Abstract
This paper aims to investigate impact of emotional and cognitive enhancement on improving the empathic aspects of young adults towards older adults. A sample of 90 young adults aged between 18 to 30 years was collected to test the research hypotheses. The results indicate that participants with either emotional or cognitive enhancement empathize lesser than those with both emotional and cognitive enhancement. Participants with both emotional and cognitive enhancement showed the highest level of empathy as with those without emotional, cognitive and both emotional and cognitive enhancement. These insights have important implications on the service sectors specifically towards serving and caring for an aging population in the midst of urbanization, globalisation and modernization. Young adults need to develop emphatic attitudes while providing service to the older adults as young adults are the future generation. The paper is concluded with a discussion on the findings, research implications and limitations.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by FMR Construction Sdn Bhd (BUS/FMR/07-2017/001), and Monash University Malaysia’s School of Business, Gerontechnology Laboratory, Health and Well-Being Cluster, Global Asia in the 21st Century (GA21) Platform. The authors wish to express their appreciation for all the volunteers who participated in the study. Special thanks are due to Jeffery Yeow Teh Thiry for his help in data collection.
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Teh, PL., Watabe, M., Ravichandran, A., Tan, K. (2020). Developing Empathy Towards Older Adults Through Emotional and Cognitive Enhancement. In: Rau, PL. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. Applications in Health, Learning, Communication, and Creativity. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12193. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49913-6_16
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