Eisenberg, Nancy

Contributions

Throughout her career, Eisenberg has made significant contributions to the understanding of a variety of developmental processes. Although her interests have changed throughout the years, there has been continuity in her research topics as one question or finding has led to another. When she first entered graduate school, she was interested in the development of humanitarian political attitudes, partly as a result of the political climate in the 1960s and early 1970s. To adequately understand such attitudes, she realized she would need to understand other-oriented responding. Thus, early in her career, she became interested in a variety of aspects of prosocial development.

Prosocial Moral Reasoning

Of particular interest to Eisenberg was the development of the cognitive aspect of prosocial functioning, specifically, prosocial moral reasoning (i.e., reasoning about dilemmas in which an individual has an opportunity to assist others, but at a personal cost). She delineated different types of reasoning (e.g., hedonistic, steoreotypical, internalized affective) and developed an interview procedure that involves questioning individuals about hypothetical scenarios in which the story protagonist can help another person, but at a cost to the self. Shortly after arriving at ASU, she began a longitudinal study on prosocial moral reasoning with preschoolers and continues to assess individuals from the original sample every few years (see Eisenberg et al., 2002, for the most recent publication based on the sample). Based on this longitudinal work, she and her students have identified important age-related changes in prosocial moral judgment from early childhood to early adulthood.

Empathy

After an initial focus on the cognitive aspects of prosocial functioning, Eisenberg became increasingly interested in the emotional aspects, particularly empathy. Her innovative work has had a large impact on the theoretical and methodological advancement of the study of prosocial development (for reviews, see Eisenberg, 2000; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990). Building on Batson's (1991) work with adults, she was instrumental in distinguishing between various empathic responses in children, specifically sympathy (i.e., other-oriented response to another's distress or need) and personal distress (i.e., self-oriented, egoistic response to another's distress or need). Eisenberg and her colleagues encountered methodological problems in this area of study, though. For example, children's empathic responses were affected by the sex of the experimenter, and children's self-reports of their emotional reactions were not related to their prosocial behavior. To deal with these methodological issues, she incorporated methodologies that had not been used previously to distinguish sympathy and personal distress. Specifically, Eisenberg implemented the use [Page 396]of videotaped facial reactions and psychophysiological responses (e.g., heart rate patterns, skin conductance) following exposure to needy or distressed others in experimental situations. Studies confirmed the usefulness of these measures, such that increased physiological arousal and distressed facial expressions generally occurred with personal distress, whereas decreased physiological arousal and facial expression involving concerned attention and sadness were associated with sympathy. In addition, individuals exhibiting the physiological and facial markers of distress generally were less likely to help others in need than were individuals exhibiting markers associated with sympathy.

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