How Inducing Empathy Affects Metaphoric Speech and Emotions

Empathy and perspective taking are important factors in building interpersonal relationships. As such, if metaphor use is a tool for expressing such emotions, then the use of metaphors likely plays a role in relationship maintenance and satisfaction. Metaphors likely enhance the experience of empathic concern and perspective taking. To test this idea, we developed a study to test whether inducing empathy will cause greater empathic concern and metaphor usage. We predict that individuals within the empathy condition will score higher on the Metaphor Usage Measure – Revised and will have stronger associations with feelings of empathic concern. We tested this hypothesis using a survey where participants (N = 197) watched a video on a story of a young girl living in Africa and wrote responses for what they watched in the video. There were two condition groups within the study: Empathy (N = 99) and Neutral (N = 98). The neutral condition scored higher on empathic concern and MUM-R. There were not any significant results found within the empathy condition. The findings reveal that the condition has no effect on empathic concern.