Another person’s suffering does not automatically awaken compassion. We may look away, become overwhelmed, assign blame, offer premature advice, or rush to relieve our own discomfort. Even sincere concern can miss what the person needs. The psychology of compassion examines the space between witnessing pain and organizing a response around the welfare of the person who is hurting.

That space contains several psychological tasks. Suffering must first attract attention and be interpreted as meaningful. The observer must feel enough emotional resonance to care without becoming so distressed that attention turns inward. Judgment is then required: Is help wanted? What kind of help fits? What risks, boundaries, obligations, and consequences belong to the situation? Only after these questions does concern become action.

This makes compassion more complex than simply feeling warm toward others. It is a coordinated emotional and motivational response—one that draws on attention, appraisal, emotion regulation, social learning, and practical wisdom. Compassion is not guaranteed by exposure to suffering, but neither is it a rare quality possessed by a special few. It is a human capacity whose expression changes with context, relationship, perceived responsibility, and the resources available for response (Goetz et al., 2010; Strauss et al., 2016).

A recent pattern theory of compassion strengthens this coordinated view. Rather than locating compassion in a single feeling or brain system, Gallagher and colleagues describe it as a dynamic pattern involving bodily regulation, thought, affect, relationship, motivation, and action. No element is compassionate by itself; the pattern takes shape through their interaction and changes with the situation (Gallagher et al., 2024).

What Is Compassion?

Compassion begins with suffering, but it is not identical to sadness about suffering. Goetz and colleagues describe compassion as an other-oriented emotional response shaped by appraisals of need, vulnerability, and the possibility of care. Its characteristic action tendency is approach: attention moves toward the person in difficulty, and motivation becomes organized around protection, comfort, or relief (Goetz et al., 2010).

A widely used contemporary psychological account identifies five related elements: recognizing suffering, understanding that suffering is part of human life, emotionally connecting with the person in pain, tolerating the feelings that arise in the observer, and acting—or wanting to act—to alleviate suffering (Strauss et al., 2016). These elements explain why compassion cannot be reduced to sentiment. Recognition without concern may remain detached. Concern without tolerance may collapse into avoidance. Motivation without judgment may produce intrusive or ineffective help.

The sequence is not always conscious or orderly. A parent may respond to a frightened child almost immediately; a clinician may deliberately slow down before answering a distressed patient. Still, the elements offer a useful map. Compassion brings perception, feeling, regulation, motivation, and conduct into the same psychological frame.

Compassion as a State, Trait, and Behavior

Compassion can describe a temporary state, a relatively stable tendency, or an observable pattern of behavior. A person may feel compassion in one moment, be generally disposed to respond compassionately across situations, or perform an act that others reasonably recognize as compassionate. These levels overlap, but they are not interchangeable. A compassionate feeling may not become behavior, and a helpful act may arise from duty, reputation, guilt, or social expectation rather than compassionate concern.

This distinction matters for both research and everyday judgment. Self-report scales often ask what people tend to feel or believe, while laboratory tasks may measure donations, attention, facial expression, physiology, or decisions. Strauss and colleagues found that existing measures did not consistently represent all five proposed elements of compassion. No single score therefore captures the whole movement from recognizing suffering to responding wisely (Strauss et al., 2016).

Compassion and Related Psychological Concepts

Distinguishing Compassion From Empathy

In ordinary speech, empathy and compassion are often treated as synonyms. Psychologically, empathy is better understood as sharing or understanding another person’s emotional state. It allows someone else’s experience to become intelligible or emotionally present. Compassion adds an other-oriented concern for suffering and a motivation to help. Psychology Fanatic explores the broader distinctions among types of empathy; here, the crucial point is that emotional resonance alone does not determine what follows.

Singer and Klimecki distinguish empathic distress from compassion. When resonance with another’s pain becomes an aversive, self-focused state, the observer may withdraw or seek distance. Compassion, by contrast, is associated with concern, warmth, and approach. The distinction is functional rather than merely semantic: one response narrows attention around the observer’s discomfort, while the other keeps the suffering person at the center of concern (Singer & Klimecki, 2014).

Sympathy, Pity, Kindness, and Altruism

Sympathy commonly refers to concern for another person rather than direct sharing of the person’s feeling. Eisenberg’s work on moral development distinguishes sympathy from personal distress: sympathy is associated more consistently with prosocial responding, whereas personal distress can produce avoidance when the observer is free to escape (Eisenberg, 2000). In many settings, sympathy and compassion overlap; compassion usually places greater emphasis on suffering, distress tolerance, and motivation to relieve it.

Pity is more socially precarious. It can contain concern, but it may also position the observer above the person who suffers, reducing a complex individual to helplessness. Kindness is broader than compassion because it need not begin with suffering; a welcoming gesture or generous courtesy can be kind without answering pain. Altruism refers to behavior intended to benefit another and does not, by itself, identify the emotion or motive behind the behavior. Compassion is one possible pathway into altruistic action, not its only source.

Self-Compassion

Self-compassion applies a similar orientation to one’s own suffering. Neff describes it through self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness: responding to personal pain without harsh self-attack, recognizing that imperfection belongs to human life, and holding distress in balanced awareness rather than becoming consumed by it (Neff, 2003). Self-compassion is not self-pity or exemption from responsibility. At its best, it creates enough inner safety to face difficulty honestly and choose a constructive response.

Evolutionary and Developmental Roots of Compassion

Compassion and the Caregiving System

Compassion is often interpreted as an extension of mammalian caregiving. Human infants are unusually dependent, making sensitivity to vulnerability and distress central to survival. Goetz and colleagues argue that compassionate responding likely developed from systems related to the attachment system that oriented caregivers toward needy offspring and later expanded through kinship, reciprocal relationships, and cooperative group life (Goetz et al., 2010).

Gilbert places compassion within a broader social-motivational architecture. Caring motives compete with threat defense, status competition, resource acquisition, and coalition loyalty. This helps explain why people can be deeply compassionate in one relationship and indifferent or hostile in another. The capacity for care is real, but its range is shaped by who is recognized as vulnerable, familiar, deserving, or part of ‘us’ (Gilbert, 2015).

Evolutionary explanations should not be turned into moral inevitabilities. A caregiving history does not mean compassion is automatic, equally distributed, or always beneficial. It suggests that humans possess systems capable of detecting distress and organizing protective approach, while also possessing competing systems that can suppress, redirect, or restrict that response.

How Compassion Develops in Childhood

Early forms of empathic concern emerge gradually. In a longitudinal study of 127 children assessed at 6, 10, 14, and 18 months, Paulus and colleagues found increasingly differentiated responses to another person’s distress during the second year of life. Maternal sensitivity, emotionality, and developing self-recognition were associated with aspects of this growth (Paulus et al., 2024).

These findings do not establish a fixed compassionate trait in infancy. Early concern develops alongside the ability to distinguish self from other, regulate arousal, interpret social cues, and learn what responses are welcomed. Eisenberg’s developmental work likewise emphasizes the interaction among emotional intensity, regulation, temperament, modeling, and socialization. Children do not simply acquire a rule that helping is good; they gradually become more capable of staying engaged with another person’s need (Eisenberg, 2000).

How Compassion Works: From Perception to Responsive Action

Compassion is often described as a feeling, but its psychological structure is better understood as a recursive, feedback-guided process. A cue of suffering must enter attention, be interpreted with enough humility to seek the other person’s perspective, generate other-oriented concern, remain tolerable, and become connected to a feasible response. What happens next matters: the recipient’s experience and the outcome of the response provide information that can confirm, correct, or redirect the care being offered. The process map below is an integrative heuristic rather than a validated stage model; compassionate responses may be rapid, recursive, and culturally shaped (Strauss et al., 2016; Eyal et al., 2018; Maisel & Gable, 2009; Reis et al., 2014).

Recognizing Suffering

Compassion cannot begin with suffering that remains unseen. Recognition depends on attention, facial and vocal cues, contextual knowledge, and willingness to acknowledge what those cues imply. Some pain is vivid; other pain is concealed by competence, social expectation, shame, or distance. A person who appears angry may be frightened. Someone who declines help may be protecting dignity rather than denying need.

Recognition is therefore interpretive. It includes noticing that something matters to another person without assuming complete access to that person’s inner life. Compassionate attention stays curious. It leaves room for correction: ‘I may be misunderstanding, but you seem burdened. Would it help to talk?’ This stance is closely related to emotional attunement—the ability to notice and respond to another person’s emotional signals without replacing their experience with one’s own story.

Getting Perspective Before Acting

Imagining another person’s point of view can loosen egocentric assumptions, but imagination is not the same as accuracy. Across a series of studies, Eyal and colleagues found that trying to take another person’s perspective did not reliably improve judgments of that person’s thoughts and feelings. Accuracy improved when participants could obtain the person’s perspective through direct conversation (Eyal et al., 2018).

Compassion therefore benefits from perspective getting: asking, listening, observing how a response lands, and allowing the other person to correct the helper’s interpretation. This does not eliminate judgment or make every request wise. It places uncertainty where it belongs. Before acting on a story about what someone needs, compassionate care makes room for what that person can say about their own experience.

Appraising Need and Responsibility

Once suffering is noticed, cognitive appraisal organizes judgments of its cause, severity, controllability, and relevance. Compassion is more likely when the person appears vulnerable and the need seems genuine. It may narrow when observers assign blame, perceive manipulation, feel powerless, or believe that somebody else is responsible (Goetz et al., 2010; Gilbert, 2015).

Appraisal can improve response, but it can also disguise prejudice. Judgments about who ‘deserves’ care are influenced by group membership, familiarity, status, and cultural narratives. Responsible compassion examines these filters while preserving discernment. It neither abandons judgment nor assumes that the first judgment is neutral.

Feeling Concern Without Becoming Lost in the Feeling

Emotional resonance helps suffering matter, yet effective compassion requires emotional regulation. If another person’s pain triggers panic, shame, helplessness, or traumatic activation, attention may turn toward escaping the encounter. Regulation does not mean suppressing concern. It means maintaining enough internal steadiness to keep the other person visible (Eisenberg, 2000; Singer & Klimecki, 2014).

Physiological research suggests that compassionate responding can involve bodily patterns related to social engagement. Across four studies, Stellar and colleagues found associations between compassion and respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a measure connected with parasympathetic regulation. The authors also noted important interpretive limits, including uncertainty about direction of causality. These findings are best treated as evidence that compassion is embodied, not as a biological test of whether a person truly cares (Stellar et al., 2015).

Translating Concern Into Effective Action

Concern becomes compassionate action only when it is fitted to the situation. The appropriate response may be practical help, patient listening, protection, advocacy, information, material support, or respectful restraint. Sometimes the first compassionate act is asking rather than assuming. A response organized around the helper’s need to feel useful can become intrusive even when its intention is generous.

This is where compassion meets genuine caring. Caring is not demonstrated solely by intensity of feeling; it is tested by whether the response respects agency, context, and consequence. Compassion may motivate action, but feedback determines whether the action actually reduced suffering. Wise compassion is willing to revise its approach.

Checking Whether Help Actually Helps

Good intentions are morally significant, but they are not the final measure of a response. Help can carry hidden costs: dependency, embarrassment, loss of agency, unwanted exposure, or pressure to perform gratitude. Effective compassion asks what the person wants, what consequences are likely, and whether the response strengthens or displaces their capacity.

Research on received social support makes this distinction concrete. In a daily-experience study of 67 cohabiting couples, both visible and invisible support were associated with less sadness and anxiety and greater relationship quality only when recipients experienced the support as responsive to their needs (Maisel & Gable, 2009). In a two-week diary study of 175 newlywed couples, compassionate acts contributed to both spouses’ daily marital satisfaction and were more influential when both partners recognized them as compassionate (Reis et al., 2014). Together, these studies make the recipient’s experience part of the evidence about whether help was responsive.

Other-oriented concern is morally important, but it is not an infallible guide to fair action. In two experiments, Batson and colleagues found that empathy for a particular person increased participants’ willingness to allocate resources preferentially to that individual, even when doing so violated an impartial principle of justice; participants also recognized the preferential allocation as less fair and less moral (Batson et al., 1995). These findings concern empathy-induced altruistic motivation rather than compassion as a whole. Nevertheless, they illustrate why compassionate concern must be translated into action with judgment: the desire to help does not, by itself, ensure that a response will be effective or ethically proportionate (Poulin, 2017). Compassionate action therefore requires attention not only to the intended recipient, but also to personal agency, competing claims, and the consequences for everyone affected.

Compassion in Relationships, Culture, and Social Life

Compassion is expressed within relationships, but relationships are embedded in cultural meanings and unequal social arrangements. What looks caring in one setting may feel intrusive, emotionally excessive, distant, or insufficient in another. Access to attention, credibility, and assistance is also shaped by status and power. Compassion must therefore be studied not only as an individual capacity but as a social response whose form and distribution are patterned.

Compassionate Goals in Relationships

Compassion is not limited to moments of crisis. It can also organize everyday relational goals. In studies of first-year university students and roommate pairs, Crocker and Canevello distinguished compassionate goals—trying to support others and avoid harm—from self-image goals centered on managing how one appears. Compassionate goals were associated with more responsive support and trust, while self-image goals were linked with conflict and loneliness (Crocker & Canevello, 2008).

The important shift is from impression management to mutual welfare. A person pursuing compassionate goals still has needs and boundaries; the goal is not self-erasure. Instead, the relationship becomes a setting in which both people’s realities matter. This orientation can create a reinforcing cycle: responsiveness builds trust, trust makes honest disclosure safer, and better information allows care to fit more closely.

Compassion and Self–Other Similarity

Compassion also changes how people perceive social distance. Across three studies, Oveis and colleagues found that compassion was associated with greater perceived similarity between the self and people who were weak or vulnerable. This does not mean compassionate people erase differences. Rather, the sufferer becomes less psychologically remote—more recognizable as a person whose vulnerability belongs within a shared human field (Oveis et al., 2010).

Similarity can be a bridge, but it can also become a gate if care is reserved only for those who resemble us. Mature compassion uses common humanity to widen concern without requiring sameness. It recognizes another person as fully human even when their history, choices, culture, or emotional expression differs from our own.

Culture Shapes What Compassion Looks Like

Cultural psychology helps explain how culture influences the ways suffering is noticed, which emotions are appropriate to display, and what a caring response should accomplish. Koopmann-Holm and Tsai describe cross-cultural differences in the conception, experience, and expression of compassion. Cultural preferences about desirable emotional states can shape whether care emphasizes shared sorrow, calm reassurance, practical problem solving, respectful restraint, or some combination of these responses (Koopmann-Holm & Tsai, 2017).

This does not reduce individuals to cultural stereotypes. People participate in multiple communities, differ within cultures, and adapt across relationships. The practical lesson is humility: a response that feels warmly compassionate to the helper may not be experienced that way by the recipient. Perspective getting and feedback allow compassion to remain responsive without assuming that one emotional style is universally correct.

Power, Class, and the Distribution of Compassion

Compassion is also shaped by social position. In face-to-face conversations about suffering, participants with a higher sense of power reported less distress and compassion, showed greater autonomic emotion regulation, and appeared less motivated to affiliate (Van Kleef et al., 2008). Across three studies, lower-social-class participants reported greater dispositional and situational compassion, and they showed greater heart-rate deceleration while viewing a compassion-inducing video (Stellar et al., 2012). These findings describe patterned tendencies, not fixed qualities of powerful or affluent individuals.

At the social level, compassion can become coordinated action and institutional change, but it can also remain episodic—generous toward a vivid individual while leaving the conditions that repeatedly produce suffering untouched. Organizational research suggests that compassion becomes socially consequential when institutions direct attention to suffering, treat it as legitimate, coordinate action, and embed their responses in routines, policies, and resource allocation. This perspective also requires asking whose suffering becomes visible, whose needs are believed, and who has the authority to define an adequate response (Worline & Dutton, 2017).

Why Compassion Can Narrow or Fail

Suffering can threaten the observer with helplessness, guilt, obligation, or memories of personal pain. Looking away may therefore function as emotion regulation. Attention narrows, explanations become dismissive, and distance offers relief. The response is understandable, but relief for the observer can leave the sufferer unseen.

This is one reason moral appeals sometimes fail. More suffering does not necessarily produce more concern. When a situation feels emotionally unmanageable or impossible to change, people may reduce engagement before compassion fully forms. Increasing compassion may therefore require credible avenues for action as well as vivid information.

Compassion Collapse and Mass Suffering

People often report less compassion for a large group of victims than for a single identifiable person. Cameron and Payne tested whether this ‘collapse’ is inevitable. Across three experiments, the decline appeared when participants expected that compassion would be costly and when they were able to regulate their emotional response. In other words, people sometimes dampened feeling in anticipation of what caring might demand (Cameron & Payne, 2011).

The finding complicates the idea that the mind simply cannot represent large numbers. Compassion can narrow because people are motivated to avoid emotional or material cost. This does not make every muted response deliberate, and the experiments do not explain all large-scale indifference. They show that expectations about obligation can shape how much feeling a person permits.

Deservingness, Blame, and Social Distance

Compassion is selective. Perceived responsibility for suffering, group identity, social status, and beliefs about reciprocity all affect who receives concern. Evolution may help explain why caregiving was extended first toward vulnerable offspring and cooperative partners, but modern moral life asks people to notice when inherited or learned filters unfairly exclude others (Goetz et al., 2010; Gilbert, 2015).

Blame can sometimes identify real responsibility, yet it becomes corrosive when it erases context or is used to justify humiliation. Compassion does not require pretending that choices have no consequences. It asks whether accountability can be pursued without losing sight of suffering, dignity, and the conditions that make change possible.

Fear of Compassion

Some people fear receiving compassion, offering it, or directing it toward themselves. Gilbert and colleagues developed scales assessing these fears and found associations with self-criticism, insecure attachment, and poorer mental-health indicators in student and therapist samples (Gilbert et al., 2011). Compassion may feel dangerous when care has been inconsistent, manipulative, shaming, or followed by obligation.

Resistance is therefore not always coldness. Warmth can activate grief for what was missing, suspicion about what will be demanded, or shame about needing anyone. A compassionate response to fear of compassion proceeds slowly. Trust is built through predictability, consent, and respect rather than pressure to become emotionally open.

Sustainable Compassion: Regulation, Boundaries, and Occupational Strain

When Empathy Becomes Personal Distress

Witnessing suffering can be painful, and that pain is not evidence of failure. Emotional contagion can be one pathway through which another person’s feeling begins to organize the observer’s own state. The difficulty begins when the observer’s distress becomes the organizing center of the encounter. Urgent reassurance, avoidance, emotional numbing, or controlling help may then serve the helper’s need for relief more than the sufferer’s need for care.

Compassion preserves emotional contact while changing its direction. The question becomes not ‘How do I stop feeling this?’ but ‘How can I remain present and respond usefully?’ Singer and Klimecki argue that compassion may be a more sustainable response than empathic distress because it combines concern with positive affiliative feeling and approach motivation (Singer & Klimecki, 2014). The distinction should not be romanticized: compassion can still be tiring, especially under chronic exposure and inadequate support.

Compassion Does Not Require Self-Erasure

A compassionate person may say no, leave an unsafe situation, refer someone to qualified help, or decline responsibility that does not belong to them. Healthy relationship boundaries protect the conditions under which care remains voluntary, honest, and sustainable. Without boundaries, compassion can be confused with appeasement, rescue, or compulsive self-sacrifice.

Boundaries also improve accuracy. A helper who is exhausted, frightened, or acting beyond competence may cause harm despite caring deeply. Acknowledging limits is not abandonment when it is paired with clarity and an effort to connect the person with more suitable support. Compassion concerns the other person’s welfare, not the performance of limitless availability.

Rethinking ‘Compassion Fatigue’

The phrase compassion fatigue is widely used for exhaustion among caregivers and helping professionals, but the label can imply that compassion itself is the depleting agent. Sinclair and colleagues reviewed 90 studies and found substantial conceptual inconsistency. Measures frequently captured burnout, secondary traumatic stress, or related occupational strain rather than a clearly defined loss caused by compassion (Sinclair et al., 2017).

A more precise question is what the work repeatedly demands and what support is missing. High caseloads, exposure to trauma, insufficient recovery, moral distress, poor supervision, and inadequate institutional resources can exhaust people who care (Sinclair et al., 2017). Calling the result compassion fatigue may obscure those conditions. Sustainable compassion depends on regulation and boundaries, but also on workplaces that do not treat individual resilience as a substitute for humane systems.

Can Compassion Be Cultivated?

Compassion Training and Meditation

Compassion practices generally train attention toward suffering, feelings of warmth or concern, perspective taking, and intentions to help. Some programs begin with a familiar or loved person, then gradually extend care toward oneself, strangers, difficult people, and broader groups. The purpose is not to manufacture constant tenderness. It is to make caring attention more available and less easily displaced by avoidance or distress.

In a small randomized study, Weng and colleagues assigned adults to two weeks of compassion training or an active reappraisal condition. Participants who received compassion training showed greater prosocial behavior, operationalized as redistributing more money toward an unfairly treated person, and changes in neural responses were associated with that behavior (Weng et al., 2013). The design is suggestive because it connects training with behavior, but the sample was small, baseline altruism was not assessed, and the study does not establish lasting or universal change.

A handbook review of compassion-training research reaches a measured conclusion. Skwara, King, and Saron note evidence that training may increase sensitivity to suffering and prosocial behavior, while also identifying mixed findings, limited active-control designs, and a major gap between feeling compassion and knowing what response is appropriate. Training may strengthen ingredients of compassion; wisdom about action still requires context and feedback (Skwara et al., 2017).

Compassion-Focused Therapy

Compassion-focused therapy was developed especially for people struggling with shame and self-criticism (Gilbert, 2015). It uses evolutionary and emotion-regulation ideas to help clients cultivate a compassionate inner orientation, experience safeness, and respond differently to threat-based self-attack. The approach treats compassion as a set of motives and competencies rather than a pleasant mood.

A 2023 systematic review of 15 controlled studies found favorable effects of compassion-focused therapy compared with waitlist conditions across several outcomes. At the same time, Millard and colleagues reported unclear risk of bias in nearly half of the included studies, a predominantly female participant base, limited comparisons with alternative therapies, and insufficient evidence about long-term outcomes (Millard et al., 2023). CFT is promising, but the literature does not justify presenting it as uniformly superior or conclusively established for every population.

Practicing Compassion Without Performing It

Cultivation begins with accuracy. Notice suffering before rushing to explain it. Distinguish the other person’s need from the feelings the situation produces in you. Regulate enough to remain present, then ask what kind of response would be welcome. Choose an action proportionate to your role and capacity, and remain willing to learn from the outcome.

Formal meditation can support this process, as can loving-kindness practice, reflective writing, supervision, therapeutic work, and repeated acts of responsive care. No exercise removes the need for boundaries or judgment. The aim is not to feel compassionate at all times. It is to become less governed by avoidance, less consumed by personal distress, and more capable of responding when suffering enters awareness.

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

Compassion asks more of us than emotion alone. It asks us to notice what we would rather avoid, to remain near suffering without making it about ourselves, and to accept that care without understanding can still miss its mark.

There is tenderness in compassion, but there is also discipline. We must regulate the impulse to flee, rescue, judge, or control. We must listen closely enough for the person before us to remain a person—not a project, a symbol, or a test of our goodness. Sometimes compassion moves toward action. Sometimes it sits quietly. Sometimes it sets a boundary or challenges a system that repeatedly produces preventable pain.

We will not respond perfectly to every suffering we encounter. Human attention is limited, our loyalties are selective, and prolonged exposure can strain even generous people. Yet compassion can widen when it is practiced with honesty. The goal is not limitless feeling. It is a steadier capacity to recognize suffering, seek perspective, stay present, and revise our response in the service of dignity, wisdom, and care.

Associated Concepts

• Empathy: Understanding or sharing another person’s emotional experience; empathy can support compassion but may also become personal distress.
• Prosocial Behavior: Actions intended to benefit other people, whether motivated by compassion, duty, reciprocity, identity, or another process.
• Emotional Attunement: Sensitive attention to emotional cues and responsive adjustment within a relationship.
• Emotional Regulation: Processes that influence which emotions arise, how strongly they are experienced, and how they are expressed.
• Self-Compassion: A kind, mindful, and humanizing response to one’s own suffering and imperfection.
• Genuine Caring: Concern expressed through responsiveness to another person’s actual welfare rather than through image or control.
• Loving-Kindness: A contemplative orientation that cultivates goodwill toward oneself and others.

References

Batson, C. Daniel; Klein, Tricia R.; Highberger, Lori; Shaw, Laura L. (1995). Immorality from empathy-induced altruism: When compassion and justice conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(6), 1042–1054. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.68.6.1042
(Return to Main Text)

Cameron, C. Daryl; Payne, B. Keith (2011). Escaping affect: How motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass suffering. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(1), 1–15. DOI: 10.1037/a0021643
(Return to Main Text)

Crocker, Jennifer; Canevello, Amy (2008). Creating and undermining social support in communal relationships: The role of compassionate and self-image goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(3), 555–575. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.95.3.555
(Return to Main Text)

Eisenberg, Nancy (2000). Emotion, regulation, and moral development. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 665–697. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.665
(Return to Main Text)

Eyal, Tal; Steffel, Mary; Epley, Nicholas (2018). Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 547–571. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000115
(Return to Main Text)

Gallagher, Shaun; Raffone, Antonino; Aglioti, Salvatore M. (2024). The pattern theory of compassion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(6), 504–516. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.04.005
(Return to Main Text)

Gilbert, Paul (2015). The evolution and social dynamics of compassion. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(6), 239–254. DOI: 10.1111/spc3.12176
(Return to Main Text)

Gilbert, Paul; McEwan, Kirsten; Matos, Marcela; Rivis, Amanda (2011). Fears of compassion: Development of three self-report measures. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 84(3), 239–255. DOI: 10.1348/147608310X526511
(Return to Main Text)

Goetz, Jennifer L.; Keltner, Dacher; Simon-Thomas, Emiliana (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351–374. DOI: 10.1037/a0018807
(Return to Main Text)

Koopmann-Holm, Birgit; Tsai, Jeanne L. (2017). The cultural shaping of compassion. In Seppälä, Emma M.; Simon-Thomas, Emiliana; Brown, Stephanie L.; Worline, Monica C.; Cameron, C. Daryl; Doty, James R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (pp. 273–286). Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464684.013.21
(Return to Main Text)

Maisel, Natalya C.; Gable, Shelly L. (2009). The paradox of received social support: The importance of responsiveness. Psychological Science, 20(8), 928–932. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02388.x
(Return to Main Text)

Millard, Leah A.; Wan, Ming Wai; Smith, Debbie M.; Wittkowski, Anja (2023). The effectiveness of compassion focused therapy with clinical populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 326, 168–192. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.01.010
(Return to Main Text)

Neff, Kristin D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101. DOI: 10.1080/15298860309032
(Return to Main Text)

Oveis, Christopher; Horberg, Elizabeth J.; Keltner, Dacher (2010). Compassion, pride, and social intuitions of self-other similarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(4), 618–630. DOI: 10.1037/a0017628
(Return to Main Text)

Paulus, Markus; Becher, Tamara; Christner, Natalie; Kammermeier, Marina; Gniewosz, Burkhard; Pletti, Carolina (2024). When do children begin to care for others? The ontogenetic growth of empathic concern across the first two years of life. Cognitive Development, 70, Article 101439. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101439
(Return to Main Text)

Poulin, Michael J. (2017). To help or not to help: Goal commitment and the goodness of compassion. In Seppälä, Emma M.; Simon-Thomas, Emiliana; Brown, Stephanie L.; Worline, Monica C.; Cameron, C. Daryl; Doty, James R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (pp. 353–368). Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464684.013.26

Reis, Harry T.; Maniaci, Michael R.; Rogge, Ronald D. (2014). The expression of compassionate love in everyday compassionate acts. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 31(5), 651–676. DOI: 10.1177/0265407513507214
(Return to Main Text)

Sinclair, Shane; Raffin-Bouchal, Shelley; Venturato, Lorraine; Mijovic-Kondejewski, Jane; Smith-MacDonald, Lorraine (2017). Compassion fatigue: A meta-narrative review of the healthcare literature. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 69, 9–24. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2017.01.003
(Return to Main Text)

Singer, Tania; Klimecki, Olga M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054
(Return to Main Text)

Skwara, Alea C.; King, Brandon G.; Saron, Clifford D. (2017). Studies of training compassion: What have we learned; what remains unknown? In Seppälä, Emma M.; Simon-Thomas, Emiliana; Brown, Stephanie L.; Worline, Monica C.; Cameron, C. Daryl; Doty, James R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (pp. 219–236). Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464684.013.17
(Return to Main Text)

Stellar, Jennifer E.; Manzo, Vida M.; Kraus, Michael W.; Keltner, Dacher (2012). Class and compassion: Socioeconomic factors predict responses to suffering. Emotion, 12(3), 449–459. DOI: 10.1037/a0026508
(Return to Main Text)

Stellar, Jennifer E.; Cohen, Adam; Oveis, Christopher; Keltner, Dacher (2015). Affective and physiological responses to the suffering of others: Compassion and vagal activity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(4), 572–585. DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000010
(Return to Main Text)

Strauss, Clara; Lever Taylor, Billie; Gu, Jenny; Kuyken, Willem; Baer, Ruth; Jones, Fergal; Cavanagh, Kate (2016). What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures. Clinical Psychology Review, 47, 15–27. DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2016.05.004
(Return to Main Text)

Van Kleef, Gerben A.; Oveis, Christopher; van der Löwe, Ilmo; LuoKogan, Aleksandr; Goetz, Jennifer; Keltner, Dacher (2008). Power, distress, and compassion: Turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1315–1322. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02241.x
(Return to Main Text)

Weng, Helen Y.; Fox, Andrew S.; Shackman, Alexander J.; Stodola, Diane E.; Caldwell, Jessica Z. K.; Olson, Matthew C.; Rogers, Gregory M.; Davidson, Richard J. (2013). Compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1171–1180. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612469537
(Return to Main Text)

Worline, Monica C.; Dutton, Jane E. (2017). How leaders shape compassion processes in organizations. In Seppälä, Emma M.; Simon-Thomas, Emiliana; Brown, Stephanie L.; Worline, Monica C.; Cameron, C. Daryl; Doty, James R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (pp. 435–456). Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464684.013.31
(Return to Main Text)