Browsing by Subject "myötätuntointerventio"

Being able to feel empathy, understand, and help others are all important in everyday social situations as well as for the survival of the human species. For this reason, it is important to research the processes behind prosocial behaviour. Compassion is one of the processes connected to prosocial behaviour, and it has been linked to feelings of warmth and concern as well as approach behaviour. This literary study investigates the association between compassion and prosocial behaviour. The aim is also to discuss possible mediating factors between compassion and prosocial behaviour. The hypothesis is that compassion is linked to increased prosocial behaviour. The method of data collection for the study was a literacy search on Scopus database. Five individual studies, consisting of seven relevant experimental set ups, were included in this literary study. The associations between compassion and prosocial behaviour were investigated using self-reports, behavioural measurements, and functional brain imaging. Three of the studies investigated the effects of compassion training to prosociality, and one of them also utilised functional brain imaging. One of the studies investigated changes in neural responses after a compassion intervention. Even though the study didn’t directly measure prosocial behaviour, the results are still important for investigating the neural correlates of compassion. Two of the studies investigated the links between self-reported compassion and prosocial behaviour. The results in this study indicate that compassion has an increasing effect on prosocial behaviour. A correlation between increased compassion and increased prosocial behaviour was found in all the studies, and activation of the brain’s reward processes seems to explain the link. However, the results should be interpreted with caution, because compassion is hard to measure reliably, and the comparison between the studies is difficult due to the differences between the experimental set ups. In any case, the results indicate that compassion has an important role enhancing prosocial behaviour. Compassion is also a trainable skill, which opens opportunities for more structured interventions for increasing prosocial behaviour in the future.