Role play and Psychology

 

Role play is a technique to develop social relationship skills by having people act out different social roles. Role playing can help people learn attitudes and coping skills that may improve relationships and has wide applicability in industry, education, psychotherapy, parenting, and couple or marital enrichment.

Role playing may promote perspective taking, a component of empathy.

Perspective taking

 Perspective taking is a range of ability to understand an event from a different viewpoint. The different viewpoint may be that of another person or a cultural role.

  Role playing exercises may help people learn to take different perspectives. Perspective taking relates to the cognitive component of empathy.

A review of studies by Eyal and others (2018) suggests that perspective taking does not help us understand what others want. See Eyal 2018 in HBR.

Links to Connections

Checkout My Page    www.suttong.com

  

My Books  AMAZON          and             GOOGLE STORE

 

FOLLOW me on   FACEBOOK   Geoff W. Sutton   TWITTER  @Geoff.W.Sutton

 

PINTEREST  www.pinterest.com/GeoffWSutton

 

Articles: Academia   Geoff W Sutton   ResearchGate   Geoffrey W Sutton 

Empathy - Cognitive and Emotional

 

Empathy is the ability cognitively and emotionally recognize and understand the experience of another. Empathy is an important component of relationships. Empathy varies from low to high ability.

Cognitive empathy is the range of ability to understand the perspective (perspective taking) of another person and may be present with a high to low range of emotional empathy. 

Emotional empathy is the range of ability to feel what another person feels.

Neuropsychological studies have identified brain areas related to empathy including the motor mirror system. See the APS Observer 2018.

Differences in definitions: Some writers do not include the two components of cognitive and emotional empathy. Some write as if empathy and its components are either or--that is, a person has or does not have empathy. However, in psychology, many abilities like empathy vary in degree such that a person may range from high to low on empathy or its components of cognitive and emotional empathy.

Empathy has also been studied in animals.

Examples

Example 1: A person high in psychopathy may have high cognitive empathy enabling the person to understand the thinking or viewpoint of another, but also be low in emotional empathy, which can lead to taking advantage of another person without an awareness of their feelings.

Example 2: A downside of high emotional empathy is that it can lead to personal distress. This has been called emotional contagion in some research reports.

Concepts: Cognitive empathy,   Emotional Empathy Emotional contagion

Related concepts: perspective taking, social roles, role playing

Links to Connections

My Page    www.suttong.com

  

My Books  AMAZON          and             GOOGLE STORE

 

FOLLOW me on  FACEBOOK   Geoff W. Sutton   TWITTER  @Geoff.W.Sutton

 

PINTEREST  www.pinterest.com/GeoffWSutton

 

Articles: Academia   Geoff W Sutton   ResearchGate   Geoffrey W Sutton