Ethnocultural empathy refers to the understanding of feelings of individuals that are ethnically and/or culturally different from oneself. This concept casts doubts on global empathy, which assumes that empathy is "feeling in oneself the feelings of others" and is not specifically targeting any one group or context. Ethnocultural empathy, on the other hand, assumes that empathy toward others probably increases if the other is similar to oneself in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, or cultural background.
Concept history
Traditionally, empathy is roughly defined as an intellectual ability of taking the role or perspective of another person and/or an emotional response to another person with the same emotional display. As a part of personal traits, empathy has been established as relatively stable and consistent within a certain time period. However, increasing research found that people usually hold different levels of empathy toward different individuals based on perceived psychological similarity. Two primary factors influencing the psychological similarity are ethnics and culture. Particularly, people usually feel more empathetic towards individuals who are in the same ethnic/cultural groups as they are than those who are not. Quintana defined ethnic perspective taking as a cognitive–developmental ability that could be reached as an individual proceeds through developmental life stages. This development contains five stages of ethnic perspective-taking ability, including physicalistic and observable perspective, literal perspective, non-literal and social perspective, group perspective and multicultural perspective of ethnicity. First, children begin to establish their ethnic identity by distinguishing themselves from other ethnic groups based on physical features. Once children understand the physical differences with other groups, they then are able to become aware of the perspectives, attitudes, experiences shared by other ethnic groups, and finally develop the ability to take the perspective of other ethnic groups. Ridley and Lingle have defined cultural empathy as a "learned ability" which is composed of three subordinate processes: cognitive, affective, and communicative. Cognitive process can be understood as a cultural perspective-taking and cultural self–other differentiation. Affective process includes affect and the expressive concern. Communicative process includes probing for insight and conveying accurate understanding. Based on the ethnic perspective of perception and culture difference of empathy, Wang and her colleague posed the concept "ethnocultural empathy". Although this is a new concept, many previous research had addressed similar or related constructs although never formally terms it. Thus, concepts such as cultural empathy, empathetic multicultural awareness, ethnic perspective taking are usually used interchangeably with "ethnocultural empathy".
Constructs and measurements
To date, the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy is the only formally published measurement of ethnocultural empathy. SEE is composed of three instrumental aspects: intellectual empathy, empathic emotions, and the communication of those two. Intellectual empathy is the ability to understand a racially or ethnically different person's thinking and/or feeling. It is also the ability to perceive the world as the other person does; that is, racial or ethnic perspective taking. The empathic emotions component of ethnocultural empathy is attention to the feeling of a person or persons from another ethnocultural group to the degree that one is able to feel the other's emotional condition from the point of view of that person's racial or ethnic culture. In addition, it refers to a person's emotional response to the emotional display of a person or persons from another ethnocultural group. The communicative empathy component is the expression of ethnocultural empathic thoughts and feelings toward members of racial and ethnic groups different from one's own. This component can be expressed through words or actions.
Application
Ethnocultural empathy is usually applied in cross-culture and/or cross-ethnics analysis. The levels of ethnocultural empathy were reported to vary by demographic features and societal factors. Previous research indicated that women were more likely to report higher level of ethnocultural empathy than men, Non-White individuals were found to have significantly higher levels of general and specific ethnocultural empathy than their White counterparts. Racism was negatively associated with ethnocultural empathy. People with different levels of ethnocultural empathy were also reported to respond distinctively to individuals who are similar with themselves and those who are not. For example, people with higher level of enthnocultural empathy had been found to work more successfully with individuals from other cultures. Enthnocultural empathy not only functioned in cross-cultural context, but was also extended to a variety of situations, such as majorities vs. minorities, males vs. females, natives vs. non-natives. High levels of enthocultural empathy were reported to be predictive of positive attitude towards minority groups, such as rape victims, domestic violence victims, female leaders, etc. Enthnocultural cultural empathy has been used in many other research areas such as racialism, feminism, multiculturalism, ethnic identity, etc.
