The emotions of frontline responders are traditionally viewed as problematic, because emotions are seen as distractive and impediments to an efficient pursuit of optimal crisis response outcomes. In addition, personal involvement in the situation might result in trauma since responders are often unable to prevent tragedy and suffering. Dissociation from the response, instead, might best enable responders to cope with traumatic experiences and avoid negative psychological consequences. Yet, compassion and altruism give meaning to their work for many responders and can improve their customized care to those in need. Detachment, moreover, is rarely fully effective. The emotional attitude of crisis responders, therefore, poses a dilemma. It is useful to note that emotions are diverse in nature and intensity. This means that there is room to explore how to manage emotions in such a way that feelings of empathy and involvement are enabled without responders succumbing to it. In any case, it requires unwavering organizational and team support.

This essay discusses W.G. Sebald’s use of biographical and autobiographical elements in his literary writing. A diachronic overview retraces Sebald’s evolving use of (auto-)biographical elements from After Nature, Vertigo and The Emigrants to The Rings of Saturn and finally Austerlitz. To do so, this essay outlines, firstly, which protagonists are based on real historical figures and which source-material Sebald used for their literary transposition. Secondly, this essay highlights the relationship between the biographies of persons of historical renown – such as writers like Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov and Stendhal – and those biographies taken from Sebald’s private life. These Sebald modelled after the lives of friends and acquaintances. Their inclusion with changed names – such as Paul Bereyter, Max Ferber or Jacques Austerlitz, raise questions concerning the relationship between truth and fiction. A third, central concern is the discussion of Sebald’s literary techniques and the various ways he introduces and intersects (auto-)biographical texts, photos, and illustrations to create a biographical pastiche.

In this chapter, a more sociological and qualitative conceptualization of relationality is provided. As with the Little Prince and the fox, building relationships require recognizing and subsequent care for the other, who becomes a special individual and not just one-of-many. The origins of the relational framework is traced to early writings from the phenomenologists and subsequent work by theorists of the ethical framework of care.

Most recently, the worlds attention has been captured by what seems like disparate issue areas: COVID-19, institutionalized racism, and (a longer-running theme) climate change. This book argues for the glue that connects these three issue areas in an intimate way: relationality. Indeed, the ways of coping with each of these areas requires that people discover, re-discover, and nurture the bonds that help one connect with the other. The chapter discusses how a relational model could be applied to carbon mitigation, and how this would differ from the model of a carbon tax. Directions for future work includes the need to work out how the relational mechanism interacts with behavioral mechanisms identified by Ostrom and Olson. How do we craft institutions that take advantage of all these models? How do we create institutions that increase connectedness between people who are not ordinarily part of the same social network? This book constitutes a small but significant step toward a concerted research program revolving around relationality.

How do we motivate the busy urbanite to care about melting glaciers half a world away? In a classroom in Pennsylvania, a teacher and his class begin interacting, online, with other students and teachers in Asia and Africa. Hearing from a teacher in Nepal about problems with glacial melt in their community, the issue of melting glaciers suddenly become immensely important to them. This phenomenon, of a change in individual orientation to connectedness, is what is referred to as relationality. Through empathy and perspective-taking, people are moved to other-regarding action in ways not considered by the literature on collective action and the commons. The book is a necessary addendum to Ostroms tome, Governing the Commons, and presents a new, relational, model of collective action and begins to imagine its implications for real-world institutions.

The culture of welcome in Germany in 2015 was met with admiration at home and abroad. Many people showed that they had great empathy for refugees. Yet the country could afford this feeling — unlike after the two World Wars, when the population itself was suffering and in need of assistance. Between 1946 and 1960, ten million families received care parcels from American welfare organisations. With the rise in its own prosperity, Germany’s willingness to help others also grew. In the early 1980s, citizens donated large amounts of money, medical supplies and clothes to the people of crisis-ridden Poland. Numerous individuals gave their support, as did church communities and welfare associations. Yet this chapter shows that empathy can also exclude people. Under the National Socialist regime, empathy had to be restricted to one’s own people and excluded ‘aliens’, such as Jews, foreign forced labourers and prisoners of war. Attacks on migrants and refugees since the 1990s show that some circles want to build walls around empathy and do not want it to be felt for everyone.

This chapter explores Plutarch’s presentation of greatness as it equates with leadership ability and outcomes. He expressly values civic participation and leadership that aims to secure and promote the welfare of the community. Subsequent to the presentation of some basic information concerning his theories of education, especially ethical education, attention is then focused on the innate components of greatness and the appropriate means to develop this inborn talent in training individuals to wield power in an effective and responsible fashion. A comparative analysis is then undertaken to set forth the similarities and differences between the psychological/behavioral makeup of Plutarch’s ideal leader and recent influential work in leadership theory by Daniel Goleman, James MacGregor Burns, and Bernard M. Bass. The significant degree of correspondence elucidated leads to a discussion of the literary techniques Plutarch employs to place in sharper relief the salient aspects of great leadership (and its opposite), including his developed use of synkrisis and the Socratic paradigm, as well as the representation of performative acts of leadership.

A neurobiological perspective can inform us about the proximate mechanisms of prosocial behavior. Brain regions involved in empathic processing have been implicated in prosocial behaviors. However, prosocial behavior is dependent on regions beyond those involved in empathy. We outline recent meta-analyses that have converged on the finding that regions implicated in reward processing also play key roles in prosocial behaviors as do ventromedial and dorsolateral regions of the prefrontal cortex. We describe instances in which empathic processing is affected – in psychiatric conditions or following psychopharmacological interventions – and what consequences this can have for the neural correlates of prosocial behavior. We emphasize the need to have clear definitions of concepts like “empathy” and “prosocial behavior,” as these will ultimately inform the behavioral tasks used to measure the neural underpinnings of these phenomena. Finally, we discuss how advancements in neuroscientific techniques could further our understanding of the neurocognitive basis of prosocial behavior.

Emotion motivates prosocial behavior, and interest in this topic usually focuses on empathy. This chapter explores other emotions that can also motivate prosocial action and the research directions and practical implications that follow. It opens with consideration of two perspectives on the association of emotions and prosocial behavior offered by Malti and Thompson, and then proceeds to discuss research concerning the following prosocial emotions: happiness derived from assisting another, moral pride derived from prosociality, indignation over observed harm, empathy and sympathy, and gratitude. Guilt as a moral and possibly prosocial emotion is also discussed. The shared element of these prosocial emotions is that they derive from a personal connection between an observer and another’s emotional experience. An overview of the research on emotional development and emotion regulation follows to explore how this connection emerges developmentally. The conclusion summarizes much-needed areas for further research along with the implications of these ideas.

Early forms of empathy and sharing appear before the first birthday. In the second year, toddlers cooperate and help or comfort others, as they begin to recognize other people’s needs. The different types of early prosocial behavior are not necessarily correlated with each other or with measures of infants’ temperament. Individual differences and gender differences in prosocial behavior begin to emerge in early childhood, when prosocial behavior becomes associated with children’s developing skills and their social understanding.

Prosocial development is considered foundational for youth civic engagement, yet associations between these two developmental domains is more complex and dynamic than typically recognized. This chapter examines theory and evidence linking prosociality and two main dimensions of civic engagement: civic helping and political engagement. Most research separately examines helping versus political engagement, given that different correlates and developmental processes are often evident. Positive youth development theory posits that adolescents’ caring and connections lead to civic contributions, and evidence lends support for bidirectional associations between civic helping and prosocial competencies. Youth political engagement is not as commonly studied in relation to prosocial development, but empathy combined with critical social analysis may support socially just political attitudes and actions, whereas other political attitudes are rooted in exclusion and inequality and antithetical to prosociality. Implications for theory, future research, and practice are also discussed.

This chapter focuses on the role of gender in the development of empathy and prosocial behavior in adolescence. Although it is a commonly held belief and a well-replicated research finding that females report higher empathy and prosocial behavior than do males, much is still unclear about the nature and meaning of this gender difference. After discussing definitions of the constructs, theoretical perspectives on biological, cognitive, and social contributions to gender differences in prosocial development are summarized. Then empirical evidence on gender differences in empathy and in prosocial behavior in adolescence are reviewed, with a particular focus on results of (1) longitudinal studies, (2) studies that take the multidimensionality of empathy and prosocial behavior into account, and (3) multimethod studies. Finally, implications and future directions are discussed.

Engaging two intertwined and yet competing literatures detailing moral aspects of suffering through the lenses of sympathy and empathy, this chapter examines the extent to which suffering (and responses to it) may be viewed as a condition of possibility for ethical/moral experience. While arguably distinctive responses to suffering that have unique ethical entailments, sympathy and empathy still share, however, a more primordial manifestation in pathos. Drawing upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, the chapter argues that pathic attunement is the generative, responsive ground from which sympathy and empathy arise. Moving beyond the either/or framework that often emerges in anthropological discussions of empathy and sympathy, a focus on pathos leads to a different way of envisioning suffering as a condition of possibility for moral experience. Without collapsing the ethical and political, pathos is thus a phenomenon through which recursive relationships between ethical, political, and ontological orientations to others becomes discernible and therefore analysable.