Motivated Down-Regulation of Emotion and Compassion Collapse Revisited

William Hagman; Gustav Tinghög; Stephan Dickert; Paul Slovic; Daniel Västfjäll

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.801150

Motivated Down-Regulation of Emotion and Compassion Collapse Revisited

Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 13:13:801150. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.801150. eCollection 2022.

Authors

William Hagman^{1

2

3}, Gustav Tinghög^{1

2

4}, Stephan Dickert^{5

6}, Paul Slovic⁷, Daniel Västfjäll^{1

2

7}

Affiliations

¹ JEDILab, Division of Economics, Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
² JEDILab, Division of Psychology, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
³ Division for Human-Centered Systems (HCS) at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
⁴ Department of Medical and Health Sciences, The National Center for Priority Setting in Health Care, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
⁵ Department of Psychology, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria.
⁶ School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
⁷ Decision Research, Eugene, OR, United States.

Abstract

Compassion collapse is a phenomenon where feelings and helping behavior decrease as the number of needy increases. But what are the underlying mechanisms for compassion collapse? Previous research has attempted to pit two explanations: Limitations of the feeling system vs. motivated down-regulation of emotion, against each other. In this article, we critically reexamine a previous study comparing these two accounts published in 2011 and present new data that contest motivated down-regulation of emotion as the primary explanation for compassion collapse.

Keywords: charitable giving; compassion; down-regulation; emotion; emotion regulation; prosocial behavior.