Empathy can be defined as the ability to understand and to share the emotions of others. It entails basic cognitive processes (e.g., the recognition of facial expressions) and basic emotional processes (e.g., emotional contagion), but also higher-order cognitive processes (e.g., abstract reasoning on the other person's emotional state) and higher-order emotional processes (e.g., empathic concern). The most important social function of empathy is the initiation of prosocial behavior. Empathy can

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... be differentiated from related constructs as theory of mind, emotional contagion, compassion, emotional mimicry, or perspective taking by its associated processes and functions. To understand the nature of empathy, it is important to combine phylogenetic, ontogenetic, neurobiological, and social learning perspectives on this phenomenon. Further, empathy can be operationalized not only as an individual trait of a single person but also as a dyadic trait of a relationship and as a systemic trait of a social group. The objective of the present study was to investigate the difference between these operationalizations and the interrelationship between systemic empathy and two specific group parameters, surface-level diversity and shared goals. To realize the research objective, self-report, performance, and behavioral measures of both individual and systemic empathy were applied within a sample of 98 persons within 18 small groups, following a longitudinal design with three experimental conditions (control, low diversity, shared goals). Psychological interventions were applied to enhance group formation processes. A manipulation check revealed that the experimental manipulation of the three experimental conditions was successful. However, structural equation models with the objective to differentiate individual and systemic empathy indicated high levels of common method variance by poor model fit indices. Multilevel analyses revealed no effect of surface-level diversity or shared goals on genuine empathy, but an effect of both [...]