ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on altruism and helping behavior—actions carried out by one individual which benefit another person. Such behavior has attracted considerable interest from social scientists for over a century, and a variety of theoretical approaches have been taken in attempting to understand it. The chapter focuses on those approaches which give a meaningful role to the empathy-related constructs they have identified thus far. It examines the evidence regarding connections between altruism/helping and the empathy-related constructs of affective reactions-, non-affective judgments, role-taking processes, situational factors, and personality traits. The chapter concerns the impact of role taking and attributional judgments on helping. The individual differences in empathic tendencies seem to be reliably associated with helping, especially for adults and especially when using self-report measures rather than picture-story indices. The chapter concludes that empathically induced affective states have reliable effects on helping behavior, and that a broad distinction can be drawn between two ways that this happens.
