Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Département de Philosophie, Miséricorde, Université de Fribourg, Av. De l'Europe 20, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Med Health Care Philos. 2020 Jun;23(2):191-203. doi: 10.1007/s11019-019-09935-1.
Empathic concern is essential to our social lives because it motivates helping behavior. It has, however, well-known shortcomings such as its limitation in scope. Here, we highlight a further shortcoming of empathic concern: it contributes little to understanding the relevant features of complex social situations (e.g. the causes of somebody's distress), and unaided by further cognitive inputs, likely fails to produce effective helping. We then elaborate on the conditions needed for an accurate assessment of others' situations: the ability to pay attention and try to understand others for their own sake. We explain that when combining these abilities with the valuing aspect of empathic concern, we obtain "availability", an understudied mental state which plays a crucial role in helping motivation. We provide a detailed definition of that notion and show how availability can be trained and exercised by health professionals in order to improve their care and relationships with patients.
同理心对于我们的社交生活至关重要，因为它激发了助人行为。然而，同理心也有众所周知的缺点，例如其范围有限。在这里，我们强调同理心的另一个缺点：它对理解复杂社会情境的相关特征（例如某人痛苦的原因）贡献甚微，而且如果没有进一步的认知投入，很可能无法产生有效的帮助。然后，我们详细阐述了准确评估他人情况所需的条件：关注和尝试理解他人的能力，纯粹是为了他人的利益。我们解释说，当将这些能力与同理心的重视方面结合起来时，我们就获得了“可用性”，这是一种研究不足的心理状态，它在助人动机中起着至关重要的作用。我们详细定义了这一概念，并展示了卫生专业人员如何通过训练和练习可用性来提高他们对患者的护理和关系。
