Congratulations to Dr. Van Cappellen for being awarded with grant funding from the Templeton Religion Trust! Dr. Van Cappellen serves as Principal Investigator, with BABLab post-doctoral fellow Dr. Kunalan Manokara as Co-Investigator, on this grant ($259,986) titled “The Science of Empathy: A Scoping Review”, a two-year project from November 2024 to 2026.
This project will evaluate the current state of the field on empathy research, guided by the following five strands:
- How is empathy defined and measured?
- What are the societal impacts of empathy?
- How is empathy situated re: related constructs?
- What is the role of religion in promoting empathy?
- How may empathy have a role in covenantal plurism?
Why empathy? Empathy is widely recognized by practitioners as essential for fostering peaceful relationships as it promotes interpersonal cooperation and intergroup peace. In an increasingly polarized world where division is exacerbated by ideological differences, cultivating empathy for different perspectives is crucial. This scoping review serves to organize conceptualizations of empathy, as well as related constructs such as compassion and love, in order to: integrate and evaluate new knowledge and robustness; identify gaps in the field; and suggest new lines of empirical research.
