Abstract: Empathy refers to the degree to which a person subjectively identifies and commiserates with a victim and feels emotional distress. Past research has demonstrated the close relationship between empathy and violent attitudes or behaviors. Past findings also suggested that empathy was negatively associated with violence and aggression, and positively associated with prosocial behaviors. In most studies, however, empathy measures were almost always based on self-report scales in which participants indicated the extent to which they empathized with, felt sympathy for, or felt sorry for a particular person or a group of people. In our research, we experimentally manipulated empathy as a contextual variable. We hypothesized that when people were primed with empathy, their attitudes toward violence would be reduced. Specifically, we expected that unconsciously primed feelings of empathy would decrease people's approval of violence. Two experiments examined the impact of priming empathy on people's implicit and explicit attitudes toward violence. In experiment 1, 131 undergraduates (76 female) were randomly assigned into either the empathy prime condition or the neutral/control condition. Participants were given a word search task that served as the prime. For participants in the empathy prime condition, the word search task contained 13 words related to the concept of empathy (e.g., concern, sensitive, share, care, etc.) and 5 neutral words. For participants in the neutral prime condition, the word search task only contained 18 neutral words. Participants then completed the violence Implicit Association Test (violence IAT). In Experiment 2, 206 students (108 female) followed the same procedure as experiment 1. After the empathy priming, the participants fulfilled a violent attitude scale, which served as an explicit measure for attitude toward violence. The results indicate that participants in the empathy prime and neutral prime conditions did not differ significantly in their implicit or explicit attitudes toward violence. However, an interaction effect between empathy and sex emerged with regard to explicit attitudes, such that explicit attitudes toward violence significantly reduced after the empathy prime for male participants, but not for female participants. These results suggest that the activating feelings of empathy do not weaken the linking of violence and negative cognition. The effects of empathy on reducing violence depend on the cognitive processing of self-awareness and individuals' dispositional empathy.

Key words: state empathy, attitude toward violence, Implicit Association Test (IAT)