EMPATHICA

Introduction

EMPATHICA is a software program designed to help people understand and resolve conflicts. It is based on the hope that increasing empathy (mutual understanding of values and emotions) between people can help to overcome impasses in disputes in many domains: organizations, politics, personal relationships, and so on. EMPATHICA uses the idea of Cognitive-Affective Maps (CAMs) developed by Paul Thagard in collaboration with Thomas Homer-Dixon, Scott Findlay, and others. These maps derive from ideas about emotional cognition described in Thagard's book Hot Thought.

The designers and programmers of EMPATHICA are: Alex Bass, Rob Disano, Ian Forneri, James Kendle, and Corey Manning. Eugene Solodkin provided additional development.

To access EMPATHICA, go to:

http://uw-empathica.appspot.com/

To login, you need a Google email account, obtainable from mail.google.com.

Alternatively, you can download a stand alone version of Empathica by clicking on the link below. After downloading the file, you will need to unzip it and then create an account on your own computer.

• Macintosh version
• Windows version

To use the Macintosh version, proceed as follows:

1. Click on the link above, which will download the file Empathica-Mac.zip, which your computer will unzip into a folder called Empathica-Mac.
2. Exit Safari.
3. Open the folder Empathica-Mac folder and click on "web2py".
4. Set up an account and password that you can use to run Empathica.
5. Proceed to use Empathica, which enables you to build, save, and export CAMs.

How to Draw a Cognitive-Affective Map:

A CAM is a diagram that shows concepts and beliefs along with the emotional values attached to them. It also shows the relationships between concepts that support each other or conflict with each other. We suggest the following method:

1. Identify the main concepts, beliefs, goals, and emotions of the person being modeled.
2. Identify these elements as emotionally positive or negative, and accordingly represent them by ovals or hexagons.
3. Identify relations between elements that are either complementary (solid lines) or conflicting (dashed lines). 
4. Show the resulting map to other people to see if it captures their understandings of the person and situation.

Here is a diagram that shows the mapping conventions used:

• Ovals represent emotionally positive (pleasurable) elements.
• Hexagons represent emotionally negative (painful) elements.
• Rectangles represent elements that are neutral or carry both positive and negative aspects.
• The thickness of the lines in the shape represents the relative strength of the positive or negative value associated with it.
• Solid lines represent the relations between elements that are mutually supportive.
• Dashed lines represent the relations between elements that are incompatible with each other. 
• The thickness of the lines in the connection represents the strength of the positive or negative relation.

CAMs can be produced using any drawing program, but we recommend EMPATHICA.

Articles about Cognitive-Affective Maps:

Findlay, S. D., & Thagard, P. (forthcoming). Emotional change in international negotiation:  Analyzing the Camp David accords using cognitive-affective maps. Group Decision and Negotiation.

Thagard, P. (2010). EMPATHICA:  A computer support system with visual representations for cognitive-affective mapping. In K. McGregor (Ed.), Proceedings of the workshop on visual reasoning and representation (pp. 79-81). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

Thagard, P. (2011). The brain is wider than the sky:  Analogy, emotion, and allegory. Metaphor and Symbol, 26: 131-142.

Thagard, P. (forthcoming). Mapping minds across cultures. In R. Sun (Ed.), Grounding social sciences in cognitive sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Increasing Empathy (Thagard's blog for Psychology Today)

Paul Thagard's home page

This page updated May 1, 2012