Creating Other Minds: Testing Measures of Creative Empathy
Open Access
- Author:
- Anderson, Stephen
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- May 05, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Christopher Daryl Cameron, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Reginald Adams, Jr., Committee Member
Roger Beaty, Committee Member
Kristin Ann Buss, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- creativity
empathy
free association - Abstract:
- Abstract Empathy measures often assess unilateral outcomes. However, empathy may also be a creative process, where people think of multiple diverging possibilities of what another person is experiencing. In four studies, we use empathy-based free association and divergent thinking methods to assess these creative elements of empathy. In Study 1, participants’ “forward flow” – level of semantic distance when free associating a list of a target’s mental states – was correlated with openness to experience. In Studies 2 and 3, participants instructed to be creative showed greater forward flow than participants instructed to be accurate and a no-instruction control condition. In Study 4, we conceptually replicated the effects of Studies 1-3 using a divergent thinking task where participants write about a target’s thoughts and feelings and are scored by human raters. Across studies, scores on both tasks were associated with trait measures of empathy and openness to experience, which was confirmed in an internal meta-analysis. We conclude that creativity may be an important, yet unmeasured dimension of empathy.