Compassion for self and others has become a major focus of scientific study in terms of its benefits on health and social relationships (e.g. [17, 42]), physiology [45] and potential as a focus for psychotherapy [19–21, 28, 29]. However, people can behave in prosocial ways for different reasons, not all of which are genuinely care focused [8, 14]. For example, some individuals engage in caring behaviour because they want to be seen positively, valued and accepted [8]. Others may engage in caring behaviour because they do not want to be shamed, or feel guilty for not caring [36]. Understanding peoples motives that can sit behind compassion and their competencies such as empathy are clearly important in health care and other helping professions.

Catarino et al. [9] developed a self-report measure to explore what they termed submissive compassion. These motives that can underpin caring behaviour, link with Goffman’s [26] seminal work on ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ on how individuals can try to ingratiate themselves with others, particularly when they feel inferior, subordinate or in submissive positions [32, 40]. Catarino et al. [9]) found that in a sample of university students submissive compassion was significantly related to self-image goals (r = .51), caring guilt and caring shame, submissive behaviour, depression, anxiety and stress, in a way that genuine compassion was not.

For people with social anxiety, ingratiating oneself by ‘trying to be kind and helpful’ can be a safety strategy for acceptance [44]. Furthermore, although a number of studies have shown that compassion is linked to the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness, Bègue et al. [6] showed that these traits in a Milgram type study, where are an authority asks to deliver electric shocks to another, are also associated with conformity, obedience and not wanting to cause trouble by refusing to obey. Presumably the fear of offending the authority over-rides compassion motives to not shock the confederate. This raises the core issue about ‘courage’ as being central to compassion rather than just wanting to help people or be ‘nice and agreeable’ ([21]). Work by Crocker and Canevello [10, 11] shows that compassion goals can be attenuated by self focussed ego goals such as avoiding being shamed and wanting to be recognised.

Exploratory factor analysis (Maximum Likelihood extraction) on the competitive perspective-taking scale produced one single factor with an eigenvalue above one explaining 47.94% of the variance. Table 1 shows the factor loadings. The Cronbach’s alpha was .82. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (.81) and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity (p = .000) both indicate the sample size is adequate for factor analysis [16].

Given that many people working in the health and other helping services are called to behave compassionately, understanding the motives behind compassion and the skills people bring to the caring role is important. One area of interest is therefore peoples attempts to be compassionate not (just) for the benefit necessarily of the other, but for self-focused reasons. Hence, this study had three basic aims: to explore in more detail the phenomena of submissive compassion and its link to empathy and self-evaluative processes; to develop and explore the value of a self-report scale exploring people’s capacity to recognise an ability to use their empathy for self-promoting reasons; and potential gender variations in these social competencies and skills.

In regard to the first question of how submissive compassion relates to empathy, this study suggests they are unrelated or minimally so. While there is a significant negative correlation with ‘reading the mind in the eyes test’ and also social skills (Table 3) these correlations are small. The data on self-image goals (which correlate significantly with submissive compassion) also reveals a small negative correlation with the social skills aspect of empathy. What is most striking, however, is that the defensive motives captured by the concept of submissive compassion and also self-image goals are both significantly linked to submissive behaviour in general, shame, negative self-evaluation, lower self-reassurance and symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. Although we cannot test it here, it is possible that it is the sense of social fragility and negative self-evaluation that partly drives the need to be submissively compassionate.

In regard to our second question, of whether people can recognise their ability to use empathy for self-focused reasons the answer would support ‘yes they can’. For example, people who scored higher on cognitive empathy also scored higher on competitive self-focused empathy. Or to put this another way, the more cognitive empathy you have, the more you recognise you can use it for self-benefit. Table 3 also reveals that empathy is correlated with compassion goals (after controlling for self-image goals).

What is also interesting is that compassion motivation is not related to the degree to which an individual sees themselves as being able to use empathy for self-focused or manipulative purposes. However, interestingly self-image goals are marginally but significantly correlated with self-focused empathy. Perhaps this is because people are more motivated to try to generate positive images of themselves in the minds of others and are more attuned to those motives within themselves.

Looking at the relationships between empathy variables and self-evaluation, depression, anxiety and stress, the relationship was mostly negative. Although these correlations are relatively small it does suggest that empathic difficulties, especially with social skills are related to increase tendencies for negative self-criticism, depression, anxiety and stress. It would make sense then that compassion focused therapy would need to focus on developing empathic competencies [20, 29].

We were also interested in the gender variations in these motives and competencies. nn provides the basic standard deviations and gender differences. In line with other studies [13, 31], women scored higher on both cognitive and emotional reactivity but not on social skills aspects of empathy. Second, women scored significantly lower on our new measure of recognising one’s ability to use empathic competencies and skills for self-focused and beneficial reasons. Interestingly, they did not differ on hardly any of the other motivational variables such as compassionate goals, self-image goals or submissive compassion. Nor did the genders differ on variables such as shame and negative self-evaluation, although men scored slightly higher on hated self.

Looking at the predictors for empathy our multiple regression revealed that compassionate goals were highly associated with empathy, whereas shame and self-image goals appear to be inhibitors. When these variables are controlled, submissive compassion becomes positively associated with empathy. This may indicate that it’s the shame and defensive self-focusing within submissive compassion that interferes with empathy rather than them being low on caring motivation itself. So the study suggests that compassion and empathy are affected by underlying motives and the degree to which one is threatened, shame-prone and critically self-focused.

This study suggests the importance of separating out a motivation for caring from its competencies of empathy and in particular the perspective-taking aspect of empathy. For example, there is no correlation at all between people’s ability to be aware they can use empathy for self-interest and caring goals. So while compassion as a motivational system draws on different competencies to pursue its goal; these competencies can be used in different ways by the same person. Data of this kind suggests that when clinical trainers focus on empathytraining they also need to focus on motivation training and in particular the nature of genuine compassion motivation [20, 29].

This is a cross-sectional study with a student population that comes with limitations regarding the difficulties of making casual inferences and stability of findings. We also raise a caution in studies like ours because if we’re trying to separate motivation from competency it’s important that scales do not combine motives (desire to be caring) with competencies such as (being able to emotionally connect to people’s feelings or perspective take). The Empathy Quotient might do that at times. For example, items like “I really enjoy caring for other people” is about caring interest, not necessarily empathy. They might enjoy caring but not be very empathic or good at it. We are aware that our new scale may be slightly unintentionally gender biased in the sense that the scale asks questions like could you be a good interrogator or poker player. However, our idea is to raise this as an area for research that others may contribute to and devise better measures of how we can use empathy in different ways with different motives. Nonetheless, this study may add to the literature on teasing apart what is linked to genuine compassionate motives and what is linked to competencies that can be used to advance social motives of which compassion may be one.