception that someone is indeed suffering, compassionate responding is facilitated by the following appraisals: (1) the suffering individual is both relevant and of value to oneself; (2) the sufferer does not deserve their suffering; and (3) one is capable of helping ( Goetz et al., 2010 ). The influence of this and similar models has propelled research focused on emotions and skills that may be necessary but incomplete constituents of compassion. Understanding complex interactions among these components requires empirical strategies that can differentiate between them and explore their dynamics.

Third, compassionate responses themselves are context-, experience-, and state-dependent, requiring empirical methods sensitive to factors ranging from bodily states to social and environmental conditions. A large body of theoretical and experimental research indicates that compassion is influenced by the observer’s perceptions of the in-group/out-group status of the suffering individual(s) ( Cikara et al., 2011 ; Preston and Ritter, 2013 ). Such perceptions can depend on psychological resources ( Dyrbye et al., 2019 ), environment ( Kim and Lopez de Leon, 2019 ), psychological priming ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ), and training or intervention ( Kang et al., 2014 ). Understanding this broader picture of compassion, including psychological states and traits, relationships, environment, and personal history, is crucial for designing appropriate compassion research and for interpreting and contextualizing any findings.

Fourth, multiple related constructs, including but not limited to altruism, empathy, empathic concern, sympathy, prosociality, and care, overlap with broad understandings of compassion and should be considered part of the body of empirical knowledge about it. Significant obstacles to comparing data on compassion-related constructs arise because of well-documented shifts in how they are operationalized and defined ( Batson, 2009 ; Marsh, 2019 ). Yet, their conceptual relatedness suggests that mapping—that is, formalizing and conventionalizing how terms in one research domain correspond with one or more terms in another field—could reveal that transdisciplinary findings converge in significant ways. Related, disparate fields of inquiry have distinct sets of methodologies, assumptions, and theoretical frameworks, which we will explore below. All of these inherent challenges invite consideration from those designing, interpreting, and evaluating research on compassion in any discipline.

We understand ways of knowing compassion to be any empirical phenomena that signal to an investigator that compassionate affect, motivation, and action are present in an individual or group. This includes signs that a necessary component of or condition for compassion may be present. Such an empirical approach to understanding compassion requires a consilient effort to alternate between vantages that focus on measurable physical, biological, and behavioral changes, and on more holistic vantages that focus on human-level, emergent properties of experience and interaction ( Slingerland and Collard (eds), 2012a ). Each way of knowing compassion that we describe evinces strengths and limitations. Some are more deeply shaped by the propensities of humans as social beings, including tendencies toward explanatory confabulation, concern for socially desirable self-representation, expectancy bias, memory bias, errors in affective forecasting, and plain old not knowing . Through understanding these, we can identify complementarity among different frameworks and methodologies and combine approaches and findings strategically to strengthen evidence and claims.

Among the ways of identifying and quantifying compassion, four clusters of features serve as guideposts or heuristics: (1) empirical perspective, (2) state versus trait, (3) quantitative versus qualitative, and (4) ecological validity. Figure 1 organizes the major methodologies reviewed according to these guiding heuristics.

Figure 1. Mapping the ways of knowing compassion. This figure maps the major methodologies reviewed here into theoretical spaces. The shape of the methodology denotes frame of reference. Color represents the extent to which that method has ecological validity. Positioning on the x -axis corresponds to the extent to which a method measures internal versus external aspects of compassion. Positioning on the y -axis corresponds to whether the methodology is generally used to measure state or trait compassion or is used to measure both. Methods on the line between state and trait can be used to measure both, depending on the specifics of the methodology.

Empirical Perspective

To examine diverse methods for studying compassion, we will employ a heuristic feature related to the empirical perspective or point of view reflected in their evidence. That is, if there is a compassionate experience in question, it may be examined from a first-, second-, or third-person perspective. First-person data typically focus on the subjective experience and self-reported assessment of one’s own compassion, collected in scale questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. Studies that rely at least partially on first-person perspectives collect participants’ reports on subjective experiences of compassionate feelings and motivations in response to others’ suffering. Methodologies rely on data emerging from first-person perspectives, when researchers collect, analyze, and interpret participants’ observations as primary evidence of compassion, or when study participants interpret their own experience of compassion as in phenomenological accounts. Second-person data often represent the perspective of the receiver or in vivo witness of compassion. Studies that depend on second-person evidence assess when and how participants recognize and experience compassion in others, be they companions, peers, caregivers, supervisors, or entire organizations. A third-person perspective, or observational perspective, applies when the experimenter or observer determines the presence, absence, and measurement of compassion, and interprets evidence such as physiological and behavioral observations. In this case, the observer neither experiences nor receives the compassion in question. These three perspectives can be mapped onto the emic and etic distinctions ( Pike, 1967 ). Here, third-person perspectives emerge from an etic point of view: observations made by persons outside and relatively objective to the compassionate feeling, action, or interaction under study. First- and second-person perspectives arise from the emic point of view, provided by those who have an insider’s perspective on the compassion (or lack thereof). Of note, we use this heuristic differently than qualitative researchers, who often refer to the interviewee and interviewer using a first- and second-person distinction ( Stelter, 2010 ).

Each empirical method or way of knowing compassion yields evidence from one or more of these perspectives and can be strategically selected to address the researchers’ questions, frameworks, or models of compassion. In other words, those interested in the internal thoughts or emotions surrounding compassion may be correct in prioritizing a first-person perspective. On the other hand, researchers interested in the behavioral aspect of compassion may be better served by informant-reporting and/or third-person measures (discussed below). Complementary first- and second-person measures may together create a more nuanced, accurate understanding of the relationship between internal states and external behavior. Moreover, combining self-report with second- or third-person reporting promises to generate new questions and hypotheses to explain conflicting evidence. In the main sections of this review to follow, we found empirical perspective to be a helpful superordinate criterion for organizing and presenting the various ways of knowing compassion.

State Versus Trait

Another heuristic is the familiar psychological distinction between dispositional or trait-level versus momentary or state-level measurement. Many studies employ measures that frame compassion as a fluctuating internal state , and self-report is used to query the extent to which a respondent endorses feeling compassion at that point in time. In addition to self-report measures of compassionate states, researchers also detect compassion by observing behavior—including speech—that is best explained by the occurrence of a compassionate state, such as responding to another person’s suffering with demonstrable care or help (or expressing the desire to respond). These approaches investigate the relationship between internal processes and/or external circumstances and varying intensities of compassionate affect, motivation, and observable behavior.

Other research methods seek to understand compassion as an enduring individual or psychological trait . Traits, unlike states, are relatively stable aspects of a person’s way of thinking, feeling, and acting across time and in a broad range of circumstances. Because fluctuating conditions or contexts tend not to dislodge an individual’s traits, their origins or causes are, in theory, traceable to more stable and general underlying processes. This is not to say that traits are immutable or hardwired. Indeed, contemplative practices and other ways of priming and cultivating compassion usually presume that repeatedly engendering compassionate states will gradually strengthen the corresponding trait ( McCrae and Costa, 1995 ; Baumert et al., 2017 ; Goleman and Davidson, 2017 ). Similarly, in the context of social and emotional education, traits are considered factors that have some level of mutability over child development ( Knafo et al., 2008 ; Bengtsson et al., 2016 ). This view of traits is informed by Bandura’s (1976 , 1999 ) impact on the field of behavioral learning, which posits that traits can be capabilities that are learned. From this perspective, compassion, like other social and emotional capabilities, can be cultivated over the course of child development and with training, an assumption that guides many social and emotional development programs. Some methods reviewed below aim to illuminate dispositional or trait compassion or the extent to which individuals tend to have compassion throughout their life.

Quantitative Versus Qualitative

A third heuristic category that distinguishes ways of knowing compassion is the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative data are numeric values that correspond directly or indirectly to measurements and/or observations of compassionate phenomena. Qualitative data, by contrast, describe compassionate phenomena in language or images to be interpreted using non-mathematical methods. While specific features of qualitative data, such as directions of change, intensities, frequencies, etc., can be systematically quantified, doing so rounds out potentially explanatory features and context that do not translate into numeric values ( Gavin, 2008 ; Ruane, 2016 ). Merging two of the heuristics that we will use here, all three empirical (first-, second-, and third-person) perspectives can be queried using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Ecological Validity

Lastly, ways of knowing compassion generate data that vary in ecological validity , meaning that they cannot be uniformly transferred or generalized from controlled settings to real-life contexts outside the research setting. Theoretically, the more closely a study’s methods mirror everyday life, the more ecologically valid their evidence will be. Usually, studies with stricter control of variables sacrifice this advantage in favor of precision, replicability, or other strengths. Ecological validity is an especially weighty consideration in light of the social and environmental situatedness of emotions and the centrality of emotion, in the form of affect and motivation, to our understanding of compassion and how it manifests ( Griffiths and Scarantino, 2009 ).

Ways of Knowing Compassion

First-person perspective.

In this section, we begin our review of ways of knowing compassion with research methods for collecting and analyzing first-person empirical evidence, including quantitative and qualitative approaches to understanding compassionate states and traits.

Quantitative

Self-report measures that use first-person data to quantify compassion are the most common methodological tools researchers use, particularly in the health and psychological sciences ( Sinclair et al., 2017c ), and are by far the most common outcome measures used in randomized controlled trials to assess the impacts of interventions for increasing compassion and prosociality ( Luberto et al., 2018 ). The majority of self-report measures assess compassion as a dispositional or trait-like quality. One example, the Compassionate Love Scale ( Sprecher and Fehr, 2005 ), rates 21 items reflecting two subscales: compassion toward significant others (example item: “If a person close to me needs help, I would do almost anything I could to help him or her”) and compassion toward strangers or humanity more widely (example item: “When I see people I do not know feeling sad, I feel a need to reach out to them”).

Self-report measures of the absence or inhibition of compassion are arguably more developed within the literature than measures of compassion itself. These compassion-negative constructs include empathic distress, 1 burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress. They indicate conditions in which a potential caregiver fails to experience or exhibit compassion. The implicit and sometimes explicit explanation is that the caregiver’s reserves of compassion are depleted and/or displaced by feelings of frustration, emotional isolation, exhaustion, and a decreased sense of accomplishment and meaning ( Boyle, 2015 ). Compassion fatigue has been studied among caregivers and providers who work in stressful environments and who are frequently exposed to suffering and death, including physicians, nurses, first responders, teachers in at-risk school districts, and spiritual caregivers ( Roberts et al., 2003 ; Yoder, 2010 ; Hotchkiss and Lesher, 2018 ; Buelher, 2019 ). In healthcare, the Professional Quality of Life Scale is frequently used to examine the relationship between compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress among providers ( Alkema et al., 2008 ; Smart et al., 2014 ; Beaumont et al., 2016 ). While the construct of compassion fatigue receives frequent attention, critical reviews of this area highlight the need for further research that explicitly addresses the relationship between failures of compassion and compassion itself ( Fernando, and Consedine, 2014 ; Ledoux, 2015 ; Sinclair et al., 2017b ). Measurement will be integral toward this end.

Whether quantifying compassion or its absence, self-report measures have various limitations ( Strauss et al., 2016 ). Many commonly used scale questionnaires are retrospective in nature, meaning they require participants to summarize their experience over an entire day, week, month, or a lifetime (e.g., “How much stress have you felt over the past 2 weeks?”; Conner and Barrett, 2012 ). These retrospective measures tend to reflect participants’ beliefs about themselves rather than their actual behavior, lived experience, or physiological correlates ( Mauss and Robinson, 2009 ). Relatedly, in simulation or hypothetical scenario-based questionnaires, participants may be asked to recall or imagine a helping scenario, rate their sense of compassion, and speculate about whether they would help. Responses in this paradigm are most likely driven by generalizations about the self (e.g., “I am a compassionate person”) and about the value of specific emotions and helping behavior (e.g., “Compassion leads to helping, which feels good.”). People often underestimate or overestimate how they might feel in a hypothetical circumstance, which is known as a limitation in affective forecasting ( Wilson and Gilbert, 2003 ). For instance, physicians’ reports of their probable experience of compassion in response to hypothetical vignettes might not resemble their actual interactions with patients. Further complicating matters, the self-reported experience of an emotion does not always match prototypical conceptions of emotional experiences, for example, when fear feels pleasant during a scary movie. This mismatch has been shown to be true of compassion in particular, with study participants reporting that compassion prototypically feels uniformly pleasant yet describing both pleasant and unpleasant experiences of compassion ( Condon and Barrett, 2013 ).

Because of limitations of retrospective self-reports, many researchers rely on momentary measures, often classified as ecological momentary assessment or experience sampling techniques. These techniques require participants to carry a device, such as a smartphone, and respond to alerts or prompts in the moment throughout their day (e.g., “How much compassion do you feel toward your patients?”). Studies have shown that such measures are more closely associated with real-time physiology and behavior patterns than retrospective self-report measures ( Conner and Barrett, 2012 ). This technique has not been widely applied to the study of compassion; however, one experience sampling study demonstrated that compassion meditation training resulted in reduced momentary reports of mind-wandering and corresponding increases in self-reported caring behaviors ( Jazaieri et al., 2016 ). While findings from momentary assessment have high ecological, convergent, and predictive validity, they are time- and resource-intensive. Moreover, although momentary reports overcome some of the limitations of retrospective reports, they remain subject to social desirability and participant expectations, although likely to a lesser degree.

Qualitative

Qualitative, first-person methods based on narratives, interviews, interactions, or focus groups examine the richer contours of compassion. These approaches allow participants to contextualize their responses, appraise significance, and inform researchers about unexpected factors that arise in situ . They capture first-person experiences and interpretations, although not exclusively. To analyze the complexity of narratives, dialog, and descriptions requires rigorous planning, often relying on computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software ( Lewins and Silver, 2007 ; Saldaña, 2011 , 2016 ).

Qualitative descriptive (QD) research uses a variety of forms of data, including first-person accounts, to craft a detailed description of a situation or process and suggest further avenues of inquiry ( Sandelowski, 2000 ; Leeman et al., 2007 ; Kim et al., 2017 ). This method has been used to investigate experiences and causes of compassion fatigue among nurses ( Berg et al., 2016 ; Fukumori et al., 2018 ). Often, QD research is an initial step before more controlled and fine-grained experimentation and analysis ( Neergaard et al., 2009 ).

Grounded theory is a more methodologically formal procedure for analyzing qualitative data, which is used in the human, social, and health sciences. It involves time-consuming recursive sifting, categorizing (i.e., coding), and interpretation to discover recurring themes and patterns in participants’ responses and interactions ( Bryant and Charmaz, 2007 ). To understand compassion, grounded theorists examine firsthand accounts of participants’ perceptions and/or experiences by reviewing and sorting transcribed interviews and interactions to identify themes or patterns that recur throughout a data set and code passages of text exemplifying those themes. They then interpret the prevalence and significance of recurring themes and features (for examples, see Crowther et al., 2013 ; McPherson et al., 2016 ; Sinclair et al., 2017a ; Tierney et al., 2017 ; Jain et al., 2019 ). Many grounded theory accounts focus exclusively on respondents’ conceptual understandings of compassion and may not assess any specific occurrence of compassion. Such projects help constitute a way of knowing how compassion is understood by a person or group. In general, grounded theory is best suited to exploratory projects that supplement or pave the way for explanatory studies ( Bryant and Charmaz, 2010 ).

Other qualitative research in the human and social sciences relies on a phenomenological framework for collecting and analyzing first-person data ( Dowling, 2007 ). This approach takes inspiration from the philosophical phenomenological tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl and developed by subsequent phenomenologists interested in developing a rigorous “descriptive psychology” of conscious phenomena such as existence, perception, care, and empathy ( Husserl, 1989 ; Stein, 1989 ; Fisette, 2018 ; Zahavi, 2018 ). From its inception, phenomenology arguably launched the first-person empirical study of compassion-related experiences. Phenomenological method involves systematically altering one’s attitude toward one’s own perceptions and cognitions, which permits a more rigorous and systematic study of subjective states. By investigating how different phenomena appear to conscious awareness, phenomenologists seek to discover an underlying structure governing consciousness itself.

However, philosophically trained phenomenological researchers are quick to note that the majority of phenomenology-inspired scientific studies depart significantly from foundational methods and questions and are conspicuously unconcerned with investigating the structure of consciousness ( Giorgi, 2010 ; Smith, 2016 ). Phenomenology-inspired empirical studies of compassion address questions ranging from how participants identify subjective experiences of feeling, receiving, and training in compassion ( Pauley and McPherson, 2010 ), to what compassion “is like for them” to experience, receive, and cultivate ( Lawrence and Lee, 2014 ; Jarvis, 2017 ). Other studies address similar questions regarding compassion inhibition, fatigue, etc. ( Waite et al., 2015 ; Jack, 2017 ).

All qualitative first-person evidence has the potential to reveal insights into how compassion is conceived of and experienced firsthand and how conscious, subjective understandings, and attitudes lead to compassionate behavior. For example, qualitative approaches have documented the uniquely rewarding and replenishing feelings that can be associated with compassion, even in the face of suffering, a documented experience of highly trained contemplative practitioners ( Dreyfus, 2001 ). First-person perspectives also reflect human sensitivities to social desirability, usually framed as an evaluative bias, which is the tendency to present oneself in a positive light and potentially underreport socially undesirable thoughts or behaviors. The presence of an interviewer often increases social desirability biases, an effect that can be moderated by the gender and characteristics of the respondent ( Krumpal, 2013 ). Qualitative researchers have given rigorous thought to minimizing social desirability biased responding, especially in interviews about highly evaluative topics ( Fisher, 1993 ; Johnson and Van de Vijver, 2003 ; Bergen and Labonté, 2020 ). While subjective, qualitative accounts of compassion draw connections between experiences, interpretations, and acts of compassion, findings are often not intended to be generalizable or transferable to different groups and settings. Still, it is clear that first-person data can reveal otherwise unknowable information about the mental contents of the compassionate (or non-compassionate) individual being studied. In this way, first-person data can also be used to complement second- and third-person empirical perspectives.

Second-Person Perspective

The limitations inherent to first-person reports of such a highly evaluative construct as compassion highlight the importance of verification with other empirical perspectives. Methods examining second-person evidence of compassion, also referred to as informant reporting , is one approach for doing so. Examples of informant reports of compassion include teacher reporting on children’s compassion, often using a psychometric instrument such as the Prosocial Behavior subscale of the Teacher Social Competence Scale ( Harter, 1982 ). Other informant reports measure compassionate acts within an intimate relationship, for example, Reis et al. (2014) ’ 10-item dyadic inventory of compassionate acts.

Informant reporting by medical patients is a common method for assessing healthcare provider compassion ( Sinclair et al., 2017c ). Scale questionnaires measure general state-level compassion conveyed in a particular clinical encounter. Examples of such tools include the Physician Compassion Questionnaire ( Fogarty et al., 1999 ), the Compassionate Care Assessment Tool ( Burnell and Agan, 2013 ), the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale ( Lown et al., 2015 ), and a new 5-item clinician compassion measure ( Roberts et al., 2019 ). Healthcare provider compassion is also measured by informant reports from colleagues in both allopathic and osteopathic medicine ( Evans et al., 2004 ), as well as clinical psychology ( Kaslow et al., 2009 ).

Some widely used measures of patient satisfaction in healthcare assess general aspects of care that are understood to tangentially reflect patient experiences of compassionate care. The Press Ganey patient satisfaction survey includes items assessing the degree to which hospital staff “addressed your spiritual needs” and “addressed your emotional needs.” One study of more than 1.7 million patient responses observed that ratings of how well staff addressed patients’ spiritual and emotional needs correlated with three Press Ganey performance areas: (1) staff response to concerns or complaints, (2) staff effort to include patients in treatment decisions, and (3) staff sensitivity to the inconvenience that health problems and hospitalization can cause ( Clark et al., 2003 ). The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, a patient satisfaction measure widely used in Medicare and Medicaid value-based purchasing, has versions for hospital (H-CAHPS) and outpatient (CG-CAHPS) contexts ( Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), HHS, 2011 ; Dyer et al., 2012 ). One cross-sectional study of 269 acute care hospitals in the United States found that hospitals that reward provider compassion and provide compassionate support for their employees have higher H-CAHPS ratings and are more likely to be recommended by patients ( McClelland and Vogus, 2014 ). The H-CAHPS survey has also been used to examine compassion in the context of a hospital chaplain consultation by measuring elements of the interaction commonly understood to comprise compassionate care ( Marin et al., 2015 ).

Qualitative research methods are also used to examine compassion from second-person perspectives. Indeed, this method may be a particularly apt alternative or complement to the measurement of overt or external behavior and its impact ( Vazire and Mehl, 2008 ). In-depth interviews allow participants to report on the importance and meaning of receiving compassion, specifics that could not be anticipated in a survey question and that may not translate into quantitative measurement. In their exemplary study, Sinclair et al. (2016a) interviewed 53 palliative care patients and used grounded theory to analyze their experiences of providers’ compassion. They also compared these experiences of compassion with patients’ experiences of related constructs, such as empathy and sympathy ( Sinclair et al., 2017a ). They found that patients viewed overt behaviors such as demonstrative and grandiose expressions of emotion as emblematic of sympathy and reported it as off-putting. In contrast, patients saw subtle behaviors, often falling outside of routine care and tailored to individual needs, as authentically compassionate ( Sinclair et al., 2017a ). The resultant empirical model of compassion is arguably the most comprehensive in clinical medicine. It identifies provider virtues such as authenticity, tolerance, and honesty as essential ingredients of compassion, and it details how these requisites of compassion are carried out in a clinical relational context.

While these strengths may tempt us to conclude that informant reports are inherently more reliable and powerful than self-reports of compassion, it is important to consider the potential sources of explicit and implicit bias when using second-person compassion data, just as with first-person data. Again, our point is not to discourage the use of any research method, but rather to assist in strategic use of multiple research methods to gain a clearer understanding of compassionate phenomena. First, it is likely that informant reports of compassion are skewed by cultural and class differences, as well as racial and gender biases, similar to those shown to impact informant reporting of other non-compassion behaviors and competencies (for example, in student evaluations, Fan et al., 2019 ). There is, moreover, some evidence to indicate that such biases may influence perceptions of care received from out-group members. For example, one study found that patient–provider social concordance levels (a measure of the patient and provider’s match on race, gender, age, and educational status) were related to patient ratings of satisfaction with their provider’s care ( Thornton et al., 2011 ). Therefore, rather than ranking the value of any one perspective on compassion, we believe that matching methods and perspectives to the research questions they are best suited to answer is vital, as we will discuss below.

Third-Person Perspective

A broad array of methods and evidence are used when observing compassion from a third-person point of view. In fact, any quantitative and qualitative data can be studied from a third-person standpoint, even when the evidence itself reflects participants’ subjective experiences of extending and receiving compassion. The crucial difference lies in whether data are examined for their insights into the subjective perception, experience, or understanding of compassion, or whether data are being marshaled as intersubjective evidence of compassion itself. In this review, we do not intend to overlook the ways that third-person observers’ subjective tendencies influence their findings and conclusions. This undoubtedly influences all research on compassion. However, we distinguish empirical perspectives as third-personal by emphasizing how the object of inquiry is specified, while remaining cognizant that there will be overlap and ambiguity in specific cases. Third-person evidence may include researcher’s observations of human-, animal-, and group-level behavior and functioning, as well as measurements of physiological changes from which compassion might be inferred, such as brain states, facial expressions, writings, etc. Human-made products—discourse, design principles, art, laws, archeological, and other artifacts—can also serve as intersubjective evidence of compassion. In the following section, we discuss several forms of third-person evidence from which a state or disposition of compassion may be inferred.

Compassionate Behavior

A great deal of behavioral research on compassion is conducted using social psychology experimental methodologies. Social psychologists generally view compassion as a prosocial state that is responsive to others’ suffering and that motivates costly helping behaviors intended to alleviate suffering, potentially at the expense of oneself. An action or state is prosocial to the extent that it is conducive to social bonding and acceptance. While prosocial helping is distinct from compassion, it is understood as an outcome of some compassionate motivational state. As such, costly helping behavior is often used to infer that compassion is present. For this reason, observations of helping behaviors have been instrumental in garnering ecological validity for compassion as a psychological construct that can influence human (and perhaps animal) behavior. Batson et al. (1983) pioneered several paradigms for studying costly helping in which participants observe a confederate —an actor posing as a study participant—typically facing a difficult situation, such as receiving electric shocks or experiencing distress over a car crash or academic demands. Importantly, these paradigms are constructed such that self-interested factors such as seeking social recognition and avoiding punishment could not explain the participant’s decision to engage in the costly helping behavior. Participants who opt to help are therefore thought to be demonstrating a compassionate state ( Batson et al., 1991 ; Batson, 2009 ; Goetz et al., 2010 ).

Confederate paradigms that assess prosocial behavior in real-time settings are perhaps the criterion standard for ecologically valid prosociality research—they overcome limitations of self-reports because of memory and affective forecasting biases and provide direct assessment of actions that alleviate others’ suffering in situations that reflect daily life. In this way, researchers can measure prosocial behavior when participants themselves are not aware that they are being observed. At the same time, confederate paradigms can be difficult or inefficient to implement, given that they require careful training of confederates and careful debriefing to assess participant suspicion. Additionally, some research scenarios may skew behaviors in a prosocial direction. For example, a participant might demonstrate compassion for someone receiving shocks or struggling with academic work within a confederate paradigm but may not be able to access or extend compassion as readily in a familiar context. Intriguingly, experiments using confederate scenarios have demonstrated the efficacy of mindfulness and compassion training for enhancing prosocial behaviors, even when situational pressures dampen the impulse to help, such as offering one’s seat to a stranger who is using crutches, even when others seated nearby are unresponsive and ostensibly less considerate ( Condon et al., 2013 ).

Other research in social psychology has used both naturalistic and simulated settings to demonstrate positive changes in real-world prosocial behavior after various types of meditation training across different contexts. In one study, mindfulness training was associated with participants’ increased willingness to interact with an ostracized individual via Cyberball, a computer-based ball-tossing game, an effect that was mediated by self-reported warmth and compassion ( Berry et al., 2018 ). Compassion training was also associated with reduced amygdala reactivity and more sustained visual attention to scenes of suffering in an experiment using an eye-tracking protocol ( Weng et al., 2018 ). In another experiment, compassion training was associated with greater increase in participants’ optimism and willingness to write a letter to a convicted murderer ( Koopmann-Holm et al., 2019 ). Behavioral markers of compassion in naturalistic settings, much like confederate-paradigm studies, can require extra time and resources to capture and evaluate, yet they reveal diverse genres of compassion-evincing behaviors across contexts and populations.

As an alternative to confederate and other behavioral paradigms, researchers often use controlled economic exchanges to examine generosity and cooperation in monetary transactions. Various studies have demonstrated that kindness-oriented meditation programs enhance prosocial behavior in the form of economic donations. Loving–kindness meditation has been shown to enhance prosocial helping in computer-based video games ( Leiberg et al., 2011 ) and in online economic transactions ( Weng et al., 2013 , 2015 ). Among preschoolers, a mindfulness-based kindness curriculum resulted in increased peer donations of stickers ( Flook et al., 2015 ). Economic paradigms have also been fruitful in neuroimaging studies that link compassion-related neural processes with prosocial behavior ( Leiberg et al., 2011 ; Weng et al., 2015 ; Ashar et al., 2016 ). While behavioral economic measures offer a well-controlled environment for research on prosocial behavior and are widely used for studying influences on human cooperation and moral decision-making, they are often conducted via computer-based interfaces and impose artificial constraints on social exchange. This approach lacks ecological validity with respect to real-time face-to-face social interactions. Results likely reflect distinctive psychological dynamics of exchange relationships that may not apply to the social bonds that occur in close communal relationships ( Clark and Mils, 1993 ). It is unclear to what extent economic generosity extends to common real-world situations involving the suffering of another individual that would purportedly elicit compassion (e.g., an interaction with a student who is struggling or a patient who is sick).

An alternative to experimental behavioral paradigms such as the confederate or behavioral economic approaches described above are naturalistic observational methods that increase ecological validity and reduce evaluative biases. One example is the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an audio recorder that intermittently captures ambient sound throughout a person’s daily routine without the person being aware of when it is recording, yielding an acoustic log of the person’s day ( Mehl, 2017 ). Previous studies have used the EAR to examine fathers’ empathic language and compassionate responses to their child’s cries ( Mascaro et al., 2017 ). Another study used the EAR to examine correlations between (1) participants’ self-reported mindfulness and (2) language and behavioral indicators associated with mindfulness ( Kaplan et al., 2018 ). The authors found that self-reported mindfulness was not related to prosocial behavior as assessed by the EAR, highlighting the kind of mismatch that can occur between different empirical perspectives (first- vs. third-person). To our knowledge, few studies have explicitly used the EAR to study compassion in the wild , and it remains a methodological tool of relatively high and untapped potential. While naturalistic observations offer high levels of external and ecological validity, they often generate a wealth of data and are time consuming to code and evaluate. In addition, they may be prohibitive in contexts where privacy and confidentiality are at a premium, for example, in clinical contexts.

Compassion in Dyads

Some third-person methods assess compassionate responding by evaluating a dynamic encounter between two or more people, such that the measurement takes into account the interchange between individuals. In the field of family psychology, researchers investigate dyadic behavior between parents and children or between intimate partners. A standard experiment involves having a parent and child collaborate on a difficult task. Researchers code and quantify communication and behavioral indicators that convey warmth (e.g., affection, encouragement, etc.) or that lack warmth (e.g., criticism, eye rolling, etc.) ( Miller et al., 2015 ). Paradigms such as these can be used to couple personal, interpersonal, and physiological correlates with parental compassion ( Miller, 2018 ). For example, Leerkes et al. (2016) examined mothers’ physiological arousal and behavior in response to a distressed infant, with a focus on sensitivity (e.g., appropriate calming behavior) and lack thereof (withdrawing). Methods such as this have been used to examine the impact of life history or trauma exposure on maternal caregiving behavior that occurs in the context of a mother–infant dyad ( Strathearn et al., 2009 ). While the behaviors and constructs examined in these studies are often referred to as something other than compassion (e.g., parental warmth), from our perspective there is a great deal of overlap between these concepts and the model of compassion as an affective and motivational response to perceiving another’s suffering. We believe these findings will converge with those of related disciplines explicitly studying compassion.

Because compassion contributes to success in clinical encounters, third-person behavioral observations are also used to evaluate and understand compassion in these dyadic encounters. Interactions between patients and providers are either observed or recorded, and those data were analyzed using a variety of approaches (e.g., grounded theory). For example, Suchman et al. (1997) examined transcripts of clinical interactions for patients’ emotional expression (direct or implied) and corresponding physician responsiveness. Others have used an ethnographic observational approach and qualitative analysis to examine compassionate communication in hospice, in which the researchers provided a rich description of hospice workers engaging in emotion recognition, relating, and reacting to alleviate patient suffering ( Way and Tracy, 2012 ).

A dyadic approach avoids many of the limitations and biases inherent in the use of self-report questionnaires. It also yields more ecologically valid findings than many behavioral paradigms, and dyadic analysis is a particularly useful tool to understand how compassion unfolds verbally or non-verbally among individuals. However, dyadic approaches are not without limitations. Of primary concern is a lack of agreement regarding the optimal markers or exemplars of compassionate behavior. For example, what constitutes compassion in a provider–patient interaction? Across studies examining patient–provider communication, a diversity of linguistic and performative markers have been coded as compassion ( Beck et al., 2002 ). Common themes included reassurance, active listening, and responsiveness to emotional cues, yet consensus is lacking. Finally, if compassion requires an affective response and motivation to help, as is suggested by most definitions, then all observable behavior, whether occurring in dyads or not, must assess compassionate intentions primarily by inference.

Organizational Compassion

Emergent features of communities and organizations constitute yet another way of knowing compassion. In an influential article, Kanov et al. (2004) define organizational compassion as a collective noticing, feeling, and responding to suffering that promotes healing. They argue that organizational compassion differs from individual-level compassion in that it is collective, sanctioned, promoted, or codified by organizational norms and policies and then coordinated and propagated across individuals. Cameron and others likewise differentiate research investigating the culture and functions of an organization itself (“virtuousness through organizations”) from studies focused on individuals acting compassionately within an organizational context (i.e., “virtuousness in organizations”) ( Kanov et al., 2004 ; Dutton et al., 2006 ; Cameron, 2017 ). Of the former, empirically tractable factors such as shared values, shared beliefs, norms, practices, leaders’ behavior, and the structure and quality of relationships relate to and indicate the emergence of organizational compassion ( Lilius et al., 2008 ; Dutton et al., 2014 ; Cameron, 2017 ).

Physiology and Compassion

Detectable changes in the functioning and structures of the body are alternative ways of knowing compassion. In general, this physiological frame of reference rests on the tenet that brain and body systems are shaped by natural selection to engender compassion and related prosocial emotions and skills. A second tenet is that these states are associated with outward compassionate behavior. It follows from these assumptions that physiological assessment helps us understand the body’s necessary conditions and likely outcomes of compassion, as well as individual variation. In addition, there is often an implicit or explicit claim that physiological measures, not being subject to self-report biases described above, are inherently more accurate than other measures ( Kirby et al., 2017 ).

The neurophysiological domain advances our ability to describe and quantify the activity of neural systems involved in compassion using neuroimaging assessment tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) ( Kim et al., 2020a ), high-density electroencephalography and event-related potentials, and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) ( Petrocchi et al., 2017b ). A common method involves inducing the affective components of compassion in participants using emotionally evocative picture or video stimuli of suffering others and comparing this putatively compassionate neural response to that which occurs while viewing neutral stimuli or stimuli thought to elicit other emotions, such as pride ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2011 ; Klimecki et al., 2012 ). Other studies have examined the relationship between prosocial behavior during an economic game and neural activity elicited by compassion-inducing stimuli ( Weng et al., 2013 ). Still other neurophysiological studies also look for correlations between participants’ self-reported state-level compassionate affect and neural activity elicited by a compassion-inducing task (see for example, Marsh et al., 2014 ; Brethel-Haurwitz et al., 2017 ). Other studies have examined brain function during the self-directed cultivation of compassion, for example, during compassion meditation ( Engström and Söderfeldt, 2010 ; Schoenberg et al., 2018 ) or after compassion meditation training ( Mascaro et al., 2013a , b ). Findings from these assessments are inherently constrained by the relative paucity of ecological validity that can be achieved in a scanner environment, the inferences necessary to link behavior with internal compassionate states, and biases inherent in self-reports. Notably, a recent meta-analysis found some inconsistency in the existing findings on the neural correlates of compassion, especially with respect to the amygdala and midbrain regions important for pain modulation and autonomic function, which may relate to whether the compassion in question was generated as a “top-down” or “bottom-up” process. While there was a high degree of consistency in other brain regions thought to be important for compassion (anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral anterior insula, basal ganglia, and bilateral inferior frontal gyri), this meta-analysis pointed to a relative sameness in the methods used thus far to study compassion in the fMRI scanner. The researchers ultimately advocated increased specification of research targets and additional innovative methods to advance neurophysiological understandings of compassion ( Kim et al., 2020a ). Future research that combines multimodal physiological assessments will be informative for potentially providing convergent evidence about the bidirectional associations between multiple physiological systems important for compassion (e.g., see Nguyen et al., 2016 ; Petrocchi et al., 2017b ; Kim et al., 2020b ). Moreover, future studies combining neuroimaging assessments with behavioral and experience sampling methods will extend the ecological validity, precision, and discriminant validity of existing measures of compassion.

A related physiological methodology focuses on the role of neuropeptides thought to be important modulators of compassion. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide synthesized in the paraventricular and supraoptic nuclei of the hypothalamus and stored and released back into the brain and into peripheral circulation by the pituitary gland. Thus, oxytocin acts as both a hormone and a neuropeptide and has effects on both the brain and the body. Two decades of research have focused attention on the role of oxytocin in parental attachment and bonding, as well as in prosocial emotions, motivations, and behavior more broadly ( Bethlehem et al., 2013 ; Johnson and Young, 2017 ). For example, Palgi et al. (2014) conducted a double-blind, crossover experiment in which participants self-administered either intranasal oxytocin or a placebo before listening to stories of suffering and writing compassionate responses to the victims in each story. The presence of self-administered oxytocin was associated with more compassionate responses toward women but not toward men. Other groups have examined the relationship between endogenous oxytocin and the amount of compassion participants report receiving or experiencing toward others. For example, endogenous oxytocin levels are positively correlated with the amount of maternal compassion that patients with bipolar disorder report receiving as a child ( Ebert et al., 2018 ).

Other researchers have examined the possibility that autonomic responses to suffering, and their downstream impact on heart rate and breathing, can serve as a bodily signal of compassion. Porges’ polyvagal theory posits that, in the face of another’s suffering, an initial fight–flight response has to be down-regulated via myelinated vagal efferent pathways of the parasympathetic nervous system. Vagal tone, as the activation of these pathways is sometimes called, impacts cardiac function and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis to support “spontaneous social engagement” in the face of distress by dampening other, less prosocial responses ( Porges, 2007 ). Early research in this area highlighted the measurement of heart rate variability (HRV) as an indicator of parasympathetic activity. HRV is a measurement of the beat-to-beat changes in cardiac output, and early thought was that the ratio of high-frequency (HF) to low-frequency (LF) HRV reflects the intrinsic balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic activity. However, more recently, researchers have called into question whether the ratio of HF HRV to LF HRV is an accurate metric for the ratio between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity and identified alternate calculations of vagal tone as a more accurate reflection of the underlying physiology ( Heathers, 2014 ). HF HRV and the root mean-square of successive differences have both been used in recent research as a measure of autonomic control of the heart, mediated by the vagus nerve ( Matos et al., 2017 ; Petrocchi et al., 2017a ; Kim et al., 2020b ).

As recent critiques have improved the rigor of research using HRV as an index of vagal tone ( Heathers et al., 2015 ), accumulating evidence supports the measurement of HRV for understanding and evaluating compassion. Researchers have found that HRV relates to the experience of compassion and predicted compassionate behavior ( Stellar et al., 2015 ). Others have found that compassionate responses appear to rely on the parasympathetic nervous system to modulate the emotional response to suffering, as indexed by HRV ( Rockliff et al., 2008 ). Still others have found that training in compassion meditation or engaging with compassion-focused therapy improves HRV, either during a resting state ( Matos et al., 2017 ; Kim et al., 2020c ), in response to stressful stimuli or a task ( Petrocchi et al., 2017a ; Ceccarelli et al., 2019 ), or during compassion training itself ( Kim et al., 2020b ). While not explicitly investigating compassion, another recent study used tDCS applied near the left anterior insula and found that stimulation increased both self-reported soothing positive affect and HF HRV. This innovative methodological approach links a brain region hypothesized to be important for compassion and empathy to both compassion-related affect and changes in HRV ( Petrocchi et al., 2017b ). Based on these findings, some have argued that HRV should be included as a primary outcome measure when assessing and training compassion ( Kirby et al., 2017 ), and recent meta-analytic evidence supports this approach ( Di Bello et al., 2020 ).

Other researchers have used the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to quantify the spontaneous expression of compassionate affect elicited by video stimuli ( Baránková et al., 2019 ). One of the first uses of this methodology emerged in a study of adults and children whose facial movements were documented as they watched a compassion-inducing video ( Eisenberg et al., 1989 ). Researchers found that movements indicating “concerned attention” or “sympathy-directed toward another” correlated with later helping behavior. Compassionate facial movements included lowered and/or furrowed eyebrows, lowered upper eyelids, and sometimes raised lower eyelids, facing forward, and relaxation of the lower face and jaw. Another group used FACS to evaluate physiognomic responses to video stimuli of human suffering to determine whether responses were impacted by a 3-month meditation retreat ( Rosenberg et al., 2015 ). They found that the intensive meditation training increased facial displays of sadness and decreased displays of rejection (operationalized as anger, contempt, or disgust). Of note, a recent theoretical article by Barrett et al. (2019) is skeptical of facial indicators of emotion, arguing that people do not express emotions with enough consistency or specificity to allow for the kinds of inferences made from FACS assessment. Moreover, even among prominent emotion scientists who endorse the theory that a core set of emotions has discrete biological bases—often referred to as “basic emotions”—a large majority (80%) do not believe compassion to be a discrete emotion ( Ekman, 2016 ).

Compassion in Text

Other methodologies are used to qualitatively mine textual content for elements of compassion. Some researchers have used qualitative analysis of content from online platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to look at compassionate language and activity within a Facebook support group ( Pounds et al., 2018 ) or by soliciting Twitter users to describe instances of organizational compassion toward healthcare staff ( Clyne et al., 2018 ). As with non-virtual interactions, online communities can be analyzed at the individual or dyadic (and beyond) level, which has the potential to reveal the dynamic nature of the digitally mediated expression and reception of compassion ( Sun, 2019 ). Others have conducted archival text analysis, for example, analyzing first- and second-century medical writing for evidence of physician compassion ( Porter, 2016 ), or used exegetical and hermeneutic approaches to sacred texts to derive doctrinal or personal positions on compassion (See for example Sears, 1998 ; McCaffrey et al., 2012 ; Gibson, 2015 ; T̈āhir ul-Qādrī, 2015 ). While textual analysis has many of the strengths of the third-person perspective, one must consider the source of the text, which in some cases may be self-reported or informant-reported and therefore subject to the limitations of those methodologies.

Summary and Conclusion

In this review, we have surveyed a variety of indicators and measures that have been used to define and study compassion. Examining these methodologies in the context of one another is vital to making compassion research more accurate, reliable, and transferable. It is also key for increasing knowledge transfer across the range of academic disciplines and other fields of compassion inquiry. Compassion is a multifaceted, intersubjective object of inquiry, glimpsed from a variety of separate viewpoints, each of which contributes to the unity of knowledge about compassion. We end with three summary points:

Method Matching

First, we find it evident from this review that the method(s) chosen to evaluate compassion should be theory-grounded and guided by specific research hypotheses. There may be times when first-person self-report measures are the best choice; however, those should be privileged only when the person’s internal states are most crucial to the hypothesis being tested and with recognition of the limitations of this methodology. Similarly, it stands to reason that other hypotheses will require methods that tap other perspectives and frames of reference. For example, identifying facilitators and inhibitors of helping behaviors directed toward strangers would be most directly inferred from third-person (i.e., behavior-based) evidence rather than self-report.

We also suggest that more thought is warranted on the use of state measures of compassion when testing hypotheses about trait compassion. Behavioral and confederate paradigms are frequently used to measure changes in trait compassion, for example, after a compassion-training intervention. The underlying rationale is that one’s augmented compassionate trait makes it more likely that they will enter into a compassionate state, such that measuring the likelihood of a compassionate response tells us something about trait compassion. The relationship between trait and state compassion is of great interest to many, and more methodological sensitivity toward this issue will be important toward advancing the field of compassion science.

Method Missing

In addition, our review process showed that certain research areas that target compassion would benefit from measurement techniques that are more fine-grained and that explicitly assess compassion. Some K–12 education programs explicitly target compassion cultivation as a broader focus, yet the majority of the effectiveness studies that provide the evidence base for such programs do not assess changes in compassion as a primary outcome being measured ( Jones et al., 2017 ). This lack of explicit measurement makes it difficult to meaningfully evaluate whether compassion-based interventions targeting K–12 students actually promote the development of compassion. Given the demonstrated impact of compassion cultivation on resilience in adulthood ( Bach and Guse, 2015 ; Bluth et al., 2016 ), education research explicitly assessing compassion in childhood and adolescence is well-warranted. Relatedly, the field of social and emotional education development could greatly benefit from interdisciplinary collaborations to create such measures.

It is also clear that there is a lack of clarity about how to measure compassion at the level of organizations and communities. Do the three core components of compassion—awareness of suffering, an affective response, and a motivation to help—also hold for organizations and communities? If so, what do “awareness” and “affective response” look like at the community or organizational level, and how can it be measured?

We have made the claim here that discipline-specific constructs such as parental warmth share a conceptual relatedness with compassion, such that cross-disciplinary sharing may reveal convergences. While this idea has in part motivated the current review, we view this claim as an empirical question for future research. Thus arise questions such as “What does the construct of parental warmth share with compassion for those who are unrelated?” We acknowledge that questions like these are not new (e.g., see Swain et al., 2012 ), but we contend that they will be informed by increased sharing of methods across disciplines. Of note, given the problematic history of the conflation of terms and constructs across disciplines, such work will require care and precision so as not to cause further confusion.

Method Mixing

A key point that emerges from this review is the importance of strategic method mixing for studies of compassion. The multiple frames of reference we have discussed can be combined to create a more accurate understanding of the relationship between internal emotions, goals, and perceptions on the one hand, and external behavior on the other. There are valuable exemplars of method mixing already in the literature. For example, Sinclair et al. (2017a , 2018) used second-person qualitative evidence to understand the perspective of patients receiving compassion and then conducted a follow-up study to understand healthcare providers’ first-person experiences offering compassion. We are optimistic that future research across disciplines will continue to utilize method-mixing approaches; however, it is important to note that at times the results of such method mixing may contradict one another. In fact, this may be important in its own right. The resulting ambivalence can be addressed by enhanced research methods that combine and cross-reference multiple ways of knowing, such as correlating individuals’ self-report scale measures with their behavior, with informant reports, or by using neurophenomenological experimental designs. For example, within intimate couples, first- and second-person reporting could be combined to reveal discrepancies between the way compassion was intended and the way it was received. It is exactly this type of method mixing that has been called for in compassion neuroimaging studies, where researchers have argued that including measurements of both motivation and action in research on the physiology of compassion will be crucial toward establishing links between neurobiology, emotion, and behavior outside the laboratory ( Kim et al., 2020b ).

Moreover, method mixing could advance consensus within controversial areas such as self-compassion and compassion fatigue research. We believe combinations of first-, second-, and third-person compassion measures would help solidify our understanding of how compassion for self relates to compassion for others ( López et al., 2018 ). In clinical research, method mixing can inform how obstacles to provider compassion relate to compassion failures and in so doing will provide a more nuanced landscape for identifying organizational solutions and interventions. Progress here will move the field beyond vague and abstract notions of compassion fatigue resulting from a depleted compassion reservoir and toward a richer understanding of the contexts and resources that foster sustainable compassion. Increasing the versatility and eclecticism of compassion research is of critical importance to comprehensive and interdisciplinary examinations of diverse ways of knowing compassion.

Limitations

Our intent in this review was to summarize the current state of methodologies that are used to understand and quantify compassion across widely varying fields of inquiry. No doubt we bring our own disciplinary biases to this work, but throughout we have used this space to bridge disparate fields. These biases may have led us to overlook important methods that could have further enhanced this review. Moreover, while we defined compassion in accordance with our own disciplines, there are nuanced differences in how compassion is operationalized that will influence the methods chosen to study it. Because of issues of feasibility, while we attempt to incorporate disparate fields of compassion research, we were unable to review all areas to the same degree as the literature from psychology, religion, and contemplative science, with which we are most familiar.

We contend that a better understanding of ways of knowing compassion is a type of consilience that at its best can improve research design, unify knowledge, and bridge disciplines for the benefit of all investigators interested in compassion ( Wilson, 1999 ; Slingerland and Collard, 2012b ). Future research will advance our knowledge by innovating novel ways of combining the measurement of multiple indicators of compassion. Ultimately, research designs that link the affective, cognitive, and motivational components of compassion with compassionate behavior will be of benefit to the many clinical, education, organizational, and interpersonal domains in which compassion is so critical to positive outcomes.

Author Contributions

JM, MF, MA, PP, TF, and PC conceived of the manuscript and wrote significant sections. All authors provided critical and substantive feedback and critical revisions for important intellectual content.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : compassion, empathy, altruism, methods, phenomenology, compassion meditation

Citation: Mascaro JS, Florian MP, Ash MJ, Palmer PK, Frazier T, Condon P and Raison C (2020) Ways of Knowing Compassion: How Do We Come to Know, Understand, and Measure Compassion When We See It? Front. Psychol. 11:547241. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.547241

Received: 30 March 2020; Accepted: 28 August 2020; Published: 02 October 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Mascaro, Florian, Ash, Palmer, Frazier, Condon and Raison. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jennifer S. Mascaro, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Compassion: An Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review

What is compassion? And how did it evolve? In this review, we integrate three evolutionary arguments that converge on the hypothesis that compassion evolved as a distinct affective experience whose primary function is to facilitate cooperation and protection of the weak and those who suffer. Our empirical review reveals compassion to have distinct appraisal processes attuned to undeserved suffering, distinct signaling behavior related to caregiving patterns of touch, posture, and vocalization, and a phenomenological experience and physiological response that orients the individual to social approach. This response profile of compassion differs from those of distress, sadness, and love, suggesting that compassion is indeed a distinct emotion. We conclude by considering how compassion shapes moral judgment and action, how it varies across different cultures, and how it may engage specific patterns of neural activation, as well as emerging directions of research.

Compassion is controversial. Within studies of morality, theoretical claims about compassion reach contrasting conclusions: some theorists consider compassion to be an unreliable guide to judgments about right and wrong, whereas others view compassion as a source of principled moral judgment ( Haidt, 2003 ; Nussbaum, 1996 , 2001 ). Within debates about the nature of altruism, researchers have sought to document that a brief state like compassion is a proximal determinant of prosocial behavior ( Batson & Shaw, 1991 ; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987 ; Hoffman, 1981 ). Within evolutionist thought, controversies have swirled around whether compassion and sympathy are the products of evolutionary processes, as Darwin assumed, or tendencies too costly for the self to align with the tenets of evolutionary theory ( Cronin, 1991 ).

These debates highlight the question that motivates the present review: What is compassion? Ironically, despite pervasive theoretical claims and numerous studies of a state-like episode of compassion, it is largely absent from traditional emotion taxonomies and research (e.g., Boucher & Brandt, 1981 ; Ekman, 1999 ; Izard, 1977 ; Roseman, Spindel, & Jose, 1990 ; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985 ; Tomkins, 1984 ; for an exception, see Lazarus, 1991 ). Instead, compassion has been described as a vicarious experience of another's distress (e.g., Ekman, 2003 ; Hoffman, 1981 ), a blend of sadness and love (e.g. Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson & O'Connor, 1987 ), or as a subtype or variant of love (e.g., Post, 2002 ; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005 ; Underwood, 2002 ). Although recent authors have treated compassion as an emotion (e.g., Batson, 1991 ; Haidt, 2003 ; Sober & Wilson, 1998 ), there has yet to be an integrative review of the evidence relevant to the question “What is compassion?”

The central goal of this paper, therefore, is to present a functional analysis of compassion, and to review the evidence related to what is known about the appraised antecedents, experience, display behavior, and physiology associated with compassion. Before delving into our own theoretical account, we clarify our definition of compassion and distinguish it from related states.

Definitions of Compassion and Levels of Analysis of Affective Experience

We define compassion as the feeling that arises in witnessing another's suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help (for similar definitions, see Lazarus, 1991 ; Nussbaum, 1996 , 2001 ; Table 1 ). This definition conceptualizes compassion as an affective state defined by a specific subjective feeling, and differs from treatments of compassion as an attitude ( Blum, 1980 ; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005 ), or as a general benevolent response to others regardless of suffering or blame ( Post, 2002 ; Wispé, 1986 ). This definition also clearly differentiates compassion from empathy , which refers to the vicarious experience of another's emotions ( Lazarus, 1991 ).

Other researchers have referred to this kind of other oriented state with different terms (see Wispé, 1986 for a review). For example, Batson defines empathy as a family of responses to another “that are more other-focused than self-focused, including feelings of sympathy, compassion, tenderness, and the like” ( Batson, 1991 , p. 86). Similarly, Davis's empathic concern scale “assesses ‘other-oriented’ feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others” ( Davis, 1983 , p. 114). Eisenberg and colleagues (1994 , p. 776) define sympathy “as an emotional reaction that is based on the apprehension of another's emotional state or condition and that involves feelings of concern and sorrow for the other person” (see also Darwin, 1871 ; Eisenberg, Michalik, Spinrad, Hofer, Kupfer, et al., 2007 ; Feather, 2006 ; Post, 2002 ; Wispé, 1986 ). The term pity is sometimes used to describe a state close to what we conceptualize as compassion (Aristotle as discussed in Nussbaum, 1996 ; Weiner, Graham, & Chandler, 1982 ; Weiner, Perry & Magnusson, 1988 ). Pity, however, involves the additional appraisal of feeling concern for someone considered inferior to the self ( Ben Ze'ev, 2000 ; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ).

We prefer the term compassion because it encompasses a slightly broader set of states than sympathy ( Nussbaum, 1996 ). We would place the states labeled with terms like “sympathy,” “pity,” and “empathic concern” into a family of compassion-related states that center upon a concern for ameliorating the suffering of another individual (for discussion of the concept of emotion families, see Ekman, 1992 ). As part of an emotion family, these states likely share central features with compassion: similar antecedents, key appraisal components, core action tendencies, and similar physiological responses and signal behaviors. They likely differ from compassion in terms of peripheral appraisals (for example appraised dominance in the case of pity) and certain display behaviors ( Keltner & Lerner, 2009 ).

Empirical studies support this emotion-family approach to compassion and closely related states. Lexical studies of emotion terms in English ( Campos, Shiota, Gonzaga, Keltner, Goetz & Shin, 2009 ; Shaver et al., 1987 ), Indonesian ( Shaver, Murdaya, & Fraley, 2001 ), Chinese, and Italian ( Shaver, Wu, & Schwartz, 1992 ) find that compassion , sympathy , and pity (or their translations) are often grouped together. In our own laboratory, participants' sorting of 150 positive emotion terms grouped compassion and sympathy together, along with words like kindness , tenderness , warmth , and caring ( Campos et al., 2009 ; pity was not included in this study). A study of both positive and negative emotion terms, however, found that sympathy and pity were sometimes placed in a positive emotion category with compassion, but more often placed in a category of sadness-related terms ( Shaver et al., 1987 ), an issue which we revisit later.

Several self-report studies lend further credence to the claim that compassion and sympathy are closely related, and plausible members of an emotion family. These studies consistently reveal that ratings of compassionate and sympathetic load on a common factor ( Batson, Fultz, & Schoenrade, 1987 ), whereas ratings of sad and heavyhearted load on a separate factor ( Fultz, Schaller, & Cialdini, 1988 ). Many studies aggregate self-reports of more than one term, but others use only single-item measures or terms that are more appropriate to children's vocabulary (see Table 2 for a summary). In light of these findings, in the present review we synthesize what is known about compassion, pity, and sympathy, with an eye towards possible distinctions within this family. A critical need is for further research on the distinctions between compassion, sympathy, and pity.

Empirical studies of compassion can also be organized according to a levels of analysis framework for studying affective experiences ( Kahneman, 1999 ; Rosenberg, 1998 ). Emotions represent a first level of analysis, and are brief, context-specific responses focused on a clear cause ( Ekman, 1992 ). Although compassion is listed in few emotion taxonomies, numerous studies have examined the characteristics of brief experiences of compassion, or related states such as sympathy or empathic concern, which we synthesize in this review. At a second level of analysis, moods or sentiments are assumed to be longer lasting than emotions, less focused on a particular cause, and less context-bound than specific emotions ( Watson & Tellegen, 1985 ). In a later section we will consider how brief experiences of compassion might develop into enduring sentiments. Finally, emotional traits refer to general styles of emotional responses that persist across context and time ( Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991 ; McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002 ; Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006 ). Studies of people prone to feeling compassion, or related states like empathic concern, are relevant to an understanding of what compassion is, given the supposition that emotional traits share core appraisals and action tendencies with the associated emotional state. Numerous studies of compassion, which we consider here, have examined trait-like tendencies towards briefer experiences of the state. Later we will consider how brief experiences of compassion might interact with the trait-like tendency to experience compassion.

Theoretical Accounts of Compassion

Three alternative theoretical approaches to compassion can be discerned in the literature (see Table 1 ), and yield contrasting predictions that we will assess in our empirical review. A first account holds that compassion is another name for empathic distress (e.g. Ekman, 2003 ; Hoffman, 1981 ). People often mirror the emotions of those around them and vicariously experience others' emotions ( Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993 ). From the empathic distress perspective, compassion is simply a label that people apply to their vicarious experience of distress in response to another person's suffering. The clear implication is that the state of compassion should be associated with the expressive behavior, physiological response, and underlying appraisals of the state it is mirroring, most likely distress, pain, sadness, or fear.

A second account holds that compassion is not its own emotion, but rather a variant or blend of sadness or love (e.g., Post, 2002 ; Shaver et al., 1987 ; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005 ; Underwood, 2002 ). In English, lay conceptions of compassion often intermingle with conceptions of sadness and love ( Shaver et al., 1987 ). In Shaver and colleagues' influential prototype analysis of emotion terms, U.S. participants categorized 135 emotion words into groups based on their similarity to one another. Participants categorized the word compassion most often with love , tenderness , and caring . In addition, the words pity and sympathy were sometimes categorized with compassion and love, but were more often grouped with sadness. In another study, participants listed compassionate love , unconditional love , giving love , and altruistic love when asked to generate examples of the category love ( Fehr & Russell, 1991 ). These terms were not rated as central to the prototype of love, but behaviors like caring, helping, and sharing were associated with most types of love (see Sprecher & Fehr, 2005 ). These lexical data raise the possibility that compassion is simply a variant of sadness or love, sharing core appraisals, properties of experience, and physiological response and display behavior of these emotions.

A third account holds that compassion is a distinct affective state, with a response profile that differs from those of distress, sadness, and love. The clearest case for this hypothesis is found in evolutionary analyses of compassion (e.g., Bowlby, 1969 , 1973 ; Darwin, 1871 ; Haidt, 2003 ; Keltner, Haidt & Shiota, 2006 ). An evolutionary approach presupposes that emotions are adaptations to particular survival-and reproduction-related situations (e.g., Ekman, 1992 ; Keltner & Buswell, 1997 ; Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009 ). The different components of emotion—antecedent appraisal process, nonverbal display, experience, and autonomic physiology—serve specific functions in enabling the individual to meet the survival- or reproduction-related problem or opportunity ( Keltner & Gross, 1999 ). Cast within this analysis, several lines of reasoning converge on the assertion that compassion is a distinct state that differs from related states like love, and that this state motivates specific patterns of behavior toward others in need.

An Evolutionary Approach to Compassion

Early in the development of evolutionary theory, compassion proved to be a source of contention ( Cronin, 1991 ). The notion that natural and sexual selection processes could have led to the emergence of an affective state that leads individuals to enhance the welfare of others at the expense to the self struck many as implausible. In stark contrast, Darwin viewed “sympathy” as the strongest of humans' evolved “instincts.” He made this assertion within the following analysis in Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex , “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” ( Darwin, 1871 , p. 130).

More recent evolutionary treatments of compassion offer three lines of reasoning that account for the emergence of an affective state that is oriented toward enhancing the welfare of those who suffer ( Frank, 1988 ; Keltner, 2009 ; Sober & Wilson, 1998 ). Compassion emerged, this reasoning holds, as a distinct affective state and trait because it enhances the welfare of vulnerable offspring, because it is a desirable emotion or attribute in mate selection processes, and because it enables cooperative relations with non-kin.

Within the vulnerable offspring argument, compassion is thought to have emerged as the affective element of a caregiving system, designed to help raise vulnerable offspring to the age of viability (thus ensuring that genes are more likely to be replicated). Human offspring are born more prematurely and more dependent than any other mammal, requiring unprecedented care to reach the age of independence and reproductive engagement ( Bowlby, 1969 ; Hrdy, 2000 ; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003 ). This pressure to care for vulnerable offspring gave rise to several adaptations: powerful responses to neotonous cues and distress vocalizations (e.g., Berry & McArthur, 1986 ; Bowlby, 1969 ); specific tactile behaviors, such as skin-to-skin contact ( Hertenstein, 2002 ); classes of attachment-related behaviors between caregiver and offspring ( Bell, 2001 ; Bowlby, 1969 ); and an affective experience—compassion—attuned to reducing the harm and suffering of vulnerable offspring. As Darwin reasoned, this tendency to reliably experience state-like feelings of compassion (or sympathy in his phrasing) for vulnerable young offspring in moments of need or suffering would have directly increased the chances of offspring surviving, and ultimately reaching the age of reproductive viability.

Consistent with this vulnerable offspring framework, caregiving and compassionate behavior have been reliably observed in remote, pre-industrial cultures living in the social environments of human evolution ( Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989 ; Konner, 2003 ). Across radically different cultures, caregiving observed in kin and non-kin alike involves similar behaviors, including soothing touch, skin-to-skin contact, and specific vocalizations, some of which resemble the displays of compassion we will detail in a later section. Nonhuman primates most closely related to humans—chimpanzees and bonobos—have been observed to show caregiving oriented toward vulnerable and wounded conspecifics, suggesting that caregiving is a primate adaptation ( de Waal, 1996 ; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006 ). Within this vulnerable offspring perspective, compassion is the brief affective state associated with caregiving toward those who suffer or are in need (see also Batson, Lishner, Cook, & Sawyer, 2005 ; Sober & Wilson, 1998 for similar arguments).

A second evolutionary argument for the emergence of compassion is found within sexual selection theory, which details the processes by which certain traits are selected for through the mate preferences of females and males ( Buss & Kenrick, 1998 ; Miller, 2007 ). Here the focus is on compassion as a trait like tendency to feel the emotion and to act altruistically. The benefits to reproducing with compassionate individuals are clear, as intimated in Darwin's early analysis. More inclined to feel compassion during times of others' need and suffering, compassionate reproductive partners should be more likely devote more resources to offspring, to provide physical care—protection, affection, and touch—and to create cooperative, caring communities so vital to the survival of offspring. It is reasonable to expect (although an untested assumption) that more compassionate romantic partners will be more likely to be faithful, and remain in long-term monogamous bonds ( Neff & Karney, 2009 ). It is interesting to note that the highest ranked attribute in young participants' assessments of a desirable mate in different cultures was character, or kindness ( Buss et al., 1990 ). In a recent speed-dating study, for both men and women personal qualities like warmth in interaction partners, which likely involve elevated levels of compassion, were positively related to subsequent relationship interest ( Eastwick & Finkel, 2008 ). The trait-like tendency to experience compassion correlates highly with a secure attachment style ( Shiota et al., 2006 ), which predicts parenting behaviors that lead to healthier adjustment in offspring. Clearly, sensitivity to others' needs, enabled by compassion, is a central criterion in the formation of intimate bonds ( Reis, Clark & Holmes, 2004 ). This reasoning, and the indirect evidence that we have reviewed, justify the claim that in intersexual selection processes, females and males likely preferred mating with more compassionate individuals—a process that over time would increase compassionate tendencies within the gene pool.

A third evolutionary argument posits that the compassionate predilections of others are an important criterion in the formation of cooperative relations with non-kin ( Axelrod, 1984 ; Frank, 1988 ; Nesse, 2007 ). In this vein, Trivers (1971) proposed that compassion (sympathy in his terminology) evolved within a complex system of emotional states—involving liking, gratitude, anger, and guilt—which enable non-kin to initiate, maintain, and regulate reciprocally altruistic relationships (see also Gintis, 2000 ; Nesse, 1990 ). Within this system of emotions, compassion emerged as a state to motivate altruism in mutually beneficial relationships and contexts. In addition, emerging theories of gene-culture coevolution suggest that compassion and other prosocial tendencies evolved to motivate altruism in the context of cultural norms, values, and practices that reward altruists and punish selfish individuals (e.g. Henrich, 2004 ; Richerson & Boyd, 2005 ). In the context of these models, an emotion like compassion serves as an internal motivation and reward for following cooperative norms ( Gintis, 2003 ).

The implication of this third line of evolutionary argument is that individuals will favor enduring relationships with more agreeable, compassionate individuals because this emotional trait predicts increased cooperative, trustworthy behavior and mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals not bound by kin relations. Framed within this cooperative non-kin argument, it is interesting to note that children high in dispositional empathy and compassion enjoy richer friendship networks ( Zhou et al., 2002 ); that adolescents high in self-reported agreeableness, which strongly predicts the experience of compassion ( Shiota et al., 2006 ), have more friends and are more accepted by their peers than adolescents low in agreeableness ( Jensen-Campbell et al., 2002 ); and that across cultures group members go to great lengths to punish individuals who are not cooperative ( Henrich et al., 2006 ).

These three lines of theorizing make a clear case for the evolution of compassion. This emotion emerged as a brief state oriented toward reducing the suffering or needs of vulnerable offspring, as a desirable trait within mate selection and alliance formation processes, and as a brief state predictive of cooperative relations with non-kin. Broader evolutionary treatments of distinct emotions have additionally posited that compassion is distinct from distress, sadness, and love (e.g., Keltner & Haidt, 2001 ; Lazarus, 1991 ). Empathic distress co-occurs and competes with compassion in responses to another's suffering ( Batson, 1991 ). In responding to another's suffering or need, compassion can be costly, and personal distress may serve as an indicator that one cannot afford to help and instead should focus on oneself ( Hoffman, 1981 ). Sadness is a similarly self-oriented response. In its purest form, sadness is a response to personal loss or negative events ( Lazarus, 1991 ). It motivates a slowing of action and withdrawal from social contact, while its expression signals a need for social support and help. Sadness is an antecedent to others' compassion and we expect its expression to elicit compassion in others.

Within evolutionary arguments, compassion is also functionally distinct from love. Love has many forms ( Fehr & Russell, 1991 ), but the two closest to compassion—maternal love and romantic love—differ in their core functions to promote positive attachments to offspring and to romantic partners respectively. These kinds of love center on affection, the appreciation of positive attributes of the other, and the motivation to be physically and psychologically close. Compassion, by contrast, responds quickly and appropriately to signals of suffering and is not necessarily accompanied or preceded by love (although clearly it can be a catalyst of love by enabling the formation of new relationships or the repair of damaged ones). The task of our review will be to ascertain whether the empirical evidence lends credence to these theoretical claims about distinctions (and similarities) between compassion and love.

Evolutionary analysis, then, posits that compassion is a distinct emotion and emotional trait, serving different functions than those served by distress, sadness, and love. Evolutionary approaches to emotion also offer guidelines for synthesizing empirical data that bear upon claims about distinct emotions ( Ekman, 1992 ; Keltner & Buswell, 1997 ). Specifically, compassion should involve distinct appraised antecedents that center upon the evolutionary problem it has been designed to meet—the reduction of suffering. Appraisals of suffering, furthermore, should be influenced by the possible costs and benefits of aiding the suffering individual (e.g., Sober & Wilson, 1998 ). Compassion should involve distinct signaling behavior, so vital to the reduction of suffering and the detection of more compassionate potential mates and reciprocators in altruistic interactions with non-kin ( Frank, 1988 ). Finally, compassion should involve distinct experiential and physiological processes that motivate appropriate behavior—approach toward those who suffer and soothing-related behavior. Finally, these compassion-related responses should be universal. The literatures to which we now turn on altruism, attribution, emotion, and prosocial behavior and traits provide a surprisingly rich empirical foundation to evaluate these claims.

Compassion-Related Appraisals: Sensitivity to Suffering Constrained by Costs and Benefits

Emotions arise as the result of specific appraisals that track the individual's interaction with the environment as it affects the self ( Clore & Ortony, 2008 ; Lazarus, 1991 ; Scherer, 1997 ; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985 ). Emotions are defined by their constitutive appraisals of antecedent events. A critical first test of the thesis that compassion is a distinct affective state is that it should arise as the result of appraisal processes that differ from those that produce distress, sadness, and love. In Figure 1 we present a model of the appraisal processes that give rise to compassion and theoretically relevant states, drawing upon insights of appraisal research (e.g. Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003 ) and evolutionary claims about compassion.

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Appraisal model of compassion displaying how witnessing negative outcomes leads to felt compassion with moderation of relevance to self.

Early conceptual analyses and recent empirical data reveal that compassion arises in response to suffering and harm. In his analysis in Rhetoric , Aristotle identified the primary antecedent of compassion (called eleos in Greek) as others' serious suffering, referring to specific events such as death, experience of bodily assault or ill treatment, old age, illness, lack of food, lack of friends, physical weakness, disfigurement, and immobility (see Nussbaum, 1996 , 2001 for analysis). Recent studies of the momentary experience of compassion dovetail with Aristotle's early analysis (see Table 2 ). In one illustrative study, participants asked to describe a recent experience of pity most often mentioned encountering individuals suffering from physical disabilities, victimization by environmental circumstances such as poverty, and catastrophic events ( Weiner et al., 1982 ). Likewise, stimuli used in laboratory studies to elicit compassion and sympathy often contain cues of others' suffering, for example when participants are asked to watch another person receive painful shocks ( Batson, O'Quin, Fultz, Vanderplas, & Isen, 1983 ), listen to someone who needs help because she is hospitalized ( Batson, Sager, Garst & Kang, 1997 ), or watch films about a handicapped child ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Bustamante, Mathy, Miller, & Lindholm, 1988 ). The suffering of vulnerable individuals—crying babies, malnourished children, and homeless individuals—is a potent elicitor of compassion ( Oveis, Horberg, & Kelnter, in press ; Zahn-Waxler, Friedman, & Cummins, 1983 ).

These findings are in keeping with the evolutionary analysis we have offered thus far—that compassion is oriented toward reducing the suffering of others. Within evolutionary analyses, however, compassion is not unbounded or unconditional, but instead shaped by cost-benefit ratios ( Henrich, 2004 ; Sober & Wilson, 1998 ). In more specific terms, compassion should be more likely when the sufferer is related—genetically or in terms of shared values and interests—to the individual, when the sufferer is a good candidate for subsequent cooperative behavior or reciprocal altruism, and when the benefits of acting upon feelings of compassion outweigh the potential costs. Within the concepts of appraisal research, this analysis suggests that compassion will be shaped by: 1) the relevance of the sufferer to the self; 2) the sufferer's blameworthiness for the negative outcome; and 3) the individual's ability to cope with the situation at hand. In the following sections, we detail the evolutionary argument and relevant evidence for each element of our appraisal model of compassion, and reveal how compassion-related appraisals differ from those that give rise to distress, sadness, and love.

Sensitivity to Benefits: Appraisals of Self and Goal Relevance

Although it is an other-oriented emotion, compassion should be most intense in response to the suffering of individuals who are self and goal relevant. By self relevant, we mean individuals who are most important to one's well-being. This can include those who are related to the self, including offspring in particular and genetic relations in general ( Bowlby, 1969 ; Hamilton, 1964 ), as well as reproductive partners ( Frank, 1988 ), friends, reciprocal alliances ( Trivers, 1971 ), and group members ( Sober & Wilson, 1998 ; Henrich, 2004 ). In addition, another's suffering can readily be appraised as relevant to the individual's broader goals or values, such as a general value that all people should have equal rights and opportunities ( Lazarus, 1991 ). To the extent that another's suffering is in keeping with the individual's goals (for example, in torturing an enemy), emotions like schadenfreude will result ( Ortony, Clore & Collins, 1988 ). To the extent that another's suffering is incongruent with the individual's goals, and with increasing relatedness between the self and other, compassion will be experienced with increasing intensity.

Similarity and emotional closeness are two more specific appraisals that serve as proxies for self-relevance, and shape the magnitude of the compassionate response. Social network studies in community samples and self-reports of closeness in undergraduate populations reveal that, on average, we feel closer to those to whom we are more closely related ( Korchmaros & Kenny, 2001 ; Neyer & Lang, 2003 ) and that we are more likely to feel compassion for those to whom we are closely related ( Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997 ). Similarly, individuals are more likely to help, and presumably feel compassion for, those with whom they are genetically related ( Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994 ) and emotionally close ( Korchmaros & Kenny, 2001 ). People are also more likely to help—presumably in part due to heightened feelings of compassion—those who are similar to them in terms of personal values, preferences, behavior, or physical characteristics ( Eisenberg & Miller, 1987 ). In one study, Cialdini and colleagues (1997) asked participants to imagine a stranger, an acquaintance, a friend, or a close family member who had been evicted from their home. Different target individuals elicited varying degrees of closeness (as measured by Aron's Inclusion of Other in Self Scale; Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992 ), and the degree of closeness fully accounted for the positive relationship between felt compassion and willingness to help.

Although self-relevance is clearly involved in compassion-related appraisals, self-other distinctions are crucial to the elicitation of compassion ( Batson, 1991 ; Nussbaum, 1996 ). Compassion involves an awareness of one's separateness from the sufferer, as well as recognition that “the bad lot of the sufferer…is, right now, not one's own.” ( Nussbaum, 1996 , p. 35). To the extent that the negative outcomes for the other are considered consequences for the self, the more one will feel sadness, distress, or even fear ( Ortony et al., 1988 ). Without self-other distinctions, one may not experience compassion upon witnessing another's suffering, but instead empathic sadness or distress. Consistent with this analysis, as children develop self-other distinctions, they begin to show clearer signs of other-oriented compassion, in the form of target-specific helping behaviors, rather than simple contagious distress ( Volling, Kolak, & Kennedy, 2009 ). Thus, although self-relevance is an important appraisal, it must occur in the context of distinguishing the self from other.

Sensitivity to Benefits: Others' Deservingness in Appraisals of Compassion

Evolutionary analyses posit that deservingness is central to the appraisal processes that give rise to compassion. Models of the evolution of altruism hinge on the assumption that altruists can choose to benefit other altruists ( Frank, 1988 ; Hamilton, 1964 , Trivers, 1971 , Henrich, 2004 ). To enjoy the benefits of mutual cooperation and avoid the risks of exploitation by selfish individuals, prosocial individuals must interact selectively with other prosocial individuals. Kin selection bases this decision on degree of kinship ( Hamilton, 1964 ); models of large scale cooperation in groups of non-kin focus on characterological factors such as trustworthiness, reputation, and prior cooperative behavior ( Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981 ; Trivers, 1971 ). The implication is that compassion should be sensitive to appraisals of deservingness and to whether or not the person suffering is altruistic, cooperative, and of good character.

In his analysis, Aristotle similarly prioritized appraisals of deservingness, which are rooted in assumptions about the sufferer's character and intentions. More specifically, Aristotle argued that deserved suffering should lead to blame and reproach, whereas undeserved suffering should elicit compassion ( Nussbaum, 1996 , 2001 ). Contemporary theories of deservingness ( Feather, 2006 ) and attribution of blame ( Weiner, 1985 ) echo Aristotle's analysis and suggest that appraisals of blame are important to whether or not compassion arises (see Figure 1 ).

One indicator of deservingness is the degree to which the individual is responsible for his or her suffering. Appraising the sufferer as responsible for his or her suffering is likely to be accompanied by certain beliefs that reflect poorly upon that individual's character: that the individual failed to exert effort to avoid the misfortune or violated norms and rules in bringing about the suffering. Assessments of controllability are intertwined with judgments of responsibility ( Smith & Ellsworth, 1985 ) and figure prominently in appraisals that give rise to compassion. For example, in one study, stigmas such as paraplegia, blindness, cancer, Alzheimer's, and heart disease were rated low on controllability and also elicited pity (and, we assume, compassion). In contrast, stigmas such as obesity, child abuse, and drug abuse were rated high on controllability and elicited anger rather than pity ( Weiner et al., 1988 ). A recent meta-analysis of 39 helping studies and 25 aggression studies further reveals how appraisals of the target's responsibility for their suffering influences the degree of compassion experienced by the perceiver ( Rudolph, Roesch, Greitemeyer & Weiner, 2004 ). This meta-analysis found that targets who had greater control over the source of their suffering elicited less sympathy ( r = -.45) and more anger ( r = .52). In turn, sympathy towards less controllable suffering was positively correlated with helping behavior ( r = .42) and negatively correlated with aggression ( r = -.44). Anger showed the opposite pattern: it was negatively correlated with helping ( r = -.24) and positively correlated with aggression ( r = .56). These studies indicate that appraisals of low controllability and responsibility on the part of the target (or what we refer to as lack of personal blame in Figure 1 ) are critical to the elicitation of compassion and not anger.

A related target characteristic that signals good character and elicits compassion is the target's warmth and trustworthiness ( Fiske, Cuddy & Glick, 2006 ). In a study of stereotype content, individuals and groups who were stereotyped as warm, but not competent—such as the disabled, elderly or retarded—elicited pity from others ( Fiske et al., 2002 ). In contrast, those who were stereotyped as cold and not competent—such as the homeless and welfare recipients—elicited contempt. Those perceived as being warm but not competent were also perceived as less competitive and more benevolent. Thus, feeling pity (and we suggest compassion) for warm individuals is consistent with the argument that compassion should be felt for other altruists and cooperators, but not for selfish competitors.

Sensitivity to Costs: Coping Potential in Compassion Appraisals

In addition to possible benefits, compassion should be sensitive to the possible costs involved in helping another (see Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio & Piliavin, 1995 ). Without consideration of the costs of devoting resources to others, one could easily be exploited or expose oneself to too many risks to emerge as an evolutionarily stable strategy ( Sober & Wilson, 1998 ).

Within studies of appraisal, coping ability in part refers to the individual's assessment of the possible costs of acting on behalf of others ( Lazarus & Folkman 1984 ). High coping ability reflects an appraisal that one's resources and abilities outweigh the costs or threats associated with a course of action. By implication, feelings of compassion should increase when the individual feels capable of coping with the target's suffering. Appraisals of low coping ability, by contrast, should activate distress in the face of another's suffering, which countervails compassion-related tendencies when resources are low ( Hoffman, 1981 ). It is important to note that sadness and fear are associated with appraisals of feeling weak, powerless ( Roseman et al., 1990 ), and unable to cope ( Ellsworth & Smith, 1988a ; Scherer, 1997 ).

No studies to date have explored this relationship between coping appraisals and felt compassion. Studies of individual differences in emotion regulation and empathic self-efficacy and compassion are informative, however. Emotion regulation reflects the individual's sense of having the psychological resources to respond adaptively to the situation at hand ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Murphy, Karbon, Maszk, et al., 1994 ; Gross, 1998 ). Children and adults who report the trait like tendency to regulate their emotions reliably report compassion rather than distress in responding to others' suffering, a finding that is in keeping with our claim that coping ability is a critical appraisal involved in the experience of compassion. For example, one study found aspects of emotion regulation such as inhibitory control (e.g. “When talking with someone, I can keep from interrupting them.”) and attention shifting (e.g. “It is easy for me to alternate between two different tasks.”) to be positively related to dispositional compassion (as measured by Davis' Empathic Concern scale) for adults who also reported high emotionality ( Eisenberg et al., 1994 ). In this research, individual differences in distress correlated negatively with measures of emotion regulation. In a recent study, children who were rated by their parents as able to control their attention and regulate emotion-related impulses were subsequently rated by their teachers as high in dispositional sympathy up to six years later ( Eisenberg et al., 2007 ).

In a similar vein, a sense of self-efficacy in aiding those who suffer increases the likelihood of experiencing compassion, presumably because the individual feels that their personal resources match the demands of the situation ( Hoffman, 1981 ). In one study, adolescents' reports of empathic self-efficacy (e.g. “I can experience how a person in trouble feels”) were positively related to their reports of sharing, helping, and taking care of others ( Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Gerbino, & Pastorelli, 2003 ). Similarly, secure attachment, which is related to feelings of self-efficacy when coping with distress ( Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003 ), predicted the increased experience of experimentally induced compassion ( Mikulincer, Gillath, Halevy, Avihou, Avidan, & Eshkoli, 2001 ; Mikulincer, Shaver, Gillath, & Nitzberg, 2005 ). In one study, participants who were subliminally primed with the name of a secure attachment figure reported feeling more compassion and were more willing to help a stranger in need ( Mikulincer et al., 2005 ). Taken together, these studies suggest that an individual's ability to cope with the situation at hand is positively related to the experience of compassion and negatively related to the experience of distress (see Figure 1 ).

A summary of the appraisal processes that give rise to compassion and related states

No research to date has established the entire appraisal pattern associated with compassion in one study. Our review of the literature, however, makes a case for a distinct, compassion-related appraisal pattern involving appraisals of self relevance, goal congruence, blame, and coping ability. Many of these specific appraisals map onto evolutionary claims about cost-benefit analyses that constrain the experience of compassion, and are supported by selected studies we have reviewed.

Critically, the compassion-related pattern of appraisal we portray in Figure 1 differs from those associated with the related states of distress, sadness, and love. Compassion is distinguished from love at the level of antecedent events: compassion responds to suffering and negative events, whereas love antecedents are primarily positive. In their study of emotion scripts, Shaver and colleagues (1987) found that love antecedents involved realizations that the loved one provides love and security, such as sharing time or good experiences with the other person, finding the other attractive, or experiencing especially good communication with the other person.

Sadness antecedents are negative, but differ from compassion in that they involve clear consequences for the self ( Ortony et al., 1988 ). When participants were asked to describe a recent experience of sadness and the events that led to its occurrence, the descriptions revealed that participants most often described sadness as a response to unexpected negative personal outcomes (60%) such as loss of a loved one (50%) or loss or separation in a relationship (50%) ( Shaver et al., 1987 ). Thus, an individual's own loss causes sadness but another's loss causes compassion. This distinction between self and other is one that humans develop early and that is critical to distinction between sadness and compassion.

Finally, our model incorporates appraisals of one's own resources. Feeling able to cope effectively with the situation at hand is central to the elicitation of compassion. If one does not feel able to cope—psychologically or physically—then one is more likely to feel distress and anxiety. This hypothesized distinction between compassion- and distress-related appraisals has received indirect empirical support, which we have reviewed, but it deserves more systematic examination. Situational manipulations that diminish emotion regulation capacities, such as cognitive load or physical or emotional fatigue, should diminish compassion and increase experiences of empathic distress in response to the suffering of others. In a similar spirit, variables that enhance a sense of coping should make one more likely to feel compassion rather than distress.

Interestingly, our model of compassion-related appraisal reveals a close relationship between compassion with seemingly unrelated states like schadenfreude and anger. These connections are consistent with evolutionary arguments about strong reciprocity and the role of punishment-related emotions like anger in enforcing cooperation (e.g. Gintis, 2000 ). In this line of thought, people feel compassion for someone who genuinely needs help, but anger towards those who fail to uphold cooperation norms or seek costly help when it is undeserved. For example, students who fail an exam after not studying elicit less compassion than those who fail an exam after working very hard ( Reyna & Weiner, 2001 ). This suggests that compassion appraisals include some judgment of fairness or justice.

Critically, more systematic comparisons of the appraisals associated with compassion, love, distress, and sadness are needed. So too are studies of the universality of the model of compassion-related appraisal we have presented here, in light of how central evidence of universality is to claims about the evolution of emotion (e.g., Ekman, 1992 ). This kind of cross-cultural work is also certain to yield interesting cultural variations in compassion, which we discuss later.

Compassion-Related Display Behavior: A Signal of Commitment and Cooperation

Nonverbal expressions of emotion serve several functions ( Ekman, 1992 ; Matsumoto, Keltner, Shiota, O'Sullivan, & Frank, 2008 ). Emotional displays in the face, voice, and body signal specific intentions (for example to cooperate or compete), motivations, and probable behaviors to others. Emotional displays also systematically evoke responses in others—for example embarrassment triggers feelings of forgiveness in others—that coordinate social interactions in adaptive ways (for reviews see Bachorowski & Owren, 2001 ; Keltner & Kring, 1998 ).

Early theoretical claims about the nonverbal display of compassion dovetail with these functional arguments. For example, Bowlby observed that infants rely on various display behaviors, such as distress vocalizations and the arm reach display, to trigger compassion in the caregiver as a central means by which to establish and maintain secure attachments ( Bowlby, 1969 ). In his analysis of the evolution of cooperation amongst non-kin, Robert Frank (1988) argued that nonverbal displays of compassion (in particular oblique eyebrows) signal an individual's prosocial disposition, and are actively sought out as signs of an individual's worthiness as a reproductive partner or participant in reciprocally altruistic exchanges. These different lines of theorizing posit a distinct display of compassion that signals commitment and cooperation.

Early studies of emotional expression did not consider compassion. What might a nonverbal display of compassion look, sound, or feel like? One answer is found in evolutionary arguments about the origins of nonverbal display, which posit that emotions are signaled in highly stereotyped, ritualized actions that originally were part of more complex behavioral responses ( Darwin, 1872 ; Ekman, 1992 ; Fridlund, 1994 ). Anger, for example, is signaled in ritualized facial and postural movements—the furrowed brow, clenched fist, and teeth display—which are elements of a more complex fight or attack response. To the extent that compassion is part of a caregiving response, as we have argued here, it should be signaled in caregiving related behaviors. This includes soothing vocalizations and tactile contact, which are less frequently studied in the literature on emotional expression, but are part of caregiving responses observed in different cultures ( Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989 ). Table 3 summarizes studies of compassion-related facial actions, posture, vocalizations, and tactile behavior.

Compassion-Related Facial and Postural Behavior

Several early laboratory studies by Eisenberg and colleagues examined nonverbal correlates of brief experiences of compassion and distress (e.g., Eisenberg, McCreath & Ahn, 1988 ; Eisenberg, Fabes et al., 1988 ; Eisenberg et al., 1989 ; 1994 ; Fabes, Eisenberg, & Eisenbud, 1993 ; Guthrie et al., 1997 ). In these studies, compassion was coded as concerned attention, including “the eyebrow pulled down flat and forward over the bridge of the nose, furrowing in the center of the brow…, eyelids not pulled in tight or raised, head and body oriented forward, bottom eyelids sometimes raised slightly, and lower face relaxed” ( Eisenberg et al., 1989 , p. 58). In contrast, personal distress was coded as mild apprehension, including eyebrows that are raised and drawn together, tensing of the lower eyelid, and nervous mouth movements ( Eisenberg, McCreath & Ahn, 1988 ; Eisenberg, Fabes, et al., 1988 ; Eisenberg et al., 1994 ; Guthrie et al., 1997 ).

These two patterns of nonverbal behavior predicted distinct self-reports, physiology, and helping behavior—solid evidence for a distinct display of compassion. The first pattern of nonverbal actions predicted increased feelings of sympathy and compassion and increased helping behavior, suggesting that these nonverbal actions signal compassion but not distress (e.g. Eisenberg, Schaller et al, 1988 ; Eisenberg et al., 1989 ; 1994 ; Fabes et al., 1993 ). It is also important to note that these compassion-related facial and postural actions differ from those that signal love, which include Duchenne smiles (i.e., those involving the action of the orbicularis oculi ), open handed gestures, and forward leans but not furrowed eyebrows or lip presses ( Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl & Smith, 2001 ; Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos & Artemus, 2006 ). These initial studies of a compassion-related display are ambiguous, though, with respect to which specific nonverbal behaviors are part of compassion or distress expressions since they relied upon a global coding system that required coders to interpret the expressions they were seeing.

Guided by these initial studies, two studies ascertained whether naïve observers can reliably decode compassion from static photographs of facial and postural behaviors ( Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ; Keltner & Buswell, 1996 ). Both studies presented different posers portraying compassion with oblique eyebrows, a fixed gaze, and head movement forward. The first study used a forced choice format and listed “sympathy” along with thirteen other emotion labels plus an option for “no emotion” ( Keltner & Buswell, 1996 ). “Sympathy” was chosen often for this expression (between 33-43%), but problematically, the compassion display was also labeled as “sadness” (36%) and “no emotion” (32%), depending on the poser. The second study showed the same photographs to participants in the United States and India, but included “compassion” instead of “sympathy” as a label in the United States along with a “none of the above” option in a forced-choice format ( Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ). Although American participants often labeled the compassion photograph as “compassion” (30%), they more often labeled it as “sadness” (37%). In addition, recognition rates were much lower for the compassion photograph (30%) than for pictures of fear (55%), sadness (88%), and happiness (73%). Rates were even lower when Indian participants judged the compassion photograph (17%), although recognition of fear (55%), sadness (43%), and happiness (45%) remained relatively high. In these studies, the facial expression for compassion was not as recognizable as well-studied expressions, such as fear or happiness (a Duchenne smile).

The failure of naïve observers to reliably identify compassion from static photos of facial expressions likely has several origins. Compassion and sadness were often confused because they share facial muscle movements, most notably those that produce the oblique eyebrows (e.g. Ekman, Friesen, & Hager, 2002a ; 2002b ). If these judgment studies had presented information about the social context, for example that a person is in the presence of someone suffering, accuracy rates would have likely increased. In addition, still photographs did not convey the temporal dynamics of compassion-related display, including orientation to the target, forward leans, and eye contact. Although compassion includes gazing and leaning towards others ( Eisenberg, Fabes, et al., 1988 ; Eisenberg, McCreath, & Ahn, 1988 ; Guthrie et al., 1997 ), sadness involves physical withdrawal ( Shaver et al., 1987 ), averted gaze ( Adams & Kleck, 2005 ) and slumped posture ( Coulson, 2004 ). Recently, experiences of love during conversations between romantic heterosexual partners were associated with head nods, leaning towards partner, and affiliative hand gestures ( Gonzaga et al., 2001 , 2006 ). Future studies of compassion-related displays should go beyond facial and postural movements, and study dynamic displays and emotion recognition within social interactions.

Touch and Voice in Communicating Compassion

Recent theory and evidence indicate that touch is a primary platform for the development of secure attachments and cooperative relationships—two contexts in which compassion is theorized to have evolved. With respect to the vulnerable offspring account, it is interesting to note that touch is the most developed sensory modality at birth ( Hertenstein, 2002 ). Touch is also intimately involved in patterns of caregiving observed in different cultures. Recent empirical studies of humans and nonhumans find that soothing touch can stimulate activation in reward regions of the brain ( Rolls, 2000 ), reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol ( Francis & Meaney, 1999 ), and reduce activation in stress-related regions of the brain when pain is anticipated ( Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006 ). Touch is a powerful means by which individuals reduce the suffering of others.

Touch also promotes cooperation and reciprocal altruism. Nonhuman primates spend up to 20% of their day grooming, and systematically share food with other non-kin who have groomed them earlier in the day ( de Waal, 1996 ). In humans, friendly patterns of touch have been found to increase compliance to requests ( Willis & Hamm, 1980 ) and cooperation toward strangers in economic games ( Kurzban, 2001 ).

Taken together, these studies indicate that touch is involved in two social processes related to the evolution of compassion: soothing and the formation of cooperative bonds. Tactile contact should be a modality in which compassion is communicated, and recent evidence supports this supposition ( Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006 ). In studies conducted in the United States and Spain, participants were asked to communicate twelve distinct emotions to another participant via touch on the forearm, including sympathy, fear, sadness, and love. Using a forced-choice format with a “none of the above” option, recipients of the touch could discern that sympathy was being communicated 48% and 57% of the time in Spain and the United States, respectively (chance guessing would yield accuracy rates less than 8%). Communication of sympathy involved patting and stroking behavior of moderate intensity and longer duration (Mean = 7.6 seconds). Impressively, in this same study decoders reliably identified love and gratitude at levels of accuracy similar to those for compassion, suggesting that in the tactile modality, compassion is distinct from displays of these two prosocial emotions. In another study, videotapes of these brief, hand-to-forearm touches were shown to a new U.S. sample of observers. Over 53% of observers discerned that sympathy was being communicated through touch simply by watching the videotape of the hand making contact with the other's forearm ( Hertenstein et al., 2006 ). This stood in contrast with basic emotions like sadness and happiness, which had relatively low recognition rates in touch versus facial expression channels (see Figure 2 ).

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Recognition accuracy of compassion, fear, sadness, and happiness by expression modality. Accuracy rates corrected for number of choices. Facial expression findings averaged from Haidt & Keltner (1999) and Keltner & Buswell (1996) ; touch findings from Hertenstein et al. (2006) .

New evidence also suggests that compassion is communicated through the voice ( Simon-Thomas, Keltner, Sauter, Sinicropi-Yao, & Abramson, in press ). In this study participants were asked to communicate different emotion states with brief (e.g., half second) non-word utterances known as vocal bursts. Vocal bursts of compassion were then presented along with those of twelve positive states, including love and gratitude. Judges were asked to listen to these vocal bursts, and identify the emotion being expressed in a forced choice format that included a “none of the above” response. Judges reliably identified prosocial vocal bursts, including compassion, love and gratitude bursts rated as compassion, love or gratitude, 47% of the time. Compassion alone was identified 24% of the time, which is significantly greater than chance levels (8%).

In summary, the evidence for a distinct display of compassion is mixed. Observational studies using global coding schemes find positive relationships between a facial expression including lowered, furrowed brows with self-report and subsequent helping behavior. However, recognition studies using a related expression—one with raised, oblique eyebrows—find that this display is just as often labeled as sadness. Compassion appears to be more readily communicated through touch and perhaps the voice. This finding is in keeping with the literatures on the role of touch in suffering reduction and the formation of cooperative bonds, and the primacy of touch early in the infant's development ( Hertenstein, 2002 ).

Our empirical review of compassion-related display behavior highlights several areas for future empirical inquiry. Studies need to examine how the different modalities—facial action, posture, touch, and voice—covary, which most strongly predict observer judgments of compassion, and how reliably compassion is signaled when all modalities are engaged (for related work on embarrassment, see Keltner, 1995 , and on pride, see Tracy & Robins, 2007 ). Given the lower accuracy rates of recognizing compassion relative to other emotions, in particular in facial display, the interpretation of the expression of compassion may prove to be more context-dependent than other emotions. We also expect dynamic movements that indicate approach and engagement—such as head and eye movements forward—to have potent signal value in communicating compassion, and these have not been studied. Finally, and importantly, it remains to be seen if compassion is expressed similarly across gender, relationship type, and culture. This kind of evidence is critical to evolutionary arguments about compassion, which presuppose universal displays.

Compassion-related Experience and Physiology: A Motivator of Approach and Commitment

Within evolutionary analyses of emotion, the experience of emotion is thought to serve as an internal signaling device, providing information about events in the environment and guiding the individual's patterns of thought and action in appropriate fashion (e.g., Keltner & Kring, 1998 ; Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987 ; Schwarz, 1990 ). In a similar vein, emotion-related autonomic responses are thought to enable emotion-related behavior (e.g., Levenson, 2003 ). For example, anger-related shifts in cardiovascular response, including elevated heart rate and changes in the distribution of blood through the body, support fight-or-flight behavior ( Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990 ).

These arguments set the stage for hypotheses concerning compassion-related experience and physiology. Compassion-related appraisals make the individual aware of situations in which helping and altruism are needed, and possibly beneficial. The experiential and physiological facets of compassion, we further reason, motivate the individual to respond quickly and appropriately to the suffering of others. In more specific terms, we would expect the experience of compassion to be associated with increased care and concern for the other, reduced focus on one's own needs, and a desire to help the other for their own sake. The structure of the experience of compassion, furthermore, should be distinct from that of distress, sadness, and love. We would also expect the physiological correlates of compassion, particularly those in the autonomic nervous system, to enable outward attention, approach, and social engagement.

The Phenomenology of Compassion

Studies of the subjective experience of compassion reveal that the momentary experience of compassion does indeed motivate altruistic and caring behavior, and that it is a distinguishable experience from sadness and distress (e.g., Batson, 1991 ; Batson & Shaw, 1991 ; Eisenberg, et al., 1989 ). Initial evidence for these claims comes from self-reports of emotion in response to witnessing another's suffering. Factor analyses consistently reveal that emotion ratings in these situations load on distinct compassion and distress factors. In a review of six studies, Batson and colleagues ( Batson et al., 1987 ) found that self-reports of feeling compassionate , sympathetic , moved , tender , warm , and softhearted consistently load on a common factor. In contrast, self-reports of alarmed , upset , disturbed , distressed , worried , and perturbed loaded on a separate factor. The distinction between these factors occurred even though correlations between responses to distress and compassion items were positive ( r 's ranged from .44 to .75, as reported in Batson et al., 1987 ). These initial studies of compassion-related experience did not include sadness-related words, but another study found that words like sad , dejected , low-spirited , heavyhearted , and feeling low loaded on a separate component from both compassion and distress ( Fultz et al., 1988 ). In subjective reports, then, compassion appears as a distinct emotional response to appeals for help.

Experimental evidence reveals that compassion also has distinct motivational underpinnings from distress, and perhaps sadness. Whereas distress motivates focus on the self and a desire to reduce one's own suffering, compassion motivates concern for others and a desire to reduce others' suffering ( Batson et al., 1987 ; Batson, 1991 ). This has been shown in multiple studies using a paradigm in which participants receive an appeal for help, but are offered an easy escape route. In this work, greater self-reported compassion led to more helping when escape was easy. In contrast, greater self-reported distress led to less helping when escape was easy (e.g., Batson et al., 1983 ).

The distinctions between the experiences of compassion and distress have been replicated with child participants using slightly different items. In one study, 3 rd and 6 th grade children were asked to recall an experience in which they felt particularly distressed and another experience in which they felt particularly sorry for someone else ( Eisenberg, Schaller, et al., 1988 ). Consistent with Batson's research, children's self-reports of sorry for and pity or concern for loaded on the same factor, whereas nervous , worried , and scared loaded on another. These studies reveal that experiences of compassion are distinct from those of distress and sadness. Research with children is also consistent with the hypothesis that compassion motivates approach. In one study, 2 nd and 5 th graders watched a video about children who had lost their parents in a car accident. Children's self-reports of compassion during this video were positively related to helping in the form of donating their experiment money ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Miller, Fultz, et al., 1989 ). Feelings of distress, by contrast, predicted less helping. In another study, children who verbally expressed distress when exposed to a crying infant were less likely to intervene and try to soothe the infant than those who did not ( Zahn-Waxler, Friedman & Cummins, 1983 ).

There is little evidence to evaluate whether compassion and love are distinct experiences. In one of the few relevant studies, romantic partners' reports of love were moderately positively correlated with reports of sympathy ( r = .26) after having discussed something good that recently happened ( Gonzaga et al., 2001 ) and were uncorrelated after romantic partners discussed their first date ( Gonzaga et al., 2006 ). In comparison, the experience of love was correlated strongly with desire ( r = .54). Romantic love, however, is a poor comparison for compassion. Instead, parental, friendship, or altruistic love would be better comparisons.

Autonomic Nervous System Correlates

The autonomic nervous system involves approximately twenty bundles of neurons originating in the spinal cord that receive signals from regions of the cortex, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus, and that activate different target organs, glands, muscles, and blood vessels distributed throughout the body. In the most general sense, the autonomic nervous system is thought to create an “internal milieu” that enables emotion-related action tendencies, from fight or flight tendencies to withdrawal, or in the case of compassion, approach and caregiving ( Janig, 2003 ).

Two lines of reasoning point to possible autonomic correlates of compassion. A first centers upon the fact that compassion, in particular compared to distress, involves orientation to the target individual and approach-related behavior ( Hoffman, 1984 ). The parasympathetic nervous system effect of inhibition of heart rate has been associated with an orienting response and sustained outward attention that is in keeping with a core action tendency of compassion ( Suess, Porges & Plude, 1994 ). In contrast, heart-rate acceleration and increased skin conductance are associated with fight or flight responses like those in fear ( Cacioppo, Berntson, Larsen, Peohlmann, & Ito, 2000 ). Given these distinctions, one might expect compassion to be associated with heart-rate deceleration and distress to be associated with increased heart rate and increased skin conductance.

Consistent with these claims, heart rate deceleration has been shown to occur in situations that evoke compassion, whereas heart rate acceleration has been shown to occur in situations that induce distress ( Eisenberg, Fabes et al., 1988 ; Eisenberg, Schaller, et al., 1988 ; Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Miller, et al., 1991 ). In one experimental study of preschoolers and second graders, children were exposed to three films. The distress induction film presented a young boy and girl who were frightened by a loud thunderstorm. There were two compassion induction films. One portrayed a young girl's sadness over her pet bird's death. In the other, a young girl discussed her physical handicap and then struggled to walk during a therapy session. Children showed heart rate deceleration during both of the compassion induction films and heart rate acceleration during the distress induction film ( Eisenberg, Fabes et al., 1988 ). In a similar study with adults, heart rate decelerated during a compassion-inducing film, and self-reports of sympathy and compassion were positively related to heart rate deceleration ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Carlo & Miller, 1991 ). Other similarly motivated research has documented that heart rate deceleration is positively associated with prosocial behavior. Children who showed heart rate deceleration during evocative films were more willing to help bring homework or donate some of their experiment money to a child in need ( Eisenberg et al., 1989 ).

Compassion and distress are differentiated in the accompanying levels of skin conductance, an index of sympathetic autonomic nervous system arousal. Distress-inducing films elicit higher levels of skin conductance than compassion-inducing films ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Carlo & Miller, 1991 ; Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Miller, et al., 1991 ), and skin conductance levels relate positively to distress self-reports ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Miller et al., 1991 ), to distress expressions ( Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Carlo & Miller, 1991 ), and to gaze aversion during a distressing film ( Fabes et al., 1993 ).

A second line of reasoning posits that one branch of the parasympathetic nervous system regulated by the vagus nerve may have evolved uniquely in mammals to support attachment and caregiving behaviors so central to compassion ( Beauchaine, 2001 ; Porges, 1995 , 2001 ). The vagus nerve and its source nuclei interact in the regulation of a “social engagement system,” which includes facial and vocal displays, looking and listening activities, and motor behaviors such as tactile contact ( Beauchaine, 2001 ; Porges, 2001 ). Activation of the vagus nerve is inferred from measures of the degree of respiration-linked variability in the heart rate, or respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA).

Tonic RSA, or an individuals' baseline level of RSA at rest, is used as one dispositional indicator of vagal activity, whereas shifts in RSA relative to baseline during exposure to emotional stimuli are used as situational indicators of vagal activity ( Beauchaine, 2001 ). With respect to compassion, studies confirm that tonic RSA is positively related to trait-like compassionate responding. Boys in kindergarten to 2 nd grade with high tonic RSA were rated by teachers and parents as more helpful and more able to regulate their emotions than those with lower RSA ( Eisenberg et al., 1996 ). In another study, children's tonic RSA was positively related to their own self-reports of sympathy, both dispositionally and in response to a compassion-inducing film ( Fabes et al., 1993 ). Tonic RSA was also related to less self-reported distress, less facial display of distress and gaze aversion, and less arousal (lowered skin conductance) in response to the film.

A recent study of RSA during exposure to emotional stimuli suggests that vagal activity may also correlate with state-like episodes of compassion ( Oveis, Horberg & Keltner, 2009 ). The researchers found that participants who were exposed to a series of 15 compassion-inducing photographs exhibited higher levels of RSA than those who were exposed to pride-inducing photographs. Higher RSA while watching the slides (after controlling for tonic RSA) was positively related to self-reports of experienced compassion, but negatively related to experience of pride.

Do the autonomic markers associated with compassion—heart rate deceleration, heart rate variability, reduced skin conductance—differ from those associated with sadness and love? No study to date has compared the autonomic profiles of these emotions. Many studies have examined sadness independently, and these point to informative physiological distinctions. Sadness, much like distress, is thought to be associated with elevated cardiovascular arousal ( Levenson, 1992 ). A meta-analysis supported this claim, finding that the experience of sadness is associated with heart rate acceleration ( Cacioppo et al., 2000 ), which differs from the pattern of heart rate deceleration associated with compassion that Eisenberg and colleagues have observed. For example, in the directed facial action task, in which participants are coached to produce prototypical emotional facial expressions, the sadness expression has been associated with heart rate acceleration (e.g., Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983 ; Levenson et al., 1990 ).

In summary, compassion-related decelerated heart rate suggests this emotion is associated with parasympathetic autonomic nervous system (as does suggestive evidence involving vagal tone measurement), whereas distress- and sadness-related heart-rate acceleration and increased skin conductance suggest that these two emotions are associated with sympathetic autonomic nervous system activation.

Critical Summary of Alternatives

The theoretical literature on compassion yields three possible frames to account for the empirical data we have just presented: that 1) compassion is a vicarious emotion (and by implication resembles empathic distress), 2) compassion is a variant of sadness or love; or 3), compassion is a distinct emotion.

Our empirical review presents problems for a vicarious emotion account of compassion, which suggests that compassion will resemble empathic distress. The evidence reviewed here shows that compassion and distress differ in their phenomenologies, display behaviors, and autonomic profiles. Clearly empathy is involved in the elicitation and experience of compassion, but compassion does not reduce to an empathic state of mirrored distress, fear, or sadness. Although the compassion expression is similar to sadness expressions, aspects such as eye gaze, forward leans, and touch appear to communicate outward attention and approach. Several studies of empathy and altruism (reviewed elsewhere, see Batson, 1991 ; 1998 ; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987 ) find that experience of compassion leads to behaviors that reduce the other's suffering whereas distress leads to actions such as escape that reduce one's own suffering. And finally, the lowered heart rate and vagal activity associated with experience of compassion represents a clear distinction from the heightened sympathetic autonomic arousal associated with the emotions that elicit it, such as sadness and fear.

The second account—that compassion is a variant of sadness or love—likewise fails to map onto the empirical data that we have reviewed. This approach predicts that compassion will have similar appraisal themes to love, such as the positive feelings of security and proximity to a loved one. In contrast, compassion arises in response to appraisals of suffering. Several studies revealed that compassion and love are signaled in different facial, postural, and tactile actions. More focused comparisons are needed to ascertain whether or not compassion and love share a common autonomic response profile that motivates social approach (e.g., potentially in vagus nerve response or oxytocin release; see Carter, 1998 ; Taylor, Klein, Lewis, Gruenewald, Gurung, & Updegraff, 2000 ). Likewise, similar comparisons between compassion and love are needed in the realm of subjective experience and appraisal process, to more confidently claim that compassion is distinct from love.

One intriguing possibility is that compassion is moderated by love and valuing of the other person, probably through appraisals of self-relevance. Some research even suggests that love may moderate the influences of blame appraisals upon the experience of compassion, particularly in extreme cases of need. On this point, participants reported greater willingness to save a sibling who was to blame for their situation than an acquaintance who was not in a life and death scenario, but were more willing to help the acquaintance when the consequences were less dire ( Greitemeyer, Rudolph, & Weiner, 2003 ).

The overlaps between sadness and compassion were most pronounced. These two affective states share certain facial actions. Of note, though, these emotions differ in their eliciting appraisals, their phenomenology, in patterns of touch and vocalization, and in their autonomic profile (although the two emotions have not been directly compared in ANS work). It is in turning to new modalities of emotion measurement that the distinctions between these emotions come into focus.

Given the difficulties these three approaches to compassion encounter, a third perspective—that compassion is a distinct emotion—is best suited to synthesize the existing empirical data. Compassion arises as the result of appraisals of suffering, and is associated with signaling behavior (e.g., soothing tactile contact), reduced heart rate, subjective feelings of concern, and social behaviors that alleviate suffering. This approach also incorporates many of the claims of the other hypotheses into a coherent framework. The empathic distress, sadness, and love accounts of compassion are easily incorporated in appraisal aspects of the distinct state of compassion. For example, individual variation in values or emotional closeness determines the degree to which another's suffering is considered self and goal relevant, and, by implication, the likelihood of compassion.

The empirical study of compassion raises intriguing questions. Importantly, we have made the case that closely related states—sympathy, pity, and empathic concern—are part of the compassion family, and should manifest in a compassion-related profile that has emerged in our review. Empirical studies on this thesis are needed. This kind of research is also likely to yield findings concerning how these states differ in subtle ways. For example, one might expect vocal markers of dominance (e.g., deeper pitch) to be involved in pity-related vocalizations but not compassion-related vocalizations.

More generally, where does compassion fall within the dimensional space that characterizes so many affective states, a space defined by two dimensions—valence and arousal ( Barrett & Russell, 1999 ; Russell, 2003 )? Compassion clearly is rooted in certain negatively valenced appraisals and feelings of distress. At the same time, it engages approach and shares a core appraisal with positive emotions like gratitude and love ( Shiota et al., 2006 ). Empirical studies of the underlying dimensions of appraisal of compassion may yield insights into the complex valence of this emotion, and new dimensions of emotion.

In this review, we have made the case that compassion is both a state and trait like tendency. Clearly, the experience, physiology, and display of compassion speak to its state like, episodic nature. At the same time it is quite clear that compassion is an enduring affective trait ( Eisenberg et al., 2002 ; Grühn, Rebucal, Diehl, Lumley, & Labouvie-Vief, 2008 ; Shiota et al., 2006 ; Underwood, 2009 ). An important area of inquiry is to explore the relationships between the state like experience of compassion and the trait like tendency towards this emotion.

One variant of this question is whether the cultivation of state like episodes of compassion can develop into more enduring compassion-based sentiments or traits. Numerous meditation practices attempt to cultivate the compassionate disposition in loving kindness exercises, in which the individual contemplates feelings of compassion toward individuals close to the self (or the self), and gradually extends those feelings to less close individuals and eventually adversaries and all sentient beings ( Wallace, 2005 ). These loving kindness meditations have been found to shift the resting lateralization patterns in the brain to the left frontal lobes, which is associated with greater approach tendencies ( Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Schumacher, Rosenkranz, Muller, et al., 2003 ), and to lead to boosts in overall well-being and social connection ( Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek & Finkel, 2008 ). These studies suggest that mindful experiences of compassionate states increase trait like tendencies to feel compassion. Other work speaks to the benefits of such shifts: more enduring compassion-related sentiments toward a romantic partner predict increased satisfaction in relationships over time ( Neff & Karney, 2009 ) and trait like tendencies toward self-compassion predict increased psychological functioning and reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and rumination ( Neff, Rude, & Kirkpatrick, 2007 ).

Based on our synthesis of the empirical studies of compassion, we now consider several questions warranting future research. We focus on three: Is compassion universal across cultures? How is it a moral emotion? And what do we know of its central nervous system correlates?

Cultural Universals and Variation in Compassion

A central implication of evolutionary analysis is that, as an adaptation, compassion should be a universal feature of the human species ( Brown, 1991 ). And it is in the study of compassion across cultures that the evidence is most lacking. The evolutionary accounts of compassion that we have detailed here posit that compassion should be involved in the care of vulnerable offspring, should be central to mate preferences, and should play an important role in the formation of cooperative alliances across radically different cultures. With few exceptions, these assertions await empirical attention, and are critical to assessing an evolutionary analysis of compassion. To the extent that compassion proves not to be importantly involved in the raising of offspring across cultures or a central criterion in mate selection or alliance formations with non-kin, the evolutionary arguments we have offered here become less tenable.

The broader thesis that compassion is a distinct emotion likewise is in need of evidence from non-western cultures. It will be important to study the appraisals, experience, display, and physiology of compassion across cultures. Again, universality in these different response modalities represents strong evidence for the evolutionary argument we are offering here; significant cultural variation in these responses represents a significant challenge to our perspective, and suggests that while compassion may still serve caregiving functions, the state itself is more subject to cultural variation than suggested by evolutionary accounts. We hope that the present review enables this line of inquiry in its identification of compassion-related inductions and measures.

What evidence is there for compassion as a universally experienced emotion? Compassion and related terms appear in the early writings of Aristotle ( Nussbaum, 1996 ), Confucius ( Bockover, 1995 ), and are a central concept in both early and contemporary Buddhism ( de Silva, 1995 ; Trungpa, 1973 ). In contemporary psychological research, compassion and related states have been studied in such diverse cultures as Brazil, India, China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Spain and Germany (e.g. Dalsky, Gohm, Noguchi & Shiomura, 2008 ; Eisenberg, Zhou & Koller, 2001 ; Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ; Hertenstein et al., 2006 ; Shaver et al., 1992 ; 2001 ; Trommsdorff, Friedlmeier, & Mayer, 2007 ). Studies of the emotion lexicon show that compassion and related terms are rated as highly prototypical emotions in Chinese ( Shaver et al., 1992 ) and Indonesian ( Shaver et al., 2001 ). Behaviors related to compassion, such as helping, forgiveness, and reciprocity are valued highly in all cultures ( Gouldner, 1960 ; Miller & Bersoff, 1994 ; Schwartz & Bardi, 2001 ). In a study of value hierarchies in 54 nations, benevolence towards people with whom one is in frequent personal contact and protection for the welfare of all people were consistently among the most important values ( Schwartz & Bardi, 2001 ).

These studies support the argument that suffering and need are universal elicitors of compassion. For example, young children from four different cultures (Malaysia, Indonesia, Isreal, and Germany) expressed sympathy (coded as inner eyebrows lifted, corners of the mouth turned down, lack of tension in the face, and a soft voice) when a female experimenter expressed sadness when her balloon broke ( Trommsdorff et al., 2007 ). Research participants in China reported feeling sympathy for AIDS patients ( Zhou, Zhang, Fang & Li, 2005 ), for individuals who were fired from their job ( Zhang, Xia, & Li, 2007 ), and for individuals who failed at a task that they tried hard to complete ( Zhang, Reyna, Qian, & Yu, 2008 ). In addition, these studies suggest that appraisals centering upon responsibility and blame—critical in our model of compassion-related appraisals—play a universal role in the elicitation of compassion, as they do in other emotions (see Mesquita & Frijda, 1992 ; Scherer, 1997 ). For example, Chinese managers and employees judged another employee as not responsible for his failure when he tried very hard to succeed but was thwarted. In turn, these appraisals of the lack of responsibility were associated with increased sympathy ( Zhang et al., 2008 ), and helping behavior ( Zhang et al., 2007 ).

Several studies in non-western cultures have examined the correlates of individual differences in the trait-like tendency to experience compassion, and these studies are germane to the question of the universality of compassion. Consistent with research in the United States, the self-reported tendency to experience compassion relates to the increased tendency to perspective-take in Brazilian adolescents ( Eisenberg et al., 2001 ) and Chinese adults ( Siu & Shek, 2005 ). Self-reported individual differences in compassion have also been positively associated with self-reported prosocial behavior in Japan ( Kitayama & Markus, 2000 ) and Brazil ( Eisenberg et al., 2001 ).

Cross-cultural studies of compassion-related display behavior suggest that compassion is recognizable in dynamic displays involving touch, but not in decontextualized facial expressions. When communicated through touch, Spanish participants recognized compassion at above chance levels, and differentiated this display from tactile contact of love and gratitude ( Hertenstein et al., 2006 ). In contrast, a study in India tested one particular facial display of compassion and found it was more often labeled as sadness ( dukha ) than compassion ( karuna ), which was consistent with a concurrent study in an American sample ( Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ). It is unclear, however, if the lack of recognition is the result of the specific expression tested or the result of compassion having no universal facial expression at all.

Just as important as the search for the universality of compassion are studies that document systematic cultural variation in this complex emotion. Compassion's functions—the reduction of suffering and the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships—almost certainly vary across cultures. In this way, the evolved capacity to feel compassion may function like a language acquisition tendency ( Henrich, 2004 ; Richerson & Boyd, 2005 ), and vary in ways that are analogous to how languages differ across cultures, varying according to culturally specific concepts, values, norms, and practices ( Clark, 1997 ; Hoshchild, 1979 ).

For example, the tendency to experience compassion and sympathy has been positively related to interdependent self-construal and collectivism in both American and Japanese samples ( Dalsky et al., 2008 ; Uchida & Kitayama, 2001 ). Indeed, theorists argue that in the context of interdependence, one's well-being is closely connected to giving and receiving sympathy from others ( Kitayama & Markus, 2000 ). This direct link has yet to be tested, however. In addition, cultures vary in the extent to which cooperation and altruism are observed outside the family ( Henrich et al., 2005 ). Individuals from collectivistic cultures (e.g., China and Japan) tend to help members of their own groups more than Americans, whereas Americans help people from groups other than their own more than Chinese and Japanese ( Leung, 1988 ; Wong & Hong, 2005 ). These findings point to a hypothesis worthy of testing: that interdependence increases the tendency to feel compassion for ingroup members, whereas independence increases the tendency to feel compassion for outgroup members.

Contemporary studies of emotion and culture point to other ways in which compassion is likely to vary across cultures ( Keltner & Lerner, 2009 ). Cultures vary in which emotions are focal in daily experience ( Mesquita, 2003 ), and which emotions are valued, or idealized ( Tsai, 2007 ). Cultural variations in the prioritization of hierarchy ( Fischer & Smith, 2003 ), equality ( Blum, 1980 ), and caring ( Levine, Norenzayan, & Philbrick, 2001 ) are likely to predict the extent to which compassion is a focal or idealized emotion in the particular culture. For example, a comparison of the emotion lexicon in English, Italian, and Chinese found that all represented compassion and related terms, but in slightly different ways ( Shaver et al., 1992 ). In the more interdependent cultures of China and Italy, these terms appear to be highly emphasized and differentiated: forming the basis of a “sad love” cluster in Chinese and a separate cluster from love and sadness in Italian. In English, however, the terms were clumped under love or sadness, indicating that the concepts are less well differentiated, and perhaps less focal.

Finally, cultures also vary in the outward display of emotion. Cultures that value particular emotions are likely to have a richer emotion-specific lexicon and vocabulary of nonverbal display for the emotion (e.g., Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ; Tsai, 2007 ). Sociological and anthropological work reveals rich variations in the cultural scripts around the giving and receiving of help and compassion ( Clark, 1997 ; Kipnis, 2002 ; Smart, 1999 ). Empirical studies of the vocabulary of compassion, both verbal and nonverbal, and the scripts, or feeling rules, that govern how compassion should be expressed, are likely to yield informative cultural differences in compassion. This work is likely to be particularly fruitful if compassion is studied in more naturalistic social interactions (e.g. Van Kleef et al., 2008 ).

Studies of compassion across different cultures are few in number but rich with promise. This work is essential to the claim that compassion is an evolved emotion (where one would expect important universalities in compassion across cultures). It is also likely to reveal striking differences in the place of compassion in the daily emotional lives of individuals in different cultures, which our next section reveals, would speak to cultural variations in the substance of moral judgment and action.

Compassion and Moral Judgment and Action

Compassion is a controversial emotion within theorizing about the ethical and moral rules that should structure society. Compassion is a central focus of many spiritual and ethical traditions, from Buddhism and Confucianism to Christianity, and a state and disposition people seek to cultivate on the assumption it will make for more morally coherent lives and more cooperative communities ( Armstrong, 2006 ; Davidson & Harrington, 2002 ; Nussbaum, 2001 ). In contrast, many influential social theorists, from Ayn Rand to Immanuel Kant, have treated compassion critically, deeming it to be a subjective and unreliable source of moral judgment and action, and antithetical to individual achievement ( Keltner, 2009 ). This stance is typified in the following quote of Immanuel Kant: “ A feeling of sympathy is beautiful and amiable; for it shows a charitable interest in the lot of other men… But this good natured passion is nevertheless weak and always blind. ” ( Kant, 1960 , p. 58)

How might compassion shape moral judgment and action? In the broadest sense, morality refers to judgments and actions that people deem as right or wrong, obligatory with respect to maintaining a cooperative social order, and relevant to formal punishment and sanctions ( Haidt, 2003 ; Turiel, 1983 ; de Waal, 1996 ). People in different cultures consider several domains of human action as moral ( Haidt, 2007 ; Rozin, Lowery, Imada & Haidt, 1999 ; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997 ). These include: harm and suffering; freedom and rights; punitive and distributive justice; purity of mind and body; and fulfilling duties in the service of a group. Within an evolutionary framework, moral principles enable more cooperative groups, which reduce the likelihood of costly, adversarial conflict ( Sober & Wilson, 1998 ) and increase the amount and quality of care given to vulnerable offspring (e.g., Hrdy, 2000 ).

The argument that emotions such as compassion figure prominently in moral judgment and action rests upon a few more specific claims (e.g., Haidt, 2003 ; McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larson, 2001 ). A first is that some emotions act as moral intuitions , or fast, automatic judgments of right and wrong within specific moral domains, which feed into moral judgments, for example about whether to punish or not or how to allocate resources ( Damasio, 1994 ; Greene & Haidt, 2002 ; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001 ; Haidt, 2003 , 2007 ; McCullough et al., 2001 ). A second is that emotions motivate relevant behavior within moral domains. For example, anger guides judgments about violations of individual freedoms and rights, and motivates specific actions within that domain, such as forms of punishment ( Haidt, 2001 ; Lerner, Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998 ).

Cast within this framework, one possibility is that compassion motivates moral judgment and action within the specific moral domain related to unjustified harm, a moral category recognized in almost all cultures that have been studied ( Haidt, 2003 ; Vasquez, Keltner, Ebenbach, & Banaszynski, 2001 ). Several findings align with this hypothesis. As we have seen, compassion is attuned to suffering and the needs of those who are vulnerable, and is sensitive to the responsibility or blameworthiness of the individual who suffers (e.g., Rudolph et al., 2004 ). In newly reported research, the trait like tendency to report elevated empathic concern predicted strong endorsements of government policies that reduce suffering and enhance the welfare of those in need, such as the elderly, the poor, or children ( Smith, 2009 ). On the other end of the continuum, Blair and colleagues have found that extremely violent people showed little emotional reaction to those who suffer (e.g., Blair et al., 2004 ). In recent work, state and trait compassion amplified the sense of self-other similarity to those who are vulnerable, who suffer, and who are in need, suggesting that compassion elevates the sense of ingroupness those who suffer. State and trait compassion predicted increased sense of dissimilarity to those who are strong ( Oveis et al., in press ; but see Batson et al., 1997 ). In this sense the experience of compassion is a moral barometer ( McCullough et al., 2001 )—it closely tracks suffering, responsibility, vulnerability, and other harm-related concerns, and serves as an intuition that guides attitudes that seek to remedy unjustified suffering or need.

In keeping with this domain specific hypothesis, compassion should motivate harm-reducing actions ( McCullough et al., 2001 ). The data relevant to this thesis are unequivocal. Batson and colleagues' definitive work has shown that felt empathic concern motivates altruistic actions toward those who suffer, even at a cost to the self (reviewed in Batson & Shaw, 1991 ). Work by Omoto and colleagues has found that felt empathic concern, a close relative of compassion, is a powerful motive of volunteerism, non-remunerated behavior that benefits non-kin (e.g., caring for the dying, the sick, or troubled children) with no expectation of reward ( Omoto, Malsch, & Barraza, 2009 ). Compassion diminishes punitive tendencies toward wrongdoers ( Rudolph et al., 2004 ). Compassion is a powerful proximal determinant of the reduction of suffering and sacrifice on behalf of others' welfare. The findings we have just reviewed align with the thesis that compassion is metaphorically a “guardian” of the moral domain of harm and undeserved suffering ( Haidt, 2003 ).

A second possibility is that compassion guides moral judgment and action across different moral domains. This perspective predicts that compassion will guide judgments and actions not solely in the realm of harm and suffering, but in other moral domains as well, including in the domains of individual freedom and rights and bodily and spiritual purity. According to this hypothesis, for example, one would expect state or trait compassion to predict judgments of the increased seriousness of undeserved suffering (a domain specific prediction) and of violations of freedoms and rights and bodily and spiritual purity. In continuing with this line of reasoning, one would expect compassion not only to predispose the individual to take action to reduce undeserved suffering but also actions to increase others' freedoms or rights or purity. Empirical studies are revealing specific emotions to guide morally relevant judgment and action within specific domains: anger is associated with judgment and actions related to individual freedoms and rights ( Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1993 ); disgust is associated with judgments and actions relevant to purity but not other domains. Data conforming to this second hypothesis would suggest that compassion is a different kind of moral emotion, one that motivates morally relevant judgment and action across domains.

Neural Correlates of Compassion

The search for distinct central neural correlates of compassion has emerged as an active area of inquiry ( Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009 ; Kim et al., 2009 ). This research promises answers to intriguing questions. For example, does the neural representation of another person's undeserved pain differ from the neural representation of morally justified or retributive pain ( Decety, Michalska, & Akitsuki, 2008 ; Singer et al., 2006 )? Studies of central nervous system activity also offer the promise of testing some of the predictions that derive from our appraisal model of compassion without relying upon retrospective, self-report measures, which are problematic with respect to verifying claims about appraisal (e.g., Parkinson & Manstead, 1992 ).

The conceptual analysis we have developed here points to two research strategies that could fruitfully guide the study of the neural correlates of compassion. A first is to compare compassion to the related states of distress, sadness, and love. No such study has made these direct comparisons, but separate lines of inquiry have documented neural correlates of these states, which we represent in Table 4 . Although this literature is just emerging, it is interesting to note distinctions in central nervous system activity across these four states. For example, love has been associated with reduced activation in the amygdala and engagement of the orbital frontal cortex, which fits its more positively valenced core, and clearly differs from compassion. Also of note is the lack of activation in temporal parietal areas implicated in comprehending other's emotions and thoughts during induced states of sadness or personal distress ( Adolphs, 2008 ; Pelphrey, Morris, Michelich, Allison, & McCarthy, 2005 ; Saxe & Wexler, 2005 ). The findings represented in Table 4 offer further evidence of distinctions between compassion and theoretically relevant states.

Note. ↑=increased BOLD activity, ↓=decreased BOLD activity, --= inconsistent/unreported activation. ACC = anterior cingulate cortex, mPFC = medial prefrontal Cortex, OFC=orbital frontal cortex, IFC/aInsula =Inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula, Temp.pole = temporal Pole, VTA/SN/VS = ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra and ventral striatum, TPC = temporal parietal corex, Pcun/PCC = precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex.

A second empirical strategy is to rely on our appraisal model of compassion to identify the specific neural processes associated with compassion-related appraisals. For example, a rich literature on the amygdala ( Adolphs & Spezio, 2006 ; LeDoux, 2007 ; Phelps & LeDoux, 2005 ) suggests that detection of suffering during compassion would engage this region of the brain, and that appraisals of the degree of suffering would strongly correlate with activation in the amygdala (see Table 4 ). In a similar spirit, studies implicating dorsal medial and lateral prefrontal cortex in reappraisal-based emotion regulation, i.e. coping, justify investigating the role that these areas play in compassion in contrast to personal distress ( Ochsner et al., 2004 ). Finally, extant research on the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) is relevant. This phylogenetically old area supports maternal-infant attachment behaviors ( Noriuchi, Kikuchi, & Senoo, 2008 ), suggesting that this region may be involved in a caregiving orientation towards those who are vulnerable or suffer, motivating compassionate responding.

In another line of speculation, appraisals of the relevance of the other to the self are also critical in the elicitation of compassion, and may specifically engage mid and ventral areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) ( Gusnard, Akbudak, Shulman, & Raichle, 2001 ; Harris, McClure, van den Bos, Cohen, & Fiske, 2007 ; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005 ). Two recent studies of compassion lend credence to this line of thinking. Compassion was induced by having participants see the self-relevance of another's suffering. Participants looked at sad facial expressions ‘compassionately with a willingness to feel, share and understand the suffering of a person’ during fMRI acquisition ( Kim et al., 2009 ). In a second study, participants recalled ‘compelling, realistic, and naturalistic’ narratives that described other individuals' physically and socially painful experiences which they had previously reviewed with an experimenter ( Immordino-Yang et al., 2009 ). Both studies reported increased blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activation in the mPFC.

Finally, neuroscientific studies offer the promise of illuminating how approach tendencies and rewarding experiences are involved in compassion. This is important theoretically for it would point to a central nervous system process involved in the cost-benefit analyses we have suggested are critical to compassion, wherein the benefits of helping are appraised as outweighing the costs. On this, it is intriguing to note that in the ‘looking at sad facial expressions’ study described in the previous paragraph, self-reports of compassion towards the sad faces predicted greater activation in dopaminergic reward signaling areas (substantia nigra – SN, and ventral tegmental area - VTA). This finding provides preliminary evidence that there is an intrinsic reward to compassion, one that could help outweigh any costs or risks perceived in helping behavior. In seeking further to document the rewarding properties of compassion, it could prove fruitful to ascertain whether compassion preferentially engages the left hemisphere, which has been associated with approach motivation ( Davidson, Shackman, & Maxwell, 2004 ; Harmon-Jones, Lueck, Fearn, & Harmon-Jones, 2006 ).

Neuroscientific studies of compassion offer the promise testing whether compassion differs from related states at the neural level, and capturing the appraisal processes engaged by this emotion. The merging of our conceptual analysis of compassion and studies of relevant regions of the brain suggest that compassion involves detecting another person's suffering expressions (TPJ), mirroring their emotional experience (IFC, insula, temporal pole), assessing the relevance/deservedness of the sufferer (mid-ventral mPFC), coping with empathic distress (dorsal mPFC/IFC), feeling warmth/tenderness towards others (PAG, SN & VTA) and an overarching motivation to approach (heightened left hemisphere).

Compassion has long had a problematic standing in the study of emotion ( Lazarus, 1991 ). It has been most typically ignored in emotion taxonomies, and when considered, treated as empathic distress, or as subtype or blend of sadness and love. Our review reveals compassion to arise out of distinct appraisal processes, to have distinct display behaviors, distinct experiences, and an approach-related physiological response. The state like experience of compassion, and the trait like tendency to feel compassion, fall under the purview of three evolutionary arguments: that compassion evolved as part of a caregiving response to vulnerable offspring, that compassionate individuals were preferred in mate selection processes, and that compassion emerged as a desirable trait in cooperative relations between non-kin. We have highlighted areas in need of more research (culture, display, neural correlates). Empirical answers to questions about altruism (is a selfless form of altruism encoded in the genes?), morality (to what extent are basic moral judgments of harm and punishment driven by compassion?), and evolution (is compassion our strongest instinct?) lie on the horizon in the study of this important emotion.

Acknowledgments

This paper was prepared with prepared with support from the National Institutes of Mental Health (T32-MH067562), the Metanexus Institute, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Fetzer Foundation.

We are grateful to Hillary Elfenbein, Qing Zhou, E.J. Horberg, Lindsay Shaw Taylor, and Elizabeth Page-Gould for their insightful comments on previous versions.

Publisher's Disclaimer: The following manuscript is the final accepted manuscript. It has not been subjected to the final copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading required for formal publication. It is not the definitive, publisher-authenticated version. The American Psychological Association and its Council of Editors disclaim any responsibility or liabilities for errors or omissions of this manuscript version, any version derived from this manuscript by NIH, or other third parties. The published version is available at www.apa.org/pubs/journals/bul

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Student Essays

Essay on Compassion | Meaning, Purpose, Importance of Compassion in Life

Compassion is the powerful motivating force that is essentially important in our lives. The following essay, written by our experts, sheds light upon the meaning, purpose and importance of having compassion in life This essay is quite helpful for children & students in their school exams, college test, etc

Essay on Compassion | Meaning, Purpose & Importance of having Compassion in Life

The Compassion is an emotional energy that we feel for someone or something else and which draws us to offer our support. If we have compassion for someone in need, it means that we feel their pain in our own hearts and are motivated to alleviate it in some way.

On a broader scale, compassion is loving kindness. It’s the heartfelt intention to offer hope and support, to feel someone else’s pain as if it is our own and to offer help.

>>>>>>> Related Post: Essay on Where there’s a Will there’s a Way

Compassion vs Empathy:

Empathy can be defined as, “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions.”

While both compassion and empathy are about relating to the feelings of others, empathy is more focused on the other person’s emotions. Compassion expands that focus to include a desire to help. It shows up as wanting to support, to be there for someone in a time of need, and to offer help.

Empathy often causes an emotional resonance within us that motivates us to action, which is an aspect of compassion. However, empathy can be limited by our own feelings and experiences. For example, if someone else is feeling sad, but the only thing you can relate to in that moment is your own sadness, you may feel empathy for them but not be able to experience their sadness fully. This might lead you to try to cheer them up instead of letting them feel what they need to feel in order to heal.

On the other hand, compassion is more about emotional resonance and less about our own emotions. Because of this, it can be a more effective motivator for both giving and receiving help.

Kinds of Compassion

Compassion can be broken down into two categories: familial and altruistic. Familial love is the kind of compassion that comes from our personal family experiences. Whenever we feel love for someone in our family, we are experiencing familial compassion. For example, your parents showed you love and support when you were growing up—those are moments of familial compassion.

Altruistic love is the kind that focuses on loving others without any expectation for reciprocity. It’s the kind of love that you can feel for people you don’t know or have just met. It’s what leads to charity, volunteering, and philanthropy. People who dedicate their lives to helping others are often motivated by altruistic love.

Compassion in our daily Life

Having compassion for ourselves and others is an important part of keeping our hearts open. We all experience challenges in life that can cause us to shut down and close our hearts. When we have compassion for ourselves in these moments, it can prevent us from closing down further.

Compassion is also often necessary when helping others. If we are trying to support a homeless person on the street, for example, it’s much more helpful if we can offer them compassion. If we are judgmental of their situation, if we think that they “should” be doing something about it or that this is “their own fault,” we are not offering effective support. The same can be said for trying to help someone who is grieving, or a person struggling with anxiety.

It’s important to receive compassion as well as offer it. We all need support sometimes, and when we don’t get it, we can feel even worse about ourselves and the situation. If you are going through a tough time, it’s important to receive compassion from others to keep your heart open.

In order to offer compassion, we have to practice awareness of the suffering in our world and take a stand against it. We can’t offer compassion if we don’t know about the problem. In addition, mindful awareness of our own thoughts and feelings is a crucial part of compassion. Without self-awareness we can’t know what others need and we won’t be able to relate to them properly.

Developing Compassion in Life

Compassion can be developed by practicing mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness is the practice of keeping our attention on the present moment and noticing how we’re feeling. We can think of this as “taking a moment” to check in with ourselves. Meditation is another way to practice mindfulness.

Compassion can also be encouraged by focusing on people’s beneficial qualities rather than their shortcomings or mistakes. If you focus mainly on the negative qualities of someone who is suffering, it can be harder to feel compassion for them. Another way to develop more compassion is by trying to imagine

>>>>>>>> Related Post: Essay on Loyalty, Value & Importance

Compassion is essential to keeping our hearts open, and developing more of it will ultimately help us build better relationships with others. When we feel compassion, we feel motivated to help and support others, but it’s important to recognize that compassion is a whole-hearted feeling, not an emotion. Therefore it’s important that we also receive compassion from others, especially when we need it.

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Essay On Compassion

— for Stephen Dunn

Family and Relationships
Religion and Philosophy
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Richard Lehnert

Correspondence

Richard Lehnert’s poem “ Essay on Compassion ” [July 2003] caught my eye because it was dedicated to poet Stephen Dunn. I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Dunn when he came to speak at my college. I was assigned to be his escort for the day, and I was in awe of him. In his keynote address, he read his poem “Loves,” which he’d conceived as a challenge to himself: to write until he had exhausted all examples of things that he loves. That poem, so simple in style, yet so complicated in imagery, inspired me.

Lehnert’s “Essay on Compassion” was reminiscent of Dunn’s “Loves,” and rich with its own kind of imagery. Thank you for reminding me of a day that helped rekindle my interest in poetry.

Also In This Issue

A Friend Of The Sun

Home for the heart attack, wasting time, dispatches from the lamb’s war, related selections.

Fear Of Rest

Judaism’s Mystical Heart

An interview with dovid din.

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Schopenhauer’s Compassionate Morality

Tim madigan on the curmudgeon who preached compassion..

“Poor Schopenhauer had this secret guilt, too, in his heart, the guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow men.” So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his incisive essay from Thoughts Out Of Season , ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (1874). Nietzsche goes on to say: “He often chose falsely in his desire to find real trust and compassion in men, only to return with a heavy heart to his faithful dog again. He was absolutely alone, with no single friend of his own kind to comfort him...” (Nietzsche, p.38.)

Schopenhauer occupies an anomalous position in the history of philosophy. His writings are a peculiar mixture of rigorous analysis of concepts, idiosyncratic interpretations of previous systems, and biting attacks on his enemies. For much of his life he was ignored, and most of the copies of his 1844 masterwork The World as Will and Representation , in Nietzsche’s words “had to be turned into wastepaper ...” (Nietzsche, ibid.) No wonder his trust and love for his fellow humans was so low. And yet, surprisingly enough, Schopenhauer – along with his philosophical hero David Hume – was one of the first Western philosophers to emphasize compassion as the basis of morality.

It might seem strange that a man who demonstrated little fellow-feeling in his own encounters with others should place such a high value on compassion. But Schopenhauer was well aware of this seeming contradiction, commenting in The World as Will and Representation : “It is just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a great sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general, it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.” ( WWR , Vol. 1, p.383.) This is what is known in the military as a ‘pre-emptive strike’.

As a philosopher, Schopenhauer averred, his job was to describe and analyze compassion – there was no compulsion to actually practice it. Yet for all of his bombast, there is much that makes Schopenhauer a sympathetic character. There is, for instance, his concern for the suffering of animals. “The greatest benefit conferred by the railways,” he writes, “is that they spare millions of draught-horses their miserable existences.” ( Essays and Aphorisms , p.171.)

It is compassion, or fellow-feeling, which Schopenhauer claims is the basis of ethics. Moral behavior consists of an intuitive recognition that we are all manifestations of the will to live. All the great religions, he holds, were attempts to express this metaphysical reality, although they usually botched the job by fomenting doctrinal disputes of their own making:

“The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? ... this ... reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.” ( Essays and Aphorisms , p.50)

Moving words, although somewhat inconsistent from a man who referred to his contemporary Hegel as an impudent scribbler of nonsense and the Caliban of philosophy and who was accused of pushing a landlady down a flight of stairs.

Schopenhauer’s most detailed examination of compassion is found in his 1839 essay On the Basis of Morality . It has a peculiar history. In that same year, at the age of fifty, he received his first public notice when his On the Freedom of the Human Will was awarded the prize for best essay in a contest sponsored by the Norwegian Scientific Society. Flushed with success, he submitted an essay to the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies, which had posed the following question: “Are the source and foundation of morals to be looked for in an idea of morality lying immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and in the analysis of the other fundamental moral concepts springing from that idea, or are they to be looked for in a different ground of knowledge?” Answering in the negative, Schopenhauer propounded the theory that the source and foundation of morals had nothing at all to do with knowledge, but rather in what he called “the great mystery of ethics” – compassion.

Fully expecting to win this second Scandinavian academic contest, Schopenhauer arranged for both essays to be published together in a work entitled The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics . He was outraged to discover that the Royal Danish Society did not award him the prize. To add insult to injury, the Society’s published rejection made it known that his had been the only entry. Schopenhauer had his two essays published together, in 1841, but the title page for the second essay proudly read: “On the Basis of Morality: not awarded a prize by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies, at Copenhagen, on 30 January 1840.” The introduction consisted of a lengthy diatribe against the Society’s failure to understand or appreciate his argument, coupled with a scathing attack on the Society’s admiration for Hegel – Schopenhauer was not one to keep his feelings to himself!

On the Basis of Morality asks the question: What can motivate individuals to overcome their egoistic tendencies? Surely not adherence to theistic commandments or the categorical imperative. Morality does not originate in human rationality, which is merely instrumental, concerned with the means towards some end which one already has in mind. For Schopenhauer, all moral actions can be expressed by the Latin phrase Neminem laede, imo omnes quantum potes, juva (“Injure no one; on the contrary, help everyone as much as you can”). Empirical investigation, he argues, shows that there are only three fundamental incentives that motivate human actions:

a) Egoism: the desire for one’s own well-being. b) Malice: the desire for another’s woe. c) Compassion: the desire for another’s well-being.

“Man’s three fundamental ethical incentives, egoism, malice, and compassion,” according to Schopenhauer, “are present in everyone in different and incredibly unequal proportions. In accordance with them, motives will operate on man and actions will ensue.” ( On the Basis of Morality , p.29.)

One can see the Platonic influence in this threefold categorization. It is interesting that he does not discuss a fourth possibility, malice toward one’s own self – the topic of suicide was one that he was particularly sensitive about, as his own father had died mysteriously, and was rumored to have ended his own life – a rumor which his son always vehemently denied. Schopenhauer held that people will be stirred to actions by the motives to which they are primarily susceptible. For instance, should you wish to induce an egoist to perform an act of loving-kindness, you must dupe him into believing the act will somehow benefit himself. But unlike the egoist, who tends to make a great distinction between himself and all other humans – and indeed all other living things – and who lives by the maxim pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim (“may the world perish, provided I am safe”), a person of compassionate character makes no such sharp distinction. Instead, he sees himself as fundamentally a part of and involved with the suffering world.

For the egoist, Schopenhauer says, humanity is the non-ego, but to the compassionate man, it is “myself, once more”, a recognition of the fundamental connectedness of all life. It is no wonder, then, that Schopenhauer calls compassion “the great mystery” of ethics, nor is it puzzling that he was intrigued by the examples and the discussions of this found within the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In his view, the only means of explaining ethics is through metaphysics. This is best understood, he felt, by Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

For all his bombast, Schopenhauer deserves credit for appreciating the insights of Eastern thought. He recognized that the philosophy of his own day was rapidly becoming desiccated and self-referential, with little to say about the issues most pertinent to people’s lives. Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers to propose a true dialogue between traditions, and his own manner of living demonstrated this cosmopolitanism. His study contained a gilt-bronze Buddha on a marble stand, a bust of Kant, an oil portrait of Goethe, and – attesting to his love of animals – sixteen portraits of canines. Schopenhauer also owned a succession of poodles, naming his favorite ‘Atma’ and commenting upon its remarkable intelligence. Contemporary students of the role of compassion in ethics owe a debt of gratitude to this ill-natured curmudgeon, whose best friend truly was his dog.

Tim Madigan is a US Editor of Philosophy Now . He teaches Philosophy at St John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.

The books by Arthur Schopenhauer which are mentioned in this article are listed below, with their original dates of publication and the details of the translations used here. • On the Will in Nature (1836) translated by E.F.J. Payne (Berg Publishers, 1992) • The World as Will and Representation , Vol. I, (1818/1819) translated by E.F.J. Payne (Dover Publications, 1969) • Essays and Aphorisms , (1851) translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1970). • On the Basis of Morality , (1840) translated by E.F.J. Payne (Berghahn Books, 1995).

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Essays on Compassion

Essay on Kindness Is Compassion in Action

Students are often asked to write an essay on Kindness Is Compassion in Action in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Kindness Is Compassion in Action

Understanding kindness.

Kindness is the act of being considerate, generous, and friendly to others. It involves showing empathy towards others, which means understanding their feelings.

Kindness and Compassion

Kindness is compassion in action. Compassion means feeling for others, and when we act on that feeling, we show kindness.

The Power of Kindness

Kindness can change lives. A simple act of kindness can make someone’s day better. It can also inspire others to be kind.

Kindness is important. It makes us human and brings happiness to others. Let’s practice kindness every day.

250 Words Essay on Kindness Is Compassion in Action

Introduction.

Kindness is a universal language that transcends cultural, social, and geographical barriers. It is the embodiment of compassion in action, a tangible manifestation of empathy and understanding towards fellow beings.

Kindness: A Humanistic Approach

Kindness is not just an act, but a lifestyle that fosters an environment of positivity and mutual respect. It is the willingness to place someone else’s needs before your own, without expecting anything in return. In essence, kindness is compassion in action, a testament to our shared humanity.

The Ripple Effect of Kindness

A single act of kindness can create a ripple effect, inspiring others to act similarly. This domino effect can influence the collective consciousness of a community, promoting a culture of empathy and compassion.

Kindness and Mental Health

Kindness also has a profound impact on mental health. It stimulates the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that induces feelings of happiness and well-being. By being kind, we not only uplift others but also enhance our own emotional health.

In a world often marred by conflict and division, kindness serves as a beacon of hope. It is compassion in action, a simple yet powerful force that can bridge divides and foster unity. As college students, we have the responsibility to cultivate this virtue, shaping a more compassionate and understanding world.

500 Words Essay on Kindness Is Compassion in Action

Kindness is a virtue that transcends cultural, religious, and social boundaries, universally recognized as a fundamental trait of humanity. It is often considered as compassion in action, a tangible manifestation of empathy and understanding towards others.

Kindness is an act stemming from a deep-seated sense of compassion and empathy towards fellow beings. It is not merely an act of benevolence but an expression of understanding someone else’s situation and extending help without any expectation of reciprocation. Kindness is a selfless act, often driven by a genuine desire to alleviate another’s suffering or discomfort.

Kindness and Compassion: An Inextricable Link

Compassion is an emotional response to the suffering of others, coupled with a desire to alleviate it. Kindness, in essence, is the action driven by this compassionate impulse. When we see someone in distress, our compassionate instincts trigger a reaction to reach out and help, and this act of reaching out is kindness. Hence, kindness is compassion in action.

The Practical Implications of Kindness

The practical implications of kindness are far-reaching and profound. Kindness fosters a sense of community and mutual respect among individuals. It promotes a culture of cooperation and understanding, making our societies more harmonious and peaceful. Moreover, research has shown that acts of kindness have a positive impact on the mental and physical health of the giver, as well as the receiver.

Kindness in the Modern World

In the fast-paced, competitive world we live in, kindness often takes a backseat. The focus on individual success and achievement can sometimes make us oblivious to the needs and struggles of others. However, it is in these challenging times that kindness becomes even more critical. It serves as a reminder of our shared humanity and the interconnectedness of our lives.

Kindness has the power to transform lives and societies. A single act of kindness can create a ripple effect, inspiring others to act kindly as well. It can break barriers of hostility and mistrust, fostering a sense of unity and mutual respect. In a world often divided by differences, kindness serves as a bridge, reminding us of our shared human experience.

In conclusion, kindness is more than just a moral virtue; it is compassion in action. It is a testament to our capacity to empathize with others and our desire to alleviate their suffering. In a world that often emphasizes individual achievement and success, kindness reminds us of the importance of community, cooperation, and mutual respect. It is a powerful force that can transform lives and societies, fostering a sense of unity and shared humanity. As such, it is incumbent upon us to cultivate and promote kindness in our lives and our societies.

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On Compassion' by Barbara Lazear Ascher: Unveiling The Motivations

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Compassion - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Compassion is the feeling of empathy or sympathy towards others, often coupled with a desire to help alleviate their suffering. Essays could discuss the psychological and social benefits of compassion, its role in moral and social development, or strategies for cultivating compassion in individuals and communities. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Compassion you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

The Caring and Compassion

My personality and characteristics as a nurse can affect and influence my interaction between patient, family, and other healthcare members. Caring and compassion is an organic self-concept I, as a nurse, must exemplify to all my patients. It is an essential characteristic to have because I am the first point of contact in a healthcare environment. Enthusiastic and assertiveness are other personalities that I continue to cultivate for it can affect my patient’s overall outlook with their recovery. Last, being […]

The Compassion for Kids

Have you ever seen someone who was doing so well and was so proud of something that they have achieved and then you get that sad feeling inside. That feeling is called compassion. In the story Marigolds, they live in a very poor, run down town. The kids are always bored so sometimes they go mess with old Ms. Lottie. In this old dirty town Ms. Lottie plants marigolds which brings her happiness. One day they decide to go destroy […]

Marigolds by Eugenia Collier

In the short story “Marigolds” by Eugenia W. Collier is about a 14-year-old girl named Lizbeth that is living in the time of The Great Depression. Early in the story, she is being a child, naive to the world around her but later in the story, she begins to realize that she is living in poverty once she hears her father crying. This leads her to destroy the Mrs lotties symbolic marigolds as an act of anger and sadness which […]

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The is Compassion Definition

When Walter Williams, the founder of University of Missouri’s school of journalism wrote the famed Journalist’s Creed (1908), he mentioned that: “I believe that the journalism which succeeds best … is … constructive”, he had the idea of constructive journalism in mind. A story on CNN’s website on October 2018 read: “Tropical Storm Rosa is about to make landfall and drench the arid Southwest.” The story went ahead to highlight how the storm could “soak” the dry Southwest. A few […]

What is Self Compassion

In the essay “on compassion” (2017), Ascher narrates about On one side is a black man in very shabby clothes and long uncombed hair walking down the street of Manhattan, he stops next to a mother and baby?The mother became nervous and clutched the pram, and the pedestrians who were waiting for the lights to change turned their eyes away from the homeless black man. Finally the homeless man got the five dollars from the mother. On the other side […]

Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy shows his sympathy and shares his advice in this speech. He shows how instead of us all show hatred towards one another, we should all come together and do great things for this country. He talks about how Blacks should not hate whites for the death of Martin Luther King Jr., although they could, but they should come together and continue what Martin had started but didn't get the chance to finish. Use this time of mourning […]

Compassion Can Save Life

When it comes to being a nurse, professionalism can be defined in many different ways. Being a professional nurse takes one to be confident, compassionate and accountable, these are just a few examples. Webster Dictionary defines professionalism as; the conduct, aims, or qualities that characterize or mark a profession or a professional person. I feel it is also the ability to evaluate your own work and proactively take corrective action to improve your own performance. The first step into becoming […]

The Love and Compassion

My operational theology derives from my mental imaging of God, those dynamic pictures that are present in my reality, such as the tender look of Jesus when he was curing, healing or talking with love and compassion; all of those being part of the set of beliefs and values which in combination with the theological virtues are constantly forming my life experience toward holiness and getting me closer to be more like Jesus, more close to God, Who is the […]

Theme of Just Mercy

Justice is not about taking revenge; it is about equity. The purpose of this reflection is to present the thoughts and analysis of the Just Mercy book by Bryan Stevenson (2014). Stevenson is the main character of the book; it is about his journey from graduating Harvard Law School to being a civil rights fighter through his profession as a lawyer. It was after I read this book that I learned the real brutality of imprisonment in the United States. […]

Why is Compassion Important

Albert Schweitzer once said that “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” Compassion is feeling sympathy, being kind, and caring for others. In William Shakespeare’s play King Lear, an important theme is that it’s important to show kindness to others, even in difficult times. Shakespeare demonstrates this theme through King Lear’s conversations with his daughters, especially the youngest, Cordelia, and his conversations with his friends. King Lear follows the […]

Compassion Fatigue Impact Nursing Job Satisfaction

Compassion Fatigue Among Nurses Multiple studies have been conducted on compassion fatigue among nurses and the ultimate effect it has on the patients under the nurse’s care. Nurses experiencing the issue of compassion fatigue exhibit physical and/or psychosocial problems that can be detrimental to the nurse and the patients under the care of the nurse. Compassion fatigue is, “the term used to describe the combination of burnout and secondary traumatic stress” (Kelly, Runge, & Spencer, 2015). Journal of Nursing Scholarship […]

My Personal Attitude to Religion

Growing up in a family who saw religion as not only priority, but a way of life is something I will always cherish. Ever since I can remember, my family and I had the same routine Sunday, after Sunday, after Sunday. Even though my parents were constantly busy with their jobs, I was always running around to attend my different sporting events while my brother and sister were vigorously training to improve their sound on the instruments they played in […]

The Tragic Legacy of Tyler Clementi: a Call for Change and Compassion

Tyler Clementi's story is one that resonates with heartbreaking clarity. A talented 18-year-old violinist at Rutgers University, his life was cut tragically short in 2010 in an incident that became a national talking point about bullying, cyber privacy, and LGBTQ+ rights. Clementi's story is not just a case study; it's a stark reminder of the consequences of intolerance and the urgent need for empathy and understanding in our digital age. Tyler's ordeal began when his roommate, Dharun Ravi, used a […]

Basic Values, Kindness, Compassion, Love and Respect

"I remember a grandmother clutching her grandson in his swaddling clothes, not knowing where the baby's next meal would come from," said Garret Hondronastas, Communications Manager at Infant Crisis Services. He was reminiscing about the time when he helped another family in their time of need (Garret Interview). In Oklahoma, one in four children live in poverty which means they lack access to clean diapers and daily food, putting them at risk for developmental delay (English). The demand grows stronger […]

How to Start a Compassion

Similarly, According to the article, the author has stated that Turgenev saw human beings as creatures bestowed with awareness, realization, feelings, and capable of finding the difference right and wrong. They have their own moral values and norms. While, Marx saw them always as “snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances” (Dalrymple,page 2 How and How Not to Love Mankind 2.pdf).Turgenev and Marx both of the great […]

The Care and Compassion

Counselors are recognized in communities as the healers to people who come to them in distress from problems in their current lives, previous severe trauma, or behaviors they’re not proud of, all in hopes that their counselor will do the healing process. When the workload of typical cases of huge distress or trauma start to accumulate during their careers, counselors may start facing burnout, or exhaustion from excessive amount of work handed to them. It should be noted that burnout […]

My Imaginary City

My "imaginary" city. The utility I would suggest it as an ideal imaginary city as close as conceivable to Eco City, despite the fact that there are a few contrasts. For instance, because of force interest, I suggest that the city have a photovoltaic force station, however in such frantic occasions, energy will come from close by towns and other force plants in the state It is bought from. To give spotless and solid water to residents and sightseers, we […]

Risk of Developing Compassion Fatigue in Refugee Service Workers

The Social Work Grand Challenge that this problem is addressing is Close the Health Gap. Refugee Service Workers of the Consulate of El Salvador are at the frontline witnessing survivors recount heart-wrenching stories of trauma (Lusck and Terrazazs, 2015). These Refugee Service Workers are at risk of developing compassion fatigue (Hu, 2018). Charles Figley coined the term Compassion Fatigue which is defined as “the suffering of clients and the natural consequence resulting from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced or […]

Traumatic Compassion Fatigue

Masters' counseling programs promote continual self-improvement to become a more competent practitioner. However, that growth sometimes originates from difficult experiences, rather than learning new techniques. When a counselor engages daily with clients dealing with traumatic events, they can rapidly become influenced by the conversation to the point it starts to affect them personally. Figley (1995) coined the term 'compassion fatigue' to describe the process of being influenced by a traumatic event from being secondarily exposed to the mere knowledge of […]

Compassion Fatigue

Working in an emergency department can be extremely stressful for nurses. Seeing a high volume of patients with potentially high acuity shift after shift exposes nurses to stress and puts them at risk for compassion fatigue. Having worked as a registered nurse in a Level II trauma center, I have witnessed first-hand the amount of stress that takes a toll on nurses. “Nurses who provide care to traumatized individuals can have intense and painful emotional responses” (Schmidt & Haglund, 2017). […]

Compassion in School Curriculum

Research has revealed that early childhood is an important developmental time where changes are happening that shapes a child’s future. As soon as a child enters school, they are building foundational skills in literacy, math and other abilities but sometimes, the social emotional skills are neglected. Schools often do not teach children how to be kind and mindful of others when that is what holds the key to their future and makes lasting consequences. (Flook, L., Goldberg, 2015) The purpose […]

All Summer in a Day Theme

In “All Summer in a Day,” a gathering of schoolchildren live in a world of Venus with their families. The children are nine years of age, anxiously anticipating a groundbreaking event. Following five years of constant downpours, the researchers on Venus have anticipated that the sun will come out today, signaling an extremely rare event. The kids remember seeing the sun when they were two; however, they do not recall what the giant body looks or feels like. To plan […]

The Analysis of Man in the Mirror

Man in the Mirror is about a lone man by changing himself can he change the world. The main focal point of the melody is a man's battle to work on himself ethically in the wake of witnessing his inability to affect the existences of those out of luck. Michael Jackson thinks about how his general surroundings is suffering while he carries on with an existence of solace, and the blame triggers his choice to change himself so he can […]

Am i Blue by Alice Walker Summary Analysis

Walker opens her well known paper with an epigraph from the melody that additionally gives its title. "Ain't these tears in these eyes tellin' you?" asked Harry Akst and Grant Clarke, who protected the tune in 1929, just as each craftsman who performed "Am I Blue?" consistently, including African American jazz legends Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday. It is a melody about discovering one's sweetheart gone one day "without a notice," a tune about depression and distress, about adoration, misfortune […]

Gender Roles in Mrs. Doubtfire

As far back as Americans can remember gender roles have had their place in society. The most argued place of gender roles is within the household. The conservative side viewed men as the main or only “breadwinners” in household, while women were the considered “caretakers” or “homemakers”. Whereas the liberal side viewed the mother and fathers as equal sharing the responsibility of work and home. Mrs. Doubtfire challenges these stereotypes by portraying a man showing care and affection to his […]

What i Learned in my Ethics Class: Transformative Lessons

My Initial Perception of Ethics When I first came to dental school, I hadn’t thought much of ethics. Of course, I remember it being asked during two of my interviews and me having to define what I think it means to be ethical. My response was always very textbook-like: “Being ethical requires one to behave morally, respect others, and treat everyone as if they were your equal.” Although I still believe this definition fits, I don’t think I really knew […]

The Pathophysiology of Burnout

Introduction Many people get into the nursing profession with the impression that they are going to make a difference in the world by getting people better. Unfortunately, it is not always that black and white, nurses do not always have the privilege of experiencing events to their moral, emotional, or spiritual ideations of patient outcome and treatment. Those that work in locations with regular exposure to trauma, death, and dying face greater emotional distress than those that do not. Facing […]

Gandhi: One of the Strongest Politicians Known

Who is the man that saved India from British rule¹3, influenced MLK², and who still today causes a difference in people? Gandhi is that man, and he was a hero. To be a hero, you need to be wise, courageous, and compassionate. Gandhi is a great hero, and always will be. Gandhi’s amazingly strong universal love brought a lot of the world together². Gandhi fasted for 21 days simply to get people to stop fighting over the cost in a […]

Consider the Lobster Analysis

David Foster Wallace's 2004 article "Think about the Lobster," initially distributed in Gourmet magazine, explores a point, not for the most part covered by such distributions—the vibes of one of the creatures who turn into our food. Wallace, an American writer, author, and English educator, names himself as perusers' "allowed reporter" of the 56th Annual Maine Lobster Festival (236). Bragging 25,000 pounds new got lobster, cooking rivalries, thrill rides, unrecorded music, and a wonderful show, the MLF draws 100,000 guests […]

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Compassion Essay Examples

Personal reflection on compassion analysis.

What I know and I have learned is we need to have compassion. Compassion makes everything fit in place. It makes a harmony of unity among the people making us one in reaching a peaceful world. The world now is so cruel. Leaders are unfair...

Practicing Compassion: Its Role in Everyday Life - Personal Reflection

To be compassionate is more than to just feel sympathy or show concern. To be compassionate is to truly feel deeply about another person feelings and opinions as they experience the ups and downs that come along with us through life. To be compassionate is...

Steps to Become More Compassionate

Compassion is one of the few abilities in life that can create both short – term and long – term joy for you. It involves realizing that we are not the only ones who suffer, and trying to create a better world for other people....

The Power of Compassion and Its Main Aspects

Compassion is the term we use for a complex emotion, that involves empathy, altruism and desire; where empathy is the ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another; altruism is the kind, and selfless behavior; and desire is the strong feeling...

Medicine for Me – the Art of Being a Compassionate Caregiver

Compassion, commitment and collaboration are important competencies that I believe I intrinsically possess, which makes me a strong candidate to read Medicine. My nature of being a caring and principled inquirer, alongside my interest in Human Biology is what initially steered me in this direction....

Love and Compassion as a Cure for Loneliness

Love and compassion are essential in human life, as it is shown everywhere around us, if we take that away, humanity cannot survive without them. Love and compassion are such fundamental qualities, that animals, who have lesser cognitive abilities than us humans, possess. Animals would...

The Importance of the Principles of Determination and Compassion in My Life

Principles are the reasons in which we live our lives. Principles are key elements that can help bring out both growth and development. There are a variety of principles that can bring balance, and great substance. Every individual has some kind of principles that drives...

People Skills and Personal Attributes: the Compassion in Practice and the 6 C’s

I will be explaining the compassion in practice program and the 6 c’s. The compassion in practice was introduced in 2010 after the patients at Winterbourne View and mid Staffordshire hospital were treated badly and inhumanely. The 6 c’s were put in place to provide...

Applications of Matrices in Computer Graphics

Abstract-Column matrices can be used to represent points in 2D or 3D, while matrices of dimension 2×n and 3×n can be used to represent sets of points in 2D or 3D. Matrices allow arbitrary linear transformations to be represented in a consistent format (T(x)=Ax for...

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