People's compassion responses often weaken with repeated exposure to suffering, a phenomenon known as compassion fatigue. Why is it so difficult to continue feeling compassion in response to others' suffering? We propose that people's limited-compassion mindsets-beliefs about compassion as a limited resource and a fatiguing experience-can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces compassion fatigue. Across four studies of adults sampled from university students and online participant pools in the United States, we show that there is variability in people's compassion mindsets, that these mindsets can be changed with convincing information, and that limited-compassion mindsets predict lower feelings of compassion, lower-quality social support, and more fatigue. This contributes to our understanding of factors that underlie compassion fatigue and supports the broader idea that people's beliefs about the nature of emotions affect how emotions are experienced. Together, this research contributes to developing a strategy for increasing people's capacity to feel compassion and their social support.

中文翻译：

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同情疲劳是一种自我实现的预言：相信同情心是有限的会增加疲劳并减少同情心。

人们的同情心反应往往会因反复遭受痛苦而减弱，这种现象称为同情疲劳。为什么对他人的痛苦继续抱有同情心如此困难？我们认为，人们有限的同情心心态——认为同情心是一种有限的资源和一种令人疲劳的经历——可能会导致自我实现的预言，从而加剧同情心疲劳。通过对从美国大学生和在线参与者中抽取的成年人进行的四项研究，我们发现人们的同情心心态存在差异，这些心态可以通过令人信服的信息来改变，而有限的同情心心态则预示着较低的同情心，社会支持质量较低，疲劳程度更高。这有助于我们理解同情疲劳背后的因素，并支持更广泛的观点，即人们对情绪本质的信念影响情绪的体验方式。总之，这项研究有助于制定一项战略，以提高人们感受到同情心和社会支持的能力。