Empathy in Online Mental Health Communities

Abstract

Empathy is usually separated into two major components: affective or emotional (the capacity to share the emotional experience felt by others) and cognitive (the recognition of the other person’s emotions, a process that likely requires perspective taking). The focus of the present contribution is how empathy is conversationally managed in two mental health online communities: a chat room and a forum for recovery from an eating disorder (ED). The analysis revealed that in the ED chat room participants resorted to primal responses, formulations of understanding, and parallel assessments to claim understanding and display emotional empathy when responding to a troubles- telling. In contrast, ED forum members tended to produce complex discursive operations to persuade recipients to modify their ED thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This goal called for cognitive empathy displays, such as echoic formulations and resolutive second stories, by which the empathizer echoed the other person’s mental representations and offered alternative epistemic and emotional stances.