The Role of Empathy and the Group-Based Emotion of Collective Guilt in the Prediction of Negative Attitudes Toward Indigenous Australians

Psychology

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The role of empathy and the group-based emotion of collective guilt in the prediction of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Australians

Previous research has found quite disturbing levels of prejudice particularly to the indigenous Australians (Bretherton and Balvin, 2012, p.78). Collective guilt among the indigenous Americans has always predicted negative attitude as far as the right and wrongs go. Lack of effective perspective taking and empathy for the indigenous Australians has predicted attitudes.

The experience of empathy towards individuals affected by anger towards the perpetrators of social ills and those affected by social problems tend to mediate the differences in attitudes geared towards different social problems (Bretherton and Balvin, 2012, p.76). To begin with, the term empathy according to emotion researchers is the ability to sense the emotion of other people, accompanied by the imagination of what the people might feel or think. Empathy come in two ways; first, there is the affective empathy which contemporary researchers refer to as the feelings or sensations people get in response to the emotion of others (Bretherton and Balvin, 2012, p.78). In most cases, this includes mirroring the feeling of the other person or stressed up on detection of other’s anxiety or fear. On the other hand, cognitive empathy, also known as perspective taking refers to the ability of one to identify or understand the emotions of other people.

Empathy derives its deep roots from brains and bodies as well as in our evolutionary history. Scientists have traced empathy to the mirror neurons of the brain. These cells fire whenever one observes someone else performing an action just the same way the cells would fire if we performed the action. On the other hand, group based emotion denotes the various

emotions, moods, as well as dispositional effects of a group of people (Pedersen et al., 2004, p.240). Group emotion...