커뮤니케이션 실천으로서 공감: 시론적 고찰

Abstract

This article investigates the communicative aspects of empathy. Pointing out that the predominant neurological notions tend to reduce empathy to a mechanistic and individual phenomenon, we suggest that empathy be viewed as a social communicative process. Specifically, we discuss problems of theories of emotional contagion and vicarious experience in which empathy is conceived as sharing an identical emotional state with other entities, and posit that distant spectatorship is the primary position of the emphatic agents who do not necessarily share such an emotion. With this respect, we argue that Adam Smith"s concept of the impartial spectator sheds light on understanding empathy as a distant spectators" response induced by the communication media.