The Shaman

The energy which created religion as a trace in the process of working itself out is very real. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with rules and borders. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance. A shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers.    

Ferguson for Thanksgiving

It was almost sadistic to release the grand jury's findings just before Thanksgiving. For many of us, Thanksgiving will be something to get through rather than something to enjoy because that elephant will be in the room with us. The divide on this issue is not between black and white but between people who are essentially decent and people who are not. The most disturbing aspect of the situation is how accurately one can predict which side of that divide someone wearing a badge is on knowing nothing more about them than that they are wearing a badge.

The officers threatened with termination unless they removed the "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets they had previously worn, on duty, in Ferguson, while working crowd control at protests triggered by Mike Brown's murder, were not "bad apples"; they were good cops as cops themselves define that term. Their only fault was being honest about who they were and what their values were in a way and in a situation where doing so was less than useful to Darrin Wilson and all the other fine people who were doing their best to see that Wilson got away with murder the way cops normally do. When Darren Wilson says that he was just doing his job, more cops believe him than not and further judge anyone who does not believe him as having issues with authority, wanting an excuse to do some looting or being otherwise motivated by something much less respectable than a simple desire for justice. 

2+2=4. What happened to Mike Brown was murder, a hate crime and the most heinous possible example of causing death while violating civil rights under color of law. The second statement is as true and obvious as the first. The horror of what happened in Ferguson goes well beyond what Darren Wilson did. The full horror of Ferguson is the personal, gut reaction of almost every other cop in America to what he did; most cops would agree with Darren Wilson that he was just doing his job.

Darren Wilson would not stand out in any way in a large room containing a random sample of cops. Most cops are Darren Wilson. Michael Brown is dead not because of a bad apple but because he encountered a cop who defined doing his job about the way most cops do. This is how policing is done now. What passes for "law enforcement" makes a mockery of the claim that America is a democracy characterized by the rule of law and respect for the rights of citizens; anyone who could make that claim with a straight face is either in denial or has no idea what cops do all day to earn their pay.

On learning to teach English as a second language: first comment

         The contrast between the descriptive studies of various languages in use done by linguists and the prescriptive approach involved in what most people mean when they say “grammar” could not be greater. Over the last three decades or so, I've taught this kind of “grammar” as part of my official job description as an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition at various community colleges. When I first started teaching those classes, I had to learn prescriptive English grammar so that I could teach it. Many people learn to speak something that is close enough to Standard English to pass for it in most settings without learning the formal rules well enough to pass a really rigorous grammar test. Some even learn to write well enough to practice law or make a living in journalism without being able to state most of the rules they do obey many more times than not in writing their legal briefs or newspaper articles.

         On the other hand, I speak from many years of experience in asserting that teaching someone who writes badly enough grammar to pass a really rigorous grammar test will not always improve their writing all that much. Some people can understand grammar at the level of abstraction without automatically following those rules when they compose text; others consistently follow abstract grammar rules they could not state clearly if asked why the words of their text are strung together the way they are. Many people know what is “right” well enough to communicate very effectively in both speaking and writing but could not tell you what exactly most of the spontaneous choices they make in the process would appeal to in response to a question about why they are right.

         I'm writing a lot about the written form even though linguists more often than not mean the spoken form when they speak of language and see the written form as an attempt to transcribe the spoken language. The great “aha” insight that came to me only recently was the realization that my own engrained and habitual way of thinking about language amounts to seeing spoken discourse as text performed under conditions that severely limit the quality of that performance.  This is natural for a person whose pattern of thinking and feeling was shaped at least as much by the vicarious experience provided by reading as by his own immediate experience participating in the particular way of life that socialized most of his peers. I've only been tutoring ESL for a few months and, thus, still think like someone who read constantly as a kid, later decided he wanted to be a writer and ended up as a teacher of writing and literature.

         On the other hand,  I'm noticing for the first time how little help knowing how to spell English words gives someone who is trying to say the word rather than to read it or writ it.  My first few students were all Puerto Ricans who amazed me by being able to read anything in English they wanted, enjoy American movies without needing sub-titles and understand me pretty well most of the time when I spoke to them. What they could not do, at first, was to get their needs met here in Florida without great difficulty. In many different settings, they faced the maddening frustration of understanding what other people said in reply to their attempts to communicate well enough to be absolutely sure of the failure of these attempts.

         The pronunciation of a word is not a fact that one comes to know but something one learns to do with one's mouth. That is what I need to learn to take for granted to be really helpful to my students, but it goes totally against the grain of how I have thought about words up until now. Knowing how a given language works both as sounds made in a particular way and as a process whereby these sounds come to mean more than they are is the goal of linguistics. It is also a habitual way of thinking about language. I need to acquire that habit in order to be more helpful to persons who are trying to learn a second language.  I need to learn to describe what I do, with my mouth and otherwise, in speaking English in order to teach anyone else to speak English. I've decided that the main difference between a very patient native speaker of English and someone who really knows how to teach English as a second language flows from this capacity to describe what you are doing when you speak English in the way that a linguist would.

         When I started volunteering as an ESL tutor I thought that tutoring ESL would be very similar to teaching college-transfer or developmental English, as I have already been doing for years. I've enjoyed tutoring immensely more than I expected because tutoring ESL has turned out to be fundamentally different from anything else I've done before. I'm learning things about how language is used and acquired that I did not know in spite of years spent being obsessed with language and determined to acquire greater skill in the use of language. I've learned enough about how teaching a second language ought to be done to be amazed at how turnip-witted some of my previous assumptions were. I'm muddling through and getting better and realizing that there is so much that I haven't learned yet about how to do this that I can almost certainly expect to be much better at something very much worth doing even just a year from today than I am right now. I had said for years that, even though I had never officially taught an ESL class, I had in practice taught a lot of ESL just given who shows up for your classes if you agree to teach developmental English in Houston, Texas, especially at a satellite campus in the inner city. I always enjoyed those classes and my department chair always made it a point to be nice to me. He knew that he would someday need someone once again to teach a developmental course in a “bad” neighborhood that was fully enrolled to the cap but would cancel anyway for lack of an instructor if I did not take it. I like teaching ESL better than anything else I have ever done and genuinely regret that I did not discover ESL sooner.

     

Autism, ESL and Second Life

Second Life (SL) is being used to teach ESL internationally with, admittedly, a selection bias favoring rich nations and the better-off in poor nations. People come to SL for many reasons, but the desire to learn spoken English is high on the list. Anyone who puts significant effort into building a "second-life" is seeking some supplement, in exactly Derrida's sense, to their first-life (Derrida, n.d.). ESL learners are supplementing their first-lives with a virtual immersion in the English language. In turn, this immersion is supplemented by resources available in SL but not in first-life immersion. Someone taught in school to read English but not to speak it would gain little from first-life immersion. In SL, he would find an abundance of ESL activities and even more activities, also conducted in English, for people who share some common interest. He could spend his entire second-life attending ESL activities and practicing English. He could type a word and immediately see and hear the English translation. He could use voice but also share text with a group or IM individuals.

            "Shiaida Palianta" is a British ESL teacher who has spent thirty years in Hong Kong teaching Cantonese speakers, many already using written English to communicate with Mandarin speakers and the outside world, to speak English. Globally, people literate in English far outnumber people who are mutually comprehensible speaking English. Many who are literate struggle to become comprehensible to native speakers defined as the largest sample of persons who are mutually comprehensible speaking English. A huge population literate in English has been drawn into SL by a keen interest in joining this conversation of the mutually comprehensible. They are in the right place.

            The best Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a better place for persons literate in English to learn to speak than the best first-world setting; the virtual supplements the actual in ways that make the actual a pale imitation of the virtual. Shiaida Palianta's ability to multi-task, using every available resource to keep everyone in their personal Zone of Proximal Development  (ZPD), is astonishing. During her English News Clips!, we read texts aloud and talk about them. Her co-host is 'Leee Megadon", a Mandarin speaker who keeps the group moving mostly via IMs and public text. The use of IM or text to provide scaffolding, either backchannel to individual users or shared with everyone, makes it possible to give help without breaking the continuity of conversation. All of us do this, often IMing or texting the written version of a word or pronouncing it for a speaker who can't say it but can write it. We also look at pictures and describe them while being primed for new vocabulary by leading questions and requests for further elaboration; a word is remembered when it is provided exactly when the learner is searching for just that word. Constant double coding of the spoken with the written plus pictures that make new words immediately useful works very well. Instant translation into English helps, especially since the translation is both written and spoken, as does access to the Internet.

            All of our regulars are literate but not (as defined above) native speakers. They come mostly from non-English speaking countries where English is required for graduation from high school or college. They, collectively, are an object lesson in what English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in the schools of a non-English speaking country typically can and cannot accomplish. All fit a single learner profile so closely that the same VLE and teaching style works for everyone. English News Clips! uses their literacy to help them learn to converse in a way that would not be possible without the tools available in SL.

            Admittedly, this only works because Shiaida Palianta spent years in Hong Kong teaching people already literate in English to speak. She then learned how to use the resources of SL to supplement what she could do in a first-life classroom. I would still claim that the supplement provided by SL makes possible  something that is more effective with this population than anything she could do in first-life. Remember also that we could never routinely meet in first-life. Given a computer, anyone anywhere can join us. SL makes it possible to deliver instruction fine-tuned to the needs of any sub-population. English Language Learners (ELL) who are autistic are one example. SL eliminates first-world location as a constraint on participation but not time. English News Clips! takes place at 5am SL (Pacific) time, 8am (Eastern) time and 4pm Moscow time.

            Much work has been done in VLE to help autistics remedy a lack of social skills (Mitchell, Parsons, & Leonard, 2007). Lack of social skills is the only disability many High-Functioning Autistics (HFA) suffer. SL provides a supplement to first world interaction teaching skills that are normally not taught but acquired, as is language, during normal development (Mangan, 2008). Autistics acquiring social skills are strikingly similar to ELL immersed without scaffolding; they and others are frustrated by their inability to "pick it up" by osmosis. The result is often Social Avoidance Disorder (SAD) as a secondary symptom of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

            An extensive support network has grown up in SL to provide safe spaces where autistics can interact without "faking  normal" to be accepted and rehearsal spaces where new approaches to being with others can be tried out in a risk-free environment where failure triggers not rejection but a "time-out" to explain what faux pas was just committed, followed by a discussion of how to avoid doing it again and/or deal better with the blow-back if it does. The potential of virtual worlds to improve the lives of persons suffering from life-long disabilities is potentially transformative (Stendal, Balandin, & Molka-Danielsen, 2011; Education Week, 2011). Enough people cross-trained in Instructional Design/Special Ed. to design the required VLE is the only limiting factor.

            I could not find ESL events created specifically for autistics in SL. To the extent that this population acquires language in atypical ways, which they definitely do, an event fine-tuned to those differences would make sense. Autistics do not, for example, follow the normal progression in learning their first language and probably would not in learning a second language (Eigsti, Bennetto, & Dadlani, 2007). One of Asperger's original cases went on to major in foreign languages (Wire, 2005). A few autistics speak with an authentic accent that is not the dominate accent of their home or neighborhood. These few are worth mentioning because all known cases were autistic; these few apparently were extreme examples of a greater capacity among autistics for exact mimicry. A talent for memorizing rules works to their advantage to the extent that languages are rule bound but is a source of frustration when exceptions are encountered (Wire, 2005).

            I know from personal experience working with HFA in SL that they very often prefer texting to FTF conversation because text fails to code context cues that they miss FTF and thus puts them at less of a relative disadvantage. Emoticons are useful as a substitute for this information. Simultaneously seeing text of what is being said helps whether they are speaking or listening (Yahya & Yunus, 2012). The idea that speaking is ephemeral and fleeting while text is something solid that one can refer back to when feeling lost was often expressed.  Autistics, especially the 20% functioning in the normal range of intelligence, tend to have larger speaking vocabularies and a better gasp of syntax and phonology than would be predicted by their IQs. The difficulties in communication suffered by this upper 20% are exclusively a matter of pragmatics (Seung, 2007). These difficulties are symptomatic of the lack of a theory of mind sufficient to allow inference from what is said to what goes without saying or goes unsaid (Colle, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Van der Lely, 2008). Inferring this background provides most of us with the context of use and intention that is the field within which the utterance as figure is fixed. Failure to read this context creates the painful sense of being on-stage without a script that many HFA use to describe how lost and clueless they often feel during social interactions.

            HFA are natural linguists. The best way to teach them a second language might be to teach them everything a linguist would say about that language. To the extent that languages follow rules, HFA seem to have an absolute advantage in learning languages in any environment where their "why" questions about a spelling or a pronunciation can be answered by stating a rule. Even "there is a distribution rule that governs that pronunciation but I can't remember it off the top of my head" might work if students were also taught where online to go and how to search for rules the teacher can not remember. A VLE might be the best place to teach ESL for autistics. Online classes exclusively made up of this target population could be taught or the site could serve as the enrichmen/accommodation that made a language class hybrid for the one autistic in a first-life class.

 References

Colle, L., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Van der Lely, H. J. (2008). Narrative discourse in adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 38(1), 28–40.

Eigsti, I., Bennetto, L., & Dadlani, M. (2007). Beyond pragmatics: Morphosyntactic development in Autism. Journal Of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 37(6), 1007-1023. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0239-2

E-Learning for Special Populations. (2011). Education Week, 31(1), S1-S22.

Jacques Derrida (1930—2004). (n. d.). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH3e

Mangan, K. (2008). Virtual worlds turn therapeutic for autistic disorders. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(18), A26.

Mitchell, P., Parsons, S., & Leonard, A. (2007). Using virtual environments for teaching social understanding to 6 adolescents with autistic spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 37(3), 589-600. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0189-8

Seung, H. K. (2007). Linguistic characteristics of individuals with high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 21(4), 247-259. doi:10.1080/02699200701195081

Stendal, K., Balandin, S., & Molka-Danielsen, J. (2011). Virtual worlds: A new opportunity for people with lifelong disability? Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability, 36e.

Wire, V. (2005). Autistic spectrum disorders and learning foreign languages. Support For Learning, 20(3), 123-128.

Yahya, S., & Yunus, M. M. (2012). Sight vocabulary acquisition in ESL students with autism: A case study. International Journal of Learning, 18(7), 367-384.

Altruism

The cultural animal is altruistic because the cultural animal’s particular kind of agent self is a looking-glass self that begins to be created early in development, typically around 30 months, by internalizing the responses of the set of significant others important to the developing person at that time. At first, the other-directed emotions of shame and guilt are felt when a significant observer reacts in sharply negative fashion to an observed behavior. An important next step comes when the developing human learns to accurately imagine how a significant other who may or may not be actually present would react to an action that was just performed or is being contemplated. Each layer of development added makes the developing animal more cultural and the “selfish” actions of this looking-glass self-agent more other-directed.

Finally, a generalized other emerges as the constant audience and judge of the actions of a self so fundamentally other-directed that almost every action, even those never witnessed by any actual other, are for the other and selfish at the same time for a self that is for the other if not all the way down at least very, very deeply down. In the fully mature cultural animal that the typical adult usually becomes, all actions are either for or in spite of this generalized other or some literal other present or imagined as the audience of the action. Actions in spite of make us feel guilt or shame. I do not feel comfortable saying that only our in spite of actions are selfish. I also do not feel comfortable saying that our for actions are finally selfish because they are performed to make us feel better. Given the way we cultural animals develop as such, it would be utterly amazing if we did not routinely do things with the ultimate goal of benefiting other persons and feel really good about ourselves when we do.

“The empathy-altruism hypothesis claims that pro-social motivation associated with feeling empathy for a person in need is directed toward the ultimate goal of benefiting that person, not toward some subtle form of self-benefit” (Batson et al., 1988, p. 52). This is the clearest statement I have found of the Batson position. It essentially argues that altruistic behaviors are based on feelings of empathy for others that lead us to perform actions that contribute to the well-being of these others. The phrase “not toward some subtle form of self-benefit” is where the argument with Cialdini starts. Cialdini and those of his camp want to say that if any form of subtle self-benefit can account for altruistic behavior then these behaviors are not truly altruistic. Their research agenda is an attempt to explain all forms of seemingly altruistic behavior in terms of such subtle forms of self-benefit. Batson’s counter-agenda is an attempt to design experiments that control for these “subtle forms of self-benefit” without eliminating altruistic responses. If Cialdini were on fire and I put him out with a foam fire extinguisher, he would claim after the fact that I only did it because it lowered my level of distress when he stopped running around and screaming and instead lay quietly on the floor repeating “Oh God, oh God” over and over. When Batson heard of this, he would immediately begin trying to design an experiment that would determine if I would have used the fire extinguisher on Cialdini in circumstances such that this reduction in my own level of distress would not have resulted. All the references cited in our textbook are examples of this agenda or this counter-agenda. The long spiel I opened with was meant as an explanation of why I see the whole dispute as being somewhat silly.

A 1991 study used a sample of 252 college students with a heavily female skew (198/252) in three experiments testing the hypothesis that helping behavior was motivated by the joy that those helping could expect to experience vicariously when the individual’s situation improved (Batson et al., 1991). These were factorial studies controlling for level of empathy (low/high) and chance of experiencing vicarious joy (20%/50%/80%). The patterns that emerged were not at all consistent with what would have been predicted if helping were motivated by the chance of experiencing vicarious joy. Vicarious joy is therefore not a “subtle form of self-benefit” sufficient to explain the helping that actually took place. This does not prove that this altruistic behavior was motivated by simple empathy with no ultimate goal beyond benefiting the person helped but the results are not inconsistent with this claim. This is the typical move of the Batson camp agenda: take some “subtle form of self-benefit” put forward by the Cialdini camp as a motive for helping behavior, control for it as an independent variable, and show that the level of this independent variable makes no difference to the dependent variable whereas the level of empathy, measured as another dependent variable, does.

The idea of a 2x2 factorial design looking at (low/high empathy) and (ease/difficulty of escape) as the levels of the two independent variables was looked at in a 1981 study by Batson et al. Once again, we have empathy and a second independent variable cross-controlling for each other. The idea is that if watching someone else suffer gives us an egotistic motive to help, then how easily we can escape watching them suffer should also determine how willing to help we are. On the other hand, if our response is rooted in pure empathy, whether we can escape watching or must continue to watch should not have much impact on our willingness to help. The results showed that in high empathy subjects, how easy it was to escape did not predict helping whereas in the low empathy subjects, it did. The low empathy subjects helped more when escape was hard and not as much when escape was easy. Empathy motivated helping even when escape was easy. Egoistic motives did so only when escape was hard. The implication is that empathy always generates altruistic behavior whereas egoistic motives sometimes do but not as reliably as high levels of empathy. High empathy alone is enough to generate altruistic behaviors at both levels of the second egoistic independent variable (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981).

In another study, a total of 100 participants broken down into three age categories (6-8, 10-12, and 15-18) were used to try to resolve contradictory findings about altruism and negative mood (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). Some studies had shown a positive correlation between negative mood and altruism and some had not. The study authors hypothesized that if negative mood does correlate with altruism, this would indicate that altruism has the egoistic motive of cheering the altruist up. They further surmised that the contradiction in the original studies were caused by not taking age, and therefore level of socialization, into account, which is why they broke their sample up into three age categories. The three groups were encouraged to think of either depressing or neutral events and then given the chance to be generous. The younger subjects were actually less generous after thinking depressing thoughts but this reversed with increasing age and level of socialization until the opposite pattern was seen for the oldest group. These results indicate that the self-rewarding impact of benevolence on mood is an artifact of socialization.

Thomas and Batson (1981) conducted a study to establish that normative pressure to help may actually undermine the self-reward that comes from being spontaneously altruistic. This was another 2x2 factorial design in which the independent variables were receiving help/no help and a second variable was based on being told either that most people helped or that few people helped. The dependent variable was how altruistic subjects felt as determined by a survey hidden in materials given out to disguise the actual purpose of the research. The subjects who felt most altruistic were those who helped without having received help and were told that very few people helped.  Normative pressure, especially normative pressure based on the principle of reciprocity and a strong social consensus about what one “ought” to do, is often put forward as an explanation of helping behavior that is egoistic and self-serving rather than being determined by a genuine empathically based concern for the other. Showing that responding to such normative pressures actually makes people feel less altruistic when they help is another way to attack the idea that altruism is finally self-serving in this way. Please forgive me if this fast sprint through only five research articles has given the impression that I do not take the subject seriously. It is more that the two well-established camps involved in the debate have defined the terms of the debate in a way that is not all the interesting from my perspective.

              I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I am something of a connoisseur of weirdness. I seek out unusual people online and, more often than not, on those rare occasions when I travel, I am going to meet someone in real-time I have gotten to know well online. Most of the people I communicate with online I will never meet in real-time. Many of them live in New Zealand for some reason. One person I got to know online knowing that I would never meet her in real-time was the only homeless woman in America, as far as I know, who managed in spite of being officially homeless to have a blog. She had a computer science degree from University of Maryland and had tapped into the power-lines while living in a sort of yurt in a forested area of Northern Virginia. Years before, she had worked for the Department of Justice and had helped win the big anti-trust suit against Micro-soft by hyper-linking all the documents together in one big file in a way that was innovative at the time. She was a high functioning autistic who after losing many jobs and suffering many frustrations moved out into the woods to avoid further trauma.

She had a real genius for online search and I paid her small amounts of money to do research for me. This was one way that she bought food and replaced her electronics gear as it wore out. I enjoyed reading her blog and remained a regular contributor and online friend even after she managed to cost me one of my own jobs and a couple of valuable professional connections just being who she was. To be fair, I also made several friends based on my gutsy willingness to be publicly associated with someone whose letters to the Washington Post often got lengthy replies and caused odd sub-conflicts to spin-off from important political issues. Many people knew about the crazy genius woman out in the woods even though no one knew exactly where her yurt was located.

At some point, she began to complain about her teeth. She had not seen a dentist for years and was never highly focused on dental hygiene. She would not let me pay for dental work. She also spent anything I paid her on food, including sweets, and computer gear all the time she was complaining about her teeth. Finally, she as changed but I’m not sure it has improved. Mine has improved.

I asked all my housemates how to answer this question and they all gave the same reply. Suzie says that I’m always the one who takes care of her when she is sick. David and Kathy mention that I’m always willing to do errands and everyone pointed out that I’m the one who takes out the garbage and cleans the cat’s liter boxes not because these tasks were assigned to me in any official way but because I started doing them and everyone now thinks of these as my tasks. I’ve ended up doing the things no one else wants to do. I believe altruism to be very real for all the reasons I presented in the first paragraphs of this essay. A cultural animal, with a self that is other-directed almost all the way down, is capable of being selfish on behalf of a self that can, on occasion, expand to include all life anywhere in the universe. It would make me happy to learn that we are not alone in this universe for all the same reasons that it makes me happy to have friends that I will never have the chance to hug in New Zealand. It makes me happy when the Democrats win elections or when one of my students from Pakistan gets admitted to the engineering program at Texas A&M partially because I put a lot of time and all the rhetorical skill I possess into writing a letter of recommendation. In less than 600 words, I skillfully undermined every negative stereotype about Muslims that might have gotten in his way so subtly that I’m sure the engineering committee never realized how carefully everything they were reading had been spun to my student’s advantage. The glory of a cultural animal is the way the very nature of this looking-glass-self, other-directed almost all the way down, makes it difficult to say what is altruistic and what is selfish. I want to argue that, the more cultural an animal becomes, the harder this distinction is to draw and, perhaps, the less meaning it has in actual practice.

References

Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Slingsby, J. K.,  Harrell, K. L., Peekna, H. M., & Todd, R. M. (1991). Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 413–426.

Batson, C. D., Duncan, B. D., Ackerman, P., Buckley, T., & Birch, K. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruism motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 290–302.

Batson, C. D., Dyck, J. L., Brandt, J. R., Batson, J. G., Powell, A. L., McMaster, M. R., & Griffitt, C. (1988). Five studies testing two new egoistic alternatives to the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 52–77.

Cialdini, R. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (1976). Altruism as hedonism: A social development perspective on the relationship of negative mood state and helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 907–914.

Thomas, G., & Batson, C. (1981). Effect of helping under normative pressure on self-perceived altruism. Social Psychology Quarterly, 44(2), 127-131.