Empathic Concern and the Desire to Help as Separable Components of Compassionate Responding

When do people experience versus regulate responses to compassion-evoking stimuli? We hypothesized that compassionate responding is composed of two factors—empathic concern and the desire to help—and that these would be differentially affected by perspective taking and self-affirmation. Exploratory (Study 1) and confirmatory (Study 2) factor analyses indicated that a compassion measure consisted of two factors corresponding to empathic concern and the desire to help. In Study 1 (N = 237), participants with high emotion regulation ability reported less empathic concern for multiple children than for one, but perspective taking prevented this effect. In Study 2 (N = 155), participants reported less desire to help multiple children, but only in the presence of self-affirmation. In both the studies, empathic concern predicted greater distress while the desire to help predicted greater chances of donating. Compassionate responding may consist of two separable facets that collapse under distinct conditions and that predict distinct outcomes.