The program called the Empathy Experiment went beyond text books and documentaries to make select students take on the issues facing working poor in Central Ohio.
All participants engaged in group discussions, immersion exercises known as a mile (in someone else’s shoes) and video journals posted athttp://empathy.capital.edu to better teach them how to move beyond sympathy and onto empathy.
The act of compassion begins with full attention, just as rapport does. You have to really see the person. If you see the person, then naturally, empathy arises. If you tune into the other person, you feel with them.
If empathy arises, and if that person is in dire need, then empathic concern can come. You want to help them, and then that begins a compassionate act. So I'd say that compassion begins with attention. - Daniel Goleman (Art Gallery & Quote)
Empathy is a psychological concept, and has been translated into sympathy, empathy and so on, first by the master of the humanist Carl Rogers proposed. It refers to a person for others feelings, emotions and aspirations of the degree of concern and sensitivity, used to evaluate a person for the position of the feelings of others and standing on other people perspective and problem solving skills.
Held in Kunshan in May this year the international scientific seminar on evaluation and education, countries in the field of education and evaluation experts have highlighted a culture of empathy. Indeed, in addition to learning ability, creativity, analytical ability, etc., the empathy for a student future development will play a crucial role.
Empathic concern refers to other-oriented emotions elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need. These other-oriented emotions include feelings of tenderness, sympathy, compassion, soft-heartedness, and the like. Empathic concern is often and wrongly confused with empathy.
To empathize is to respond to another's perceived emotional state by experiencing feeling of a similar sort. Empathic concern or sympathy not only include empathizing, but also entails having a positive regard or a non-fleeting concern for the other person.
Human beings are strongly motivated to be connected to others. In humans and other higher mammals, an impulse to care for offspring is almost certainly genetically hard-wired, although modifiable by circumstance.
Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion.
The English word is derived from the Greek word ἐμπάθεια (empatheia), "physical affection, passion, partiality" which comes from ἐν (en), "in, at" + πάθος (pathos), "passion" or "suffering". The term was adapted by Hermann Lotze and Robert Vischer to create the German word Einfühlung ("feeling into"), which was translated by Edward B. Titchener into the English term empathy
Working in such an environment that I do, within a psychiatric unit, it is quite common to be with patients who have absolutely no feeling of compassion, love or affection for anyone. Their whole world totally revolves around them and only them. It doesn't matter how hard you work with these people, more often than not they don't change. The most scariest thing of all, the number of people that are like this, is increasing. One only has to look in our jails as well.....I really don't know what the answer is.
Cathaven, I think we need to find more ways of teaching empathy and build a culture of empathy
Cathaven's comment April 27, 2011 5:14 PM
I totally agree but unfortunately this is something that I believe if people can't learn or are incapable of learning it doesn't happen. The psychiatrists's quick fix, give them another tablet, to an already chemically addicted body thus numbing all feelings that they have. Feelings that should be worked on by capable counsellors and therapists. Mental health is a very complex issue and we haven't even touched the surface here yet. There is a lot of focus on self unfortunately................
For the 48 students who had spent 30 hours over the weekend voluntarily going without food as part of the 30 Hour Famine, the time wasn’t spent idly..
"I'm just really hungry," she said before her chair nap. She said she had learned a lot from the experience and gained empathy toward those who may be going hungry.
Jennifer Peterson, the program coordinator at First United Methodist Church, had an explanation for the sudden deflation around her. "It's the perfect storm," she said. "We hit our crash point."
She said that the students - depending on the individual - were learning valuable lessons about empathy and priorities.
Last night I was lucky enough to be at a talk by Simon Baron-Cohen at the Royal Institution. And it was a fabulous way to spend 90 minutes on a warm Spring night in London.
Professor Baron-Cohen is probably best known as an expert in autism, but he's also interested and works in the field of psychopathic behaviour. And in his talk last night, he proposed a fascinating idea: that we should think less about 'evil' and more about 'empathy erosion.'
The Professor's latest book Zero Degrees of Empathy is just out and his talk was one hell of an appetiser for it.
A new study from The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry finds that mothers who feed their babies breast milk exclusively, as opposed to formula, are more likely to bond emotionally with their child during the first few months after delivery.
The breastfeeding mothers surveyed for the study showed greater responses to their infant's cry in brain regions related to caregiving behavior and empathy than mothers who relied upon formula as the baby's main food source.
Something is amiss in our discussion of empathy. I came to this conclusion after a brief search through recent news articles yielded the following headlines: College students have less empathy than past generations, too much testosterone will lower empathy, empathy is considered to be a cause of yawning, and my favorite newsflash, chickens are capable of empathy too!
While this might be very bad news for college-going chickens who suffer from low testosterone and fatigue, it doesn't do much for our public discussion of empathy either. The main problem is we've been asking all the wrong questions.
The empathy gap, for both physical and psychological pain, undermines human ability to objectively evaluate harsh methods of interrogation.
Psychological scientist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, working with Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell of Harvard Law School and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon, wanted to explore a well known psychological phenomenon called the "empathy gap" as it relates to torture. Normally, it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to experience someone else's visceral states. (img http://bit.ly/fHbFnb)
First of all, I owe the launch of today's thought process to Ms. Jone Johnson Lewis of the Northern Virginia Ethical Society, and her thought-provoking blog post, "Empathy in the White House."
The concept of empathy as a worthy and even central consideration in our world is one I've seen highlighted by President Obama, as noted in past posts of mine, such as this one.
But I laud an effort Jone highlighted by an individual to collect a documentary's worth of examples of Obama discussing empathy, titled "Barack Obama and a New Spirit of Empathy".
If I were to pick the most important art in dealing with people it would be the art of listening. Nothing increased my ability to lead people as much as learning how to listen. No matter how powerful a speaker you develop into, it is not as effective as powerful listening.
I am hesitant to share this topic because I am aware of how much I need to improve in this area still! With that said, I can still remember the day I focused on listening to others before drawing wrong conclusions and solving the wrong problems. - Orrin Woodward
Empathy is a powerful interpersonal tool which is under-valued in our society. Ineed it is a skill that is frequently underutilised. Perhaps this is in part due to the misconception that em-pathetic somehow implies pathetic? It is often confused with sympathetic, but while empathy denotes a deep emotional understanding of another’s feelings or problems, sympathy is more general and can apply to small annoyances or setbacks.
In Deep Brain Learning: Pathways to Potential with Challenging Youth, Brendtro, Mitchell, and McCall summarize empathy as follows:
Empathy is the foundation of moral development and pro-social behavior. The original word began in the German language as Einfuhlung which is literally translated as feeling into. Empathy taps the ability of mirror neurons to display in our own brain the emotions, thoughts, and motives of another. Empathy allows us to share anothers joy and pain and motivates care and concern.
Self-compassion is extending compassion to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. Neff has defined self-compassion as being composed of three main components - self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.
*Self-kindness: Self-compassion entails being warm towards oneself when encountering pain and personal shortcomings, rather than ignoring them or hurting oneself with self-criticism.
*Common humanity: Self-compassion also involves recognizing that suffering and personal failure is part of the shared human experience.
*Mindfulness: Self-compassion requires taking a balanced approach to one's negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. Negative thoughts and emotions are observed with openness, so that they are held in mindful awareness. Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which individuals observe their thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them.
Conversely, mindfulness requires that one not be "over-identified" with mental or emotional phenomena, so that one suffers aversive reactions.This latter type of response involves narrowly focusing and ruminating on one's negative emotions
Compassion (from Latin: "co-suffering") is a virtue - one in which the emotional capacities of empathy and sympathy (for the suffering of others) are regarded as a part of love itself, and a cornerstone of greater social interconnectedness and humanism - foundational to the highest principles in philosophy, society, and personhood.
There is an aspect of compassion which regards a quantitative dimension, such that individual's compassion is often given a property of "depth," "vigour," or "passion." More vigorous than empathy, the feeling commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another's suffering. It is often, though not inevitably, the key component in what manifests in the social context as altruism. In ethical terms, the various expressions down the ages of the so-called Golden Rule embody by implication the principle of compassion: Do to others what you would have them do to you.
Empathy – the capacity to recognize and share feelings that are being experienced by others. This is what helps us get through the difficult times.
Maybe it’s just a hug from a friend or a note saying “I’m thinking about you and saying a little prayer.” Maybe it’s just a few words of encouragement and comfort, a cup of tea or coffee at the local coffee shop with a friend that helps us shift our focus and gives us what we need to continue our journey. To have one say “I know that what you’re going through may be painful at the moment but this too, shall pass.”
Importantly, the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy.
The present findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes.
Watch as investigators give insight into techniques used to establish empathy with suspects and how they work to get the confession needed to close the case in this video from Investigation Discovery's "Real Interrogations.
This is the first study to show a distinction between breast and formula feeding mothers in brain activity in response to their babies' cries.
Medical News Today reports: The breastfeeding mothers surveyed for the study showed greater responses to their infant's cry in brain regions related to caregiving behavior and empathy than mothers who relied upon formula as the baby's main food source. This is the first paper to examine the underlying neurobiological mechanisms as a function of breastfeeding, and to connect brain activity with maternal behaviors among human mothers.
Currently empathy seems to be a sought-after goal. Why? I am not sure because seeking it in the name of good, peace, and collaboration is as silly as seeking focus or communication skills or charisma for the same purposes. Empathy, focus, skilled communication, and charisma are a few of many traits and states that are neutral. When they are used in the furtherance or service of helping or harming another, they assume goodness or badness.
Because empathy is a neutral skill until one uses it, I grow impatient when I hear people blithely stating that we must raise the amount of empathy in our culture or foster it in our children. As a result of my impatience, I've blogged in the past here and here about this mischaracterization of empathy.
This fascinating and disturbing book is an examination of why some people are viciously, violently cruel to others. “They’re evil” is the standard answer to that question, but as Simon Baron-Cohen points out, invoking evil isn’t really an explanation. It simply raises the question: but why are some people evil? ..
Zero Degrees of Empathy is a strange amalgam of scientific sophistication and philosophical naivety. The detailed findings on which Baron-Cohen bases his conclusions about which parts of the brain do what, and his identification of the particular neurological pathways on which the capacity for empathy depends, are as dazzling as they are surprising.
Peter Kropotkin was one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, who managed to multi-task as a Russian prince, renowned geographer and revolutionary anarchist. In this interview with Phonic FM, a wonderful community radio station based in Exeter, I discuss how Kropotkin’s ideas about ‘mutual aid’ relate to my own work on empathy, and why Kropotkin is a prophet for the art of living in the twenty-first century. The interview lasts around 50 minutes.
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