Animal Abuse and Interpersonal Violence by Heng Choon (Oliver) Chan & Rebecca W. Y. Wong

Author:Heng Choon (Oliver) Chan & Rebecca W. Y. Wong [Heng Choon (Oliver) Chan & Rebecca W. Y. Wong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119894124
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2023-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Dispositional Empathy

Empathy, the ability to share and understand others’ affective and mental states (Singer & Decety, 2011), is often activated automatically. When individuals are exposed to (or even imagine) others in pain, the areas of the brain involved in the first‐hand experience of pain are activated (Lamm, Decety, & Singer, 2011). However, empathy is not only human‐directed, as the same neuronal circuit is activated when seeing human or animals in pain (e.g., Filippi et al., 2010). Empathic reactions therefore represent a disposition that has to be subjugated by scientists, who cannot fail to be aware that animals experience harm in some research protocols, and that they also suffer from the conditions in which they are housed. According to ethnographic testimony, training in physiology means “undergoing a process of desensitization to the emotional response that many people have to the act of cutting into an animal body” (Birke, 1994). For lab workers, professional socialization entails working to “switch between objectification (keeping animals at distance) and identification with them” (Birke, Arluke, & Michaal, 2007, p. 96). In the field of human‐animal relationships, it has been shown that a positive attitude or attachment toward animals is positively related to dispositional empathy (Eckardt Erlanger & Tsytsarev, 2012; Pagani, Robustelli, & Ascione, 2007; Taylor & Signal, 2005), while individuals with low empathy tend to harm animals (McPhedran, 2009).

Moreover, support for animal experimentation has been reported to be inversely related to empathy (Broida, Tingley, Kimball, & Miele, 1993; Hills, 1993; Hills & Lalich, 1998; Swami, Furnham, & Christopher, 2008). The present study therefore introduced a measure of empathic concern, with the expectation of an inverse relationship between this disposition and the commission of harmful behavior toward animals.

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