Emotion researchers define empathy as “the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.” The film and episode we watched demonstrates what researchers define empathy as with a psychological example and a humorous example.
In the film Possessor, an assassin, Tasya Vos takes control of others’ bodies to commit murders. There’s a special machine that inserts her consciousness into their minds. To return back to her own body, she has to force the host(the other body) to commit suicide. The beginning of the film shows Vos in the first host body and is seen looking in a mirror and crying. It then switches to the host killing the intended target. Vos struggles to pull the trigger when it’s time to commit suicide so she waits for the police arrive to kill her instead. She feels empathy for this host body that she is in because she knows that she has ruined this person’s life and now has to kill them while being in their body. It’s as if she can feel that person suffering and their sadness as she takes their life. Vos also seems to show empathy when she is back in her own body and her boss asks her to explain a personal object she has. It’s a framed butterfly and Vos expresses her guilt for killing it.
In the episode “I second that emotion” of Futurama, Bender flushes Nibbler down the toilet in an act of annoyance towards Nibbler. Leela gets so anger that Bender isn’t feeling any emotion and wants him to feel the way she feels: sadness. The professor puts an empathy chip on him so he can feel every single one of her emotions. Throughout the episode we see him feel all different types of emotions such as anger, sadness, and jealousy. I think in this episode we were able to see Cognitive and Emotional empathy because Bender was able to understand Leela’s emotions being controlled by the chip and emotional empathy because every time she would cry, for example, he would cry as well and express why he is crying.
The film/episode really portrays of feeling empathy because it really helps us understand how others are feeling and how those feelings can help us respond to certain situations.
4 thoughts on “Empathyyyyyy”
Hi Brianna,
You do a really nice job of discussing Vos’s experience of empathy at the start of the film. As you note, she is unable to pull the trigger and kill her victim, and she indicates that she feels guilt over the butterfly she killed as a child. How do we see her change throughout the film? What happens to her experience of empathy as the film progresses? Would you say that she is still empathetic at the end of the film? What changes her? And how can you connect this experience of empathy to what you learned about in this week’s voicethread?
I think that you’re absolutely correct that we are seeing Bender experience emotional empathy—he is literally feeling what Leela is feeling. But it is worth noting that Leela’s emotions are not being caused by the chip. Those are the emotions that she experiences as she deals with the grief of losing her beloved lil Nibbler. Cognitive empathy refers to our ability to understand someone else’s perspective. Do we see this at work at all throughout the episode?
Jessica Hautsch
Hi Brianna,
You’ve done an excellent job analyzing Tasya’s empathy for the host that she is in at the beginning of the film. She definitely demonstrates empathy in this scene, for she is unable to kill the host and return to her own body by committing suicide. This scene is very intense and shows a lot of emotions. I think it’s also important to note how Tasya does not feel empathy for killing the butterfly at the end of the film. This shows her mental state has changed, and she no longer is able to feel empathy after all she has experienced throughout the film. You’ve also done a wonderful analysis on the Futurama episode that we watched in this module. It was interesting to see that Bender clearly did not have empathy for how Leela was feeling after he flushed Nibbler down the toilet, but then he shared the same emotions as Leela when he had the chip in. This pretty much forced him to feel her emotions, but I don’t think it really goes in line with Embodied Theory because Bender does not see Leela’s emotions and empathize with them. Instead, he the emotions Leela feels are just forced onto Bender through the chip. I think it’s really cool that they’ve used a robot vs. human to represent this idea. Great work!
Anthony Aromolo
Hi Anthony,
Yes, I think that you’re absolutely right that the change in how Vos responds to the butterfly at the end of the film is key to understanding how her character changes throughout the film. Her loss of guilt over its death is indicative of her loss of empathy.
Jessica Hautsch
Hey Brianna !
I’ve seen a few of people discuss how Vos seems to empathize with those she “becomes,” in her inability to pull the trigger when she’s ready to return to her body. This was something I totally didn’t think about as I was so focused on the brutality of everything she did and her overall disconnect when it came to the lives she was taking. Additionally, while we can see this also in how she feels guilt over killing the butterfly in her childhood, we also see her retract her statement of guilt at the end of the movie, showing an overall loss of empathy. I think it’s interesting to see how she changed !
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