Center for Building a Culture of Empathy References (100+) Articles On this page we track the daily flow of articles related to empathy. It's a work in progress. • • • • • • • • • • • • • - Evolution and animal behavior • - Neuron brain studies • - Mirror neurons • - Empathy altruism hypothesis • - Greater Good Center • • • • • • • • • Karen Armstrong • • • • • • See Below. ============================================================================== New 2010-12-15 - - Zac Whyte I feel that my only true strength comes from being empathic – sensing myself in everything makes me want to care for it deeply to honour my own life. To serve the world is to serve yourself and when cheap attempts of guilt evoking marketing material make me feel bad, the world is worse, not better. Poverty porn breeds animosity and fortifies a subconscious us and them mentality that is harmful. An empathic lifestyle on the other hand, is sustainable because it nurtures everyone involved – it builds strong bonds essential for a secure community.
Thankfully, there is evidence everywhere in our communities that empathy is on the rise. 2010-09-02 - - What are those values? They are the values that won the 2008 election for Barack Obama -- and they were not just hope and change. Candidate Obama made the case that American is, and has always been, fundamentally about Americans caring about each other and acting responsibly on that care. Empathy, which he proclaimed over and over was the most important thing his mother taught him, and is the basis of our form of government. Responsibility is both personal and social. 'I am my brother's keeper,' as he said over and over in the campaign.
And thirdly, excellence -- doing everything as well as we can, individually and as a nation. That is why we have life, freedom, fairness, equality -- and quality -- as fundamental values. 2010-09-02 - Jeffrey Ellis I’ve about the need for critical thinkers to practice intellectual empathy — the ability and willingness to examine issues from others’ viewpoints in a fair and open-minded manner.
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A person who fails to practice intellectual empathy often unfairly mischaracterizes an opposing viewpoint (committing the ) and snarkily ridicules its holder (committing various forms of the ). 2010-09-02 - There is a new type of demagoguery in cyberspace occuring whereby the political left is equated with lacking empathy and being on the Autistic spectrum. First of all, I need to refute the ignorance that people with Autism have no empathy. Such a blanket statement about people with Autism encourages society to disregard people with Autism as having no set of feelings, either for themselves or others, leading to discrimination against them.
2010-09-02 - Jean Decety Empathy, which implies a shared interpersonal experience, is implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality and the regulation of aggression. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current knowledge in developmental and affective neuroscience with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others. It will be argued that human empathy involves several components: affective arousal, emotion understanding and emotion regulation, each with different developmental trajectories 2010-09-02 - What is empathy? Do you value empathy? Is empathy a strength or weakness?
These questions are a few queries about what I think is an important intellectual trait or virtue. 2010-09-02 - Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been? Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps.
First, among vertebrates, birds and mammals developed ways of rearing their young, plus forms of pair bonding – sometimes for life. This is very different from the pattern among fish and reptile species, most of which make their way in life alone. Pair bonding and rearing of young organisms increased their survival and was consequently selected for, driving the development of new mental capacities. Others might claim that empathy is a value held in high regard in that old canard, our Judeo-Christian ethics. As religious philosopher Karen Armstrong tells us, it is the unifying idea in every religion.
It is popularly known as the Golden Rule. Yet though just about anyone would agree that Jesus was one compassionate dude, empathy is being looked on with suspicion by certain upstanding Americans. On June 28 th, Elena Kagan was vetted by the United States Senate to determine if she was suitable to join the Supreme Court of our land. In his at those hearings, our honorable white, male, and good Christian Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said, 2010-07-14 - John Malkin - Restorative Justice These are examples of a growing trend in responding to harmful actions and building trust between individuals and communities called Restorative Justice. Restorative Justice (RJ) is a philosophy that incorporates a diversity of tools to restore safety and connection through voluntary dialogue and mutual agreement. Often these meetings lead to transformational changes in people’s lives.. Barter views conflict as something to engage with and fully express rather than “resolve.” He explains the difference: “Implicit in the idea of conflict resolution is that conflict is a problem.
I view conflict as a message and really the choice is to either receive the message or ignore it. If we label conflict or violence as bad, then politically that is so handy because what we do is condemn the frustrated expressions of anger and powerlessness by those who are most marginalized.” ( Here's a good article about Restorative Justice and Restorative Circles. I took a workshop with Dominic Barter who has developed the Restorative Circles process and I found it to be the most effective process I've come across. He calls the process a series of empathy hot tubs. ) - An interviewer was once giving a lecture on the art of the the Q&A. He shared question strategies, tips and techniques he had carefully collected over the years.
The overarching advice he offered to the intently listening crowd was empathy. That’s it – that’s all it takes to be a good interviewer. - - Mirror neurons, the brain cells believed to be the basis for empathy, have recently been identified in the human brain. And yet we’re left to explain the disjuncture between this deep-seated, pre-reflective, moral intuition and the paucity of actual empathic behavior, especially in certain cultures.
I suggest that answers may be found in the bidirectional connection between culture and brain development. Barbara Bradley Hagerty - A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret - Part 1 - sociopaths As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got 'a bad roll of the dice.' 'It's an unlucky day when all of these three things come together in a bad way, and I think one has to empathize with what happened to them,' he says.
But what about people who rape and murder — should we feel empathy for them? Should they be allowed to argue in court that their brains made them do it? Enter the new world of 'neurolaw' — in which neuroscience is used as evidence in the courtroom. - - “Greed is out, empathy is in,” writes primatologist Frans de Waal in his recent book,.
He may have a point: is one of several recent books to make a persuasive case for putting empathy at the center of ideas about human nature, education, and the future of the planet. Indeed, following the success of books like Mary Gordon’s, joins Jeremy Rifkin’s as two significant recent releases that move discussions of empathy out of the laboratory and into major policy debates. - Marsha Lucas - Empathy is strength, and an asset towards surviving and thriving in any environment. It promotes genuine curiosity about others, which facilitates a desire to teach and learn. It allows a would be bully the opportunity to gain insight into how his behaviors would affect others negatively- in regards to both the potential victim and witnesses and it also affords the would be bully the ability to enlist the help of his peers in getting his needs met in healthier ways. With empathy, a potential bully victim wouldn’t be a victim of bullying.
- Sara Konrath - Recently Fox News covered our study on declining empathy in American college students with this alarming title: '.' Is this true? Are we now living in a society entirely devoid of the basic glue of human connection and interaction? The good news is that empathy is not 'destroyed' or 'under siege,' as the author of the Fox News post suggests. Instead, empathy may be sick.
Not ' you have 6 months to live' sick, more like ' you need to spend a few days in bed' sick. In other words, although there has been a decline in empathy, there are a few key things to consider about the data before declaring a state of emergency on the health of the nation. - The Academy Award-winning director complained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find an actress who could use her face to express the range of human emotion, especially anger.
It may be worse than the famed director suspected. New evidence is now suggesting that Botox may harm not only the expression of emotion, but also its comprehension. The facial paralysis that does away with unwanted frown lines may cripple a crucial ability to process emotional language. - - George Lakoff has many talents. But he cannot read hearts and minds. When he that Barack Obama 'knows in his heart' that acting on empathy 'is the main business of government,' it was sheer guesswork. Bill OReilly - (Video) Bill O'Reilly from Fox News asks Washington Post's Sally Quinn is Obama empathic?
Bill O'Reilly: Pundits are writing off the Obama Administration. Say he's to cool.
Does Obama really lack empathy? Sally, you think the president is an empathetic guy, why? Sally Quinn: I think he is empathetic. Bill O'Reilly: He went to the gulf and showed sympathy. Letting a giant conglomerate call the shots, is that empathy? Obama is coming across as a cool technocrat and I think it's hurting him.
Sally Quinn: Obama is authentic. Bill O'Reilly:: Authentic about what though? He looks cold blooded.
Sally Quinn: It's clear he cares. Bill O'Reilly: Peggy Noonan on Wall Street Journal says Obama is done because of a lack of empathy. Sally Quinn: I disagree with that. I think he is empathetic, he's not dramatic and I don't' think his presidency is done.. Another main theme of Drayton’s speech was children. “Every young child should master and practice empathy,” he said.
“Without early training in empathy, it’s hard for them to grow to become change-makers as adults. (Forthcoming Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives.
Oxford University Press.) It is widely believed that empathy is a good thing, from a moral point of view. It is something we should cultivate because it makes us better people. Perhaps that’s true. But it is also sometimes suggested that empathy is somehow necessary for morality. That is the hypothesis I want to interrogate and challenge. Not only is there little evidence for the claim that empathy is necessary, there is also reason to think empathy can interfere with the ends of morality.
A capacity for empathy might make us better people, but placing empathy at the center of our moral lives may be ill‐advised. That is not to say that morality shouldn’t centrally involve emotions. I think emotions are essential for moral judgment and moral motivation (Prinz, 2007).
It’s just that empathetic emotions are not ideally suited for these jobs. The point of these remarks has not been to criticize empathy so much as bring out some limitations. When we look for moral systems that have placed greater emphasis on empathy, we can see that empathy is a double‐edged sword: • it can promote compliance and complacency.
Of course, empathy can also promote moral concern, and that, one might think, is a good thing. I invite the reader to reflect on whether these worries threaten all species of fellow‐feeling. • First, as we have seen, empathy is not very motivating. • Second, empathy may lead to preferential treatment. • Third, empathy may be subject to unfortunate biases including cuteness effects. • Fourth, empathy can be easily manipulated. • Fifth, empathy can be highly selective.
• Sixth, empathy is prone to in‐group biases. • Seventh, empathy is subject to proximity effects. • Eighth, empathy is subject to salience effects. • In sum, empathy has serious shortcomings. It is not especially motivating and it is so vulnerable to bias and selectivity that it fails to provide a broad umbrella of moral concern.
A morality based on empathy would lead to preferential treatment and grotesque crimes of omission. Empathy may do some positive work in moral cognition, such as promote concern for the near and dear, but it should not be the central motivational component of a moral system.
------------------------------------------------- 2010-06-10 - - Empathy is usually thought of as purely an emotional experience, one of feeling with another as best as we can sense being in their shoes, skin and heart. This is not sympathy in feeling sorry or pity for another, their feelings and situation. This is not exactly compassion either, a deeper sense of affective empathy that means 'to suffer' another's troubles and feel another's sorrow. Being able to empathize is actually three interrelated abilities: to perceive and be aware of another's situation (perceptual empathy); to take another's point of view through thinking (cognitive empathy); and to feel with what another is feeling (affective empathy). Each of these forms of empathy taps the ability of 'taking perspectives,' that is, putting yourself inside of another's experience, whether it is in what that other person sees and hears, thinks and feels. 2010-06-07 - CHARLES SIEBERT - As a graduate student in psychology, Lockwood had an interest in human-animal interactions and the role of animals and education in the development of empathy in children.
This inevitably led him to consider the flip side of the equation: the origins of cruelty to animals and what such behavior might indicate about an individual’s capacity for empathy and his or her possible future behavior. Such children are also often driven to suppress their own feelings of kindness and tenderness toward a pet because they can’t bear the pain caused by their own empathy for the abused animal. In an even further perversion of an individual’s healthy empathic development, children who witness the family pet being abused have been known to kill the pet themselves in order to at least have some control over what they see as the animal’s inevitable fate. Those caught in such a vicious abuse-reactive cycle will not only continue to expose the animals they love to suffering merely to prove that they themselves can no longer be hurt, but they are also given to testing the boundaries of their own desensitization through various acts of self-mutilation.
In short, such children can only achieve a sense of safety and empowerment by inflicting pain and suffering on themselves and others. The matter of empathy, of course, goes to the heart of most of our inquiries into the nature of cruel acts and their possible causes.
There seems to be little doubt anymore about the notion that a person’s capacity for empathy can be eroded; that someone can have, as Lockwood put it to me, “their empathy beaten or starved out of them.”. Neuroscientists are now beginning to get a fix on the physical underpinnings of empathy. A research team at the headed by Jean Decety, a neuroscientist who specializes in the mechanisms behind empathy and emotional self-regulation, has performed fMRI scans on 16-to-18-year-old boys with aggressive-conduct disorder and on another group of similarly aged boys who exhibited no unusual signs of aggression. Others • • • June 13, 2010 - Hard to read in parts (I skipped them, I'm not ashamed to admit) but superb and well overdue in a national paper is this on the connection between violence towards animals and violent, unempathetic behavior in general. 2010-06-10 - Alan Bean - I am inclined to see the empathy gap as an indication that the dominant political message has branded empathy as futile, weak, and counterproductive. There is no sense trying to help people, we are told — it just makes them dependent and pathetic. This being the case, the best strategy is to pursue naked self-interest, leave the less fortunate to suffer the consequences of their laziness, and this will become the best of all possible worlds.
Why is having empathy for both sides the same as having no empathy at all? Universal empathy was the heart and soul of the beloved community King and others pursued.
The Wendy Longs of this world believe that compassion begins and ends with the family and the clan. In the early 1960s, America was still deciding if the enormous military and geographical reach fashioned out of World War II necessity would be dismantled or sustained. The decision to get serious in Vietnam was a resounding vote for imperial hegemony. There are many reasons why parents should consider putting an emphasis on teaching empathy and fostering emotional intelligence in children. Empathy is the ability to articulate and understand another person's feelings. People who lack empathy do not care for other people's feelings in the way their opposite number does, Understanding the importance of caring for other people's feelings and emotions is essential for living in a healthy society. Empathy is an essential, and often undervalued, life skill.
Emotional intelligence affects the degree to which an individual can control and regulate their own behaviour out of consideration to others. Empathy should be taught as an essential social skill because of its importance in preventing one person bullying another.
Kids that have high levels empathy are more likely to have happy, productive relationships with others I'm against Empathy as the new political buzzword. It's not that I don't think the world could use a lot more empathy: the golden rule is the most human and civilized ethical guideline the world will ever have. What I'm against is staging Empathy as the political pose du jour when our institutions do not support empathy as everyday praxis. 2010-06-06 - Mitchell Rosen - There is some controversy about whether empathy, the ability to understand the world from another person's point of view, can be taught. I have a sinking feeling when parents tell me they wonder if their child lacks the capacity to empathize with others.
They may notice their son or daughter seems to be indifferent to hurting others or may act in a manner that suggests they can be downright mean and not care. That said, I would not overlook early signs of indifference to the suffering of others or disregard for conventional rules. Life presents us with moral dilemmas every day, and the ways in which we respond define who we are ethically. In last week's newspaper, an article described how officers pulled over a police chief who appeared to be driving while intoxicated. That dilemma would be a great question for the next edition of Scruples.
2010-xx-xx - Anna Conlan - You know when you get a glimpse into someone else’s emotional experience or their pain? You can really feel it for a moment and sometimes it might bring you to tears or motivate you to help someone. That’s empathy. Overactive empathy, on the other hand, is when you have that experience of opening up to someone else’s emotions and experience, but then instead of coming back to yourself afterwards and being centered in your own needs and feelings, you remain ‘out there’ – absorbed in everyone else’s ’stuff’.
In social situations, you can sense what everyone else is feeling and thinking. Even walking past people in the street, you can feel and sense what is going on with them. 2010-xx-xx - Anna Conlan - As a very empathic person, I have spent a lot of energy over the last few years learning how to manage my empathy and establishing better energetic boundaries with those around me.
I have noticed that many other people, especially clairsentient, sensitive, intuitive and lightworker types often have similar problems with their empathy and energetic boundaries. For such people, I have always recommended Rose Rosetree’s book for this. 2010-05-02 - Our prisons and jails are fulland getting fullerof people in pain. Emotional pain is one of the prime motivators for addiction and criminal behavior. Being in pain does not excuse someone for committing a criminal act, but it does help explain why so many of us do the dumb things we do. People in pain need empathy, not sympathy. They need relationships with emotionally stable and spiritually mature people, who have the God-given ability to put themselves in the shoes of a hurting person and understand in their hearts how that person feels.
When empathy meets pain, it wants to get involved; it wants to facilitate healing. But it doesn’t give credence to bull stories, either. Empathy wants to get to the heart of the matter and work the problem. That is what empathy does. Unlike empathy, sympathy operates at arms’ length. For any number of reasons, it does not really want to be involved. Sympathy pats someone on the shoulder and says “there, there,” but what a person in pain needs to hear is “here, here.” Empathy says here is where you will find what you need to become free and stay free.
2010-05-20 - Marc Bekoff - Marc Bekoff explains that if we want to understand the roots of human goodness, we've got to look beyond humans. A number of recent books have been concerned with the importance and prevalence of human goodness and empathy. These include Dacher Keltner’s Born To be Good, Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy, and The Compassionate Instinct, edited by the editors of Greater Good. Given my own in animal behavior and cognitive ethology, I’ve written about goodness and empathy and its relationship to fairness and moral behavior from the nonhuman animal’s point of view in The Emotional Lives of Animals, The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons For Expanding Our Compassion Footprint, and, with Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Related articles • Fall 2008 • Spring 2008 • Fall/Winter 2005-06 • November 1, 2009 • Spring 2004 2010-05-21 - Richard Lopez - How do I know that I know what I know – about you? This is clearly a question about epistemology, about knowledge.
But it’s a special kind of knowledge, about others. So far there doesn’t seem to be a definite consensus on how we empathize with others, but there are two prominent theories on the table that try to explain the phenomenon of empathy. The first one, called Simulation Theory. (other) - is known as Theory of Mind—the ability to understand what another person is thinking and feeling based on rules for how one should think and feel. 2010-05-15 - A study found that when we watch someone from our own race do something our simulates the action mentally as a form of empathy, known as 'mirroring'.
But when we see someone of a different race do the same thing we make much less effort to empathize. 2010-05-09 - Compassion fatigue is thought to be the result of dealing with too much bad news or having prolonged time periods confronting difficult issues such as terminal illness, anger or death.
Charles Figley, PhD, scholar and author writes in 2002: 'Compassion fatigue is a phenomenon that occurs when a caregiver feels overwhelmed by repeated empathic engagement with distressed clients.' 2010-05-07 - Mark Olmsted - Arizona's 'Paper's Please' law is the latest in a series of recent political events that underline the decline in empathy in the United States. Americans increasingly resist the simple act of imagining themselves in the shoes of others. This resistance is serious business; its natural consequence is dehumanization.
When you don't quite believe others think or feel quite like you do, it's much easier to jail or even torture them. The contempt for empathy came out of the closet during the hearings of Sonia Sotomayor. I suppose it undercuts the rightwing attachment to American exceptionalism--the idea that we are inherently superior just by virtue of nationality. Nine ways to foster empathy 1. Listen carefully to your child's experiences, asking questions to help them understand their feelings and thoughts. This will help them relate to others on a deeper level.
2010-05-05 - The art of mindreading - empathy or rational inference? The ability to infer what another person is thinking is an essential tool for social interaction and is known by neuroscientists as 'Theory of Mind' (ToM), but how does the brain actually allow us to do this? We are able to rationally infer what someone knows, thinks, or intends, but we are also able to 'slip into their shoes' and infer how they feel, and it seems that the brain processes these different types of information in different ways, as confirmed by a new report in the June 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex (2010-05-05 - Dr. Shock - In this study psychiatrists have the highest mean empathy score on The Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy. They were folowed by Internists, general pediatrics, emergency medicine and family medicine. The differences in empathy scores among psychiatrists and physicians in internal medicine, pediatrics, and emergency medicine were not statistically significant, but physicians in all other specialties scored significantly lower than psychiatrists.
In the middle were physicians in general surgery, obstetrics and gynecology. Anesthetists scored the lowest followed by orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, radiology and cardiovascular surgery. These differences might reflect the notion that different individuals have different empathy scores and are attracted to different specialties.
These differences might also be explained by differences in training for each specialty. • • • • • 2009-09-08 - Dr. Shock - There is a significant decline in empathy occurs during the third year of medical school. This decline occurs during a time when the curriculum is shifting toward patient-care activities. • There is a significant decline in empathy during third year of medical school, regardless of gender or specialty interest. • Every year women scored significantly higher than men.This seems to be regardless of population studied. It also appeared in Italian Physicians and Japanese medical students.
• Except for scores at baseline, students interested in people-oriented specialties scored significantly higher than students interested in tech-oriented specialties. • The magnitude of the decline (effects) was much smaller for women and students interested in people oriented specialties. 2010-05-02 - Lou Sexson - As human beings, we make an infinite amount of mistakes. Many of those wrongs require an apology. The ability to apologize and be sincere is born out of empathy.
By definition, empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” It is more than just another nice sentiment. It is the emotion that is the basis for the conscience. In fact, without it, there is no Jiminy Cricket. Empathy lays the foundation from which we make many of our best decisions. For example, let's say that I think my friend's new hairdo is not the best look for her.
What keeps me from telling her exactly what I think? Being empathetic. 2010-04-30 - slacktivist Empathy, at its most basic level, is epistemic. It is sometimes discussed as though it is identical to love, respect or regard for others, but really it precedes that. It is what makes such love, respect or regard for others possible -- what informs it.
Empathy is a way of seeing, and therefore a way of knowing. To avoid empathy is to limit one's own perspective to only one's own perspective -- to choose not to see and therefore to choose not to know. Worse than that -- it is to choose not to be able to know.
Empathy, in other words, makes you smarter and wiser. Rejecting empathy makes you dumber and more foolish. To choose not to see what empathy shows us is to choose stupidity. 2010-04-28 - Does how much empathy we feel for other people depend on their race? A team of Canadian researchers recently decided to and found that white men show less activity in the motor-cortex area of their brains when they watch men of other races (blacks, South Asians, and East Asians) sip a glass of water than when they watch white men do the same. Typically, certain cells in the brain, called are activated not only when we perform a certain action, but also when we watch another person perform that same action.
2010-04-26 Black Americans: More empathy than whites Northwestern University study suggests that on a neurological level, race matters when it comes to empathy for African-Americans in distress. The study led by Assistant Professor Joan Chiao determined blacks showed greater empathy for African-Americans facing adversity as victims of Hurricane Katrina than whites demonstrated for Caucasian-Americans in pain. 'We found that everybody reported empathy toward the Hurricane Katrina victims,' Chiao said. 'But African-Americans showed greater empathic response to other African-Americans in emotional pain.'
2010-03-29 - Tool Use and The Limits of Empathy One of the ways I've been thinking about balancing this sense of extension and empathy without letting other people become tools is with aikido. An aikido class is basically about two people taking turns throwing one another on the ground with a good amount of power, but ideally no force. Empathy and listening are part of this, but the fundamental idea is to use the force that the person you're throwing is giving you, and to keep that force separate from yourself.
One of the teachers at my dojo puts this idea in terms of posture. He says, 'See, I am the one throwing. I am standing up straight and my feet are on the ground. My partner is the one who's back is contorted and whose feet are moving all over the place.' 2010-03-26 -Marsha Lucas - 'Empathy leads you to very bad decisions.' Empathy, the brain, and relationships.
In a recent search for the latest research and popular media references about empathy, I was stopped in my tracks when I found the video below, in which Glenn Beck expounds on empathy: (see video) Yes, you heard it: Beck states that empathy 'leads you to very bad decisions' (and, yes, he said that it was empathy on the part of Hitler that led to mass genocide). Holy mis-wired, Batman. I'm opting to spare myself (and you) a rant about all that's wrong about this, or from saying much about what is (or isn't) wired in Beck's brain. Instead, I'll use it as a launching point for understanding empathy from the point of view of healthier relationships, and potentially a healthier world. What most of us mean by empathy. Giving empathy a boost From the standpoint of creating a greater capacity for healthy empathy, there are many paths.
One which I've found to be very helpful, and easily accessible, is the simple practice of. 2010-03-15 - Carolyn Zahn-Waxler - Empathy is a feeling we experience when we share another’s pain and sorrow. It is a reflexive response and, as such, it cannot be taught.
Empathy can motivate acts of caring and compassion, such as comforting, helping, sharing, and offering sympathy—however, empathy does not always lead to prosocial acts, and these acts are not always accompanied by empathy. These emotions and behaviors are present even in the first years of life; for example, an 18-month-old coos and sympathizes while trying to comfort a crying infant by hugging and patting him, bringing him a bottle, and getting the mother to help. Many of these responses arise naturally (though more so in some children than others). But nurture can coax their expression and provide examples of ways to care for the needs of others. 2010-03-15 - The Empathic Civilization & The Age of Empathy Jeremy Rifkin's and Frans de Waal's are truly books for these times. If you read only two books this year, make it these! (If you read three, add Tom Atlee's.) I carefully read every page of 's doorstopper (616 pages, not counting footnotes).
I marked it up extensively. I re-read some sections. Next, I listened to the audiobook version of 's take on the deep evolutionary roots of human (and mammalian) empathy. Nearing its end (his discussion of 'The Dark Side'), I was moved to tears more powerfully than by any other book I can remember.
2010-03-11 - Introducing the near-perfect model of empathy Empathy' is becoming the new classroom buzzword, pressed into wide service to signpost a valuable sensitivity at the heart of social and emotional accomplishment. Adobe Download Free. Not only in school: the online newspaper lately made a splash of The Empathic Civilization by the 'social and ethical prophet' Jeremy Rifkin. Rifkin's meditation on the 'race to global consciousness in a world of crisis' reminded Post editor Arianna Huffington of her own 2003 essay on altruism The Fourth Instinct>which she described as 'the call to soul' – not to be confused with any call to survival, power or sex. 2010-03-11 - Clif Cleaveland - Cleaveland: One sad headline follows another: murders at Fort Hood, Texas; faculty shootings at the University of Alabama at Huntsville; a deliberate crash of a private airplane into an office building in Austin, Texas. Less dramatic but no less deadly outbursts of violence occur frequently across our country, including in our community. Is violence so much a part of our DNA that we must arm ourselves and retreat into gated bunkers? Noted biologist Frans de Waal provides an alternative vision in 'The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society' (Harmony Books, New York).
Professor de Waal directs the Living Links Project at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. The biological division of primates includes chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and humans.
2010-01-23 - Our Personal and Political Brains The heavy-weight Ted Kennedy's senatorial seat was filled by a light-weight ─a Don Draper look-alike draped over a Cosmopolitan centerfold! It's not that the Obama is flawless or that the conservative Republican Party is fatally flawed. Obama's escalation of the war in Afganistan is not exactly worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. But then again, neither is the mongering of the Tea Party worthy of killing a national health care bill. That fear kills love, empathy and caring is self-evident in our private lives. That fear kills love, empathy and caring in our public lives is not as clear.
But what is clear is that a mean-spirited ethos pervades our society. 2010-01-28 - How involved do we become when misfortunate falls upon those around us? Our level of affection and acquaintance may determine our response, as well as our level of responsibility; this will obviously be higher in our immediate family than with our friends or with strangers. The three main responses to misfortune are usually clustered around expressions of sympathy, empathy, and compassion. 2010-01-28 - When Empathy Attacks Have you ever known someone who was SUPER empathic? I mean not just like 'hey man, be kind to animals because they're our fellow travelers on this space ship called Earth' but more like, 'Yes, I do identify with (insert the worst movie you have ever seen here) because I think that the artist is entitled to their own vision and I think the people who worked on it worked very hard and criticizing the quality of the movie might hurt their feelings.' 2010-01-26 - I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy lately, and it ties in with something you referred to in your December 1 letter — the concept of “othering.” I guess I’ve been thinking about empathy (or the lack of it) for many reasons.
On the one hand, I think of the tremendous outpouring of compassion for the suffering people of Haiti after the earthquake; and on the other hand, I think about the callous attitudes of many powerful leaders of large financial institutions and corporations who seem unable or unwilling to mentally put themselves in the shoes of millions of people who have had to deal with job loss, mortgage foreclosures, and lack of health care in the midst of the current economic crisis. 2010-01-28 - Joseph Naft - Standing in our shared sameness and accepting people as they are carries us to the threshold of empathy and compassion, wherein we allow others' joys and sufferings, as well as the basic fact of their being, to touch us directly. We willingly enter the experience of other people, celebrating their successes and suffering their setbacks. This is the place of heartfelt prayer and charitable acts for others' welfare.
The walls of separation grow thin and ready to evaporate. 2010-01-31 - The Perverse Lutheran - Empathy The guy on NPR with a book to push was saying that humans and other higher primates are wired for empathy, to think along with one another, to be socially cohesive. I believe (though I'm not sure since I was calculating whether or not I'd make it through a green light at this point)--I believe he pronounced the end of the era of original sin and the beginning of an era where we would begin to understand that history should be written by the common folk who all get along with one another.
Not by the powerful. Lou Agosta, Ph.D -. You are invited to participate in this conversation about empathy, not only in the context of philosophy, but whatever aspect or dimension engages you, the reader. A substantial amount of research has been devoted to the concept of empathy.
However, empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom.
• • • • • • • They could also be called the Empathic Generation. Their international experiences and education have made them more aware than any previous generation of how interconnected the world is.
According to Zogby, they expect to be able to vacation, live and shop anywhere they like, and they prefer to do so with a clear conscience: they want people in developing countries protected from the depredations of multinational corporations and the destructive fiscal policies of multinational lending institutions. 2010-02-11 -Maia Szalavitz - Born for Love: Welcome Blog: Empathy, the Brain, and Human Connections by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD When Dr. Perry and I set out to write about empathy, we knew it was a hot topic in and we knew it had wide-ranging implications. But I had no idea just how big a task we'd set for ourselves. Every day, new studies and new stories about empathetic or extremely un-empathetic behavior appear. There are new books and intriguing results in,,, and education-and many others.
It's almost impossible to keep up. In this blog, we want to highlight some of the data and ideas we couldn't include in our book, which comes out in April. We want to point out important new research and connect it to our ideas about why empathy is so important to everything from to economic growth. We'd also love to hear from others interested in this topic-and start a discussion about the aspects of empathy that matter most. Book: 2010-02-19 - Peter G.
Vajda - Empathy - it's not about cognition In his recent book, 'Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis,' Jeremy Rifkin concludes in one of his chapters: '.what is needed is a more transparent public debate around views of freedom, equality and democracya moratorium on the hyperbolic political rhetoric and incivility.and begin a civil conversation around our differing views on human nature.' But love and empathy are matters of the heart, not the mind, and here is where Rifkin and so many others who posit intellectual, social and cognitive solutions for social ills come up short.
- As a child psychologist, it is clear to me that the quickest route to a more empathic civilization is to stop beating, belittling and in other ways psychologically scarring boys when they are young. Boys from traumatized backgrounds with brutal fathers can grow up to be tyrants and murderers--think about Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia--while boys who have been raised with emotional support almost certainly will not. We need to raise loved and loving boys who have the capacity to grow into empathic leaders and partners. Across cultures, if we want to change the world quickly, our best option is to raise emotionally literate boys who value understanding. 2010-03-3 - Simon Baron-Cohen - In the movie 'Blade Runner,' the earth becomes populated by a species that looks and behaves just like humans, except they lack empathy. The problem becomes how to identify who is truly human, and who is an impostor. In the movie there was an empathy test.
If you took a photo of the person's iris, when presented with an emotional stimulus (a loving phrase, an expression of pain), the true human showed a pupil-dilation reflex only visible using a sensitive camera. The human impostor did not. Is there an unambiguous test to identify if someone has empathy? Empathy seems straight-forward to identify because, countless times each day, we observe surface behaviour that we take to be empathy.
2010-03-3 - - A number of recent books in addition to Jeremy Rifkin's 'The Empathic Civilization' have been concerned with the importance and prevalence of human empathy. These include Dacher Keltner's 'Born To be Good,' D. Keltner et al.
'The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness,' and Frans de Waal's 'The Age of Empathy.' Many animals are far more empathic and fair than many people realize. Even mice are empathic beings and capuchin monkeys and domestic dogs expect to be treated fairly. Individuals who are short-changed during a bartering transaction by being offered a less preferred treat refuse to cooperate with researchers. 2009-09-03 - Article - Laura Casey - In the Bay Area, empathy is the word For the last year or so, Rutsch has been compiling news clips and interviews of the president and his supporters and detractors for a documentary on empathy. He even counted how often the word was used during Sotomayor's confirmation hearing — more than 250 times.more 2009-08-19 - Article - Jared Gniewek - Empathy is needed to write And empathy begins with clothing. This week should bring my musings to a close on the subject of empathy.
I’m sure I’ll return to it at a later date as my conviction remains that it is our brightest blade as writers and as human beings.more 2007-04-25 - Philoctetes Center - - video Roundtable discussion featuring Blair Brown, Vittorio Gallese, Joe Grifasi, Robert Landy, Adam Ludwig, and Tom Vasiliades Mirror neurons as source of empathy and how it relates to acting. A panel of scientists and actors talk about empathy from their different points of view. Art Exit - Hundreds of students were able to explore and engage the Empathy Experience at a recent conference. The Empathy Experience is a mixed media, multi-sensory art exhibit that educates and engages the public on the child trafficking issue in SE Asia. Poem - Circle of empathy The women gathered As if silently summonsed As if a signal had sounded throughout the air A release of emotion Unexpected and not understood Was rippling through the atmosphere.
2010-05-13 - Yesterday I shared. One of the push backs that people always have when I get all soft and touchy-feely and start talking about emotions and empathy, is that philanthropy requires more rigor than an empathetic, emotional approach (supposedly) allows. So I want to point to about how great leaders defy the empathy/accountability tradeoff. 2010-05-13 - Suze Orman: A common pattern among leaders is to adopt a persona that's either excessively tough or overly empathetic.
The assumption at the root of this pattern is that these positions must somehow tradeoff on each other — you can either hold people accountable or support them, but not both. Drill sergeant or grandparent.. We've found that exceptional leaders often defy these tradeoffs 2009-10-29 “Empathy is a characteristic which is hard to learn, and which is ripe for identifying in the recruitment phase through personality testing, for example. Empathy is important for an agent to display in order to make the caller feel that someone is listening to and understanding them, and that they are trying to solve their issue, rather than just seeing the caller as a nuisance.
As such, empathy is vital for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, cross-selling and up-selling.”.more 2009-09-21 - Article - Anthony Tjan. I believe that a small business is likely to deliver better customer service than a large company because of its innate common sense and understanding of the power of empathy. For my money, the two best customer-service practices are sincere empathy over indifferent calmness and common sense over standard operating procedure. These two simple guiding principles remind us how easy it can be to transform the customer experience, and how unfortunate it is that more businesses have not done so.more 2009-09-21 - Article - Empathy is the ability to place ourselves in another’s situation, experiencing their emotions and perspective. If you’re worried that you aren’t good at empathizing, don’t.
We actually have specific neurons in our brains, called, that help us with empathy. So we all have the tools to empathize, we just need to start working them out. So here are a couple tips to cultivating empathy within yourself; a fair warning that these things need to be practiced every day, as often as you can. Yes, they are soft and touchy-feely.more Articles list - Wired To Care Dev Patnaik • Big Think Interview With Dev Patnaik - a good clip of him talking about empathy • • writes a blog at 2010-05-16 - Andy Kaufman - What comes to mind when you think of empathy? Do you think of someone who is highly sensitive and compassionate--maybe even too much? Or does that description sound more like sympathy, where empathy isn't quite as emotional?
2010-01-22 - Article - Wired To Care Yesterday we helped a big client run an off-site meeting about empathy. Empathy with consumers, that is. Sincerely understanding the people who buy, rent, use or refuse your product or service. Empathy is critical if you work in marketing and advertising. The one main lesson of my career (learned and relearned) has been know your consumer.
Knowing your consumer permits you to invent the right product, find the right message to sell it, choose the right media to engage consumers with it, and design the right ads for each medium.* 2010-02-16 - Dev Patnaik - Getting the Fundamentals of Innovation Right For individuals, empathy affords the ability to step outside their own perspective to see the world as other people do. For organizations, empathy is a shared intuition for the people who buy your products and services. That goes far beyond market research.
Companies that create a widespread sense of empathy for the people they serve see new opportunities faster, have the courage to take a risk on new ideas, and make better decisions on all levels. 2009-06-22 - Article - Eve Tahmincioglu - Empathy can go a long way in at the office There’s been a lot of talk about the merits and drawbacks of empathy lately following the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Many have questioned whether a judge with empathy for others, something President Obama has touted as a virtue, would hinder how well she can perform the job of justice. But does empathy make sense in any job? What about in Corporate America, especially given the tough economy and the cutthroat competition? It's not ‘all touch-feely’ “Empathy has gotten a bad rap in the last 25 years in business,” says Dev Patnaik, author of “Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy.” The best organizations and the ones that survive economic tsunamis, he says, are those with empathetic cultures and managers who are able to step outside themselves and walk in someone else’s shoes. It’s not about being all touchy-feely.
“It’s about having intuition and a gut feeling for other people,” he explains. Turns out, there are positives and negatives when it comes to empathy at work. 2009-08-19 - Article - Empathy, one of the competencies of emotional intelligence, is defined as the ability to be aware of, to understand and to appreciate the feelings and thoughts of others. We expect family and friends to empathize as they listen to us. We pay therapists to skillfully listen with empathy. What should we expect of our leaders? As a quality of leadership, empathy is critical to success.
Empathy may, indeed, prove to be the most significant skill of leadership. Try this experiment: Think about the leader you most admire.
Describe what you admire about him or her. Does the following description fit that individual? People for whom empathy is a strength will generally interact well with others one-on-one, and they also work effectively in cooperative efforts. They will probably avoid hurting others’ feelings. 2009-11-22 - Article - Dr.
Dustin Ballard: How to avoid a 'hardened' heart According to a study in Academic Medicine, the 'hardening' of physician's hearts begins in medical school. Using a standardized questionnaire, the vicarious empathy (spontaneous empathetic response) of 419 University of Arkansas medical students was measured at the beginning of each school year. Over time, researchers found a significant decline in student empathy scores, especially after the first and third year. There are a number of potential explanations for these findings: academic workload and stress, poor clinical role models, and, especially after medical rotations begin in the third year, a need for an emotional defense system. In a get-rich-fast, quick fix, 'me' time, bottom-line driven society such as ours, it is awfully difficult to expect a different ethos from medicine. So, while individual physicians can and should (and do) attempt to bring greater empathy to their care, as we enter the holiday season, we might each consider how we can bring greater empathy into our society at large.
Instructor: Dirk Knemeyer 2009-11-02 - Article - Larry Marturano - Organizational Empathy “disciplinary empathy” – the ability to get out of one’s acculturated box and see problems from the point of view of other peoples’ expertise and training. I made the observation that people I’ve run across with high disciplinary empathy are remarkably innovative in teams. Because they get that there is more than one way to look at the world, they can see a problem from multiple perspectives, and see solutions that integrate multiple approaches.
I’d like to talk about a related kind of empathy here – organizational empathy. 2009-11-02 - Article - PRINCETON: Social entrepreneur calls for empathy amid change The most important quality we all must cultivate to participate in the rapidly changing world? Empathy, said veteran social entrepreneur Bill Drayton in a talk delivered at the Friend Center on the Princeton University campus last Thursday. ”There hasn’t been a time since the agriculture revolution that bigger, more fundamental, more hopeful changes are afoot” in the structure of society, said Mr. Drayton, founder, chairman and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a global association of 2,700 social entrepreneurs. Innovative ideas for improving the human condition are originating from all sectors of society and rapidly being tested and implemented, superceding the traditional top-down mode for society, which has existed for 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution, where a small elite dictated what everyone else did, Mr.
Drayton said. 2010-01-02 - Article - Ian Segail - What is Empathy? Empathy is an emotional skill and is necessary to both understand and practice if you are going to be one of the great ones.
The best way to understand empathy is to recognize it. The following are a few example of empathy in motion. 2009-08-19 - Article - Carol Porter - Another question was about what happened with gang members when they went to jail, and if there were any ways that were being implemented that separated them. McAuliffe said that sometimes the gangs in prisons mirrored those on the outside, and other times they fell along racial lines. What troubled him and other attorneys prosecuting the cases, he explained, was the lack of empathy that was evident among the offenders.
Many of them were youngsters who committed the crimes in their late teens and early twenties, but many of them seemed to have no compassion or empathy, meaning they did not know or care about the person they hurt, and they had no concept of what it was like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Once a youngster began going down that road, he continued, it was hard to turn him or her around, and it was very to rehabilitate someone like that. The best thing to do, sadly enough, was to take them off the streets, and to keep them from harming people. “If I were king of the world for a day,” said McAuliffe, “I would give everyone a safe and loving family, and a dose of empathy. You see this lack of empathy, and an inability of them to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes or to see it from their perspective. We are dealing with extremely violent behavior of some young offenders.
The idea of rehabilitating some of these folks tends to be very low. By the time, you are shooting people, robbing folks and killing folks when you are 16, what do you policy wise with these folks.
My answer is you hold them fully accountable. You remove them from the ability to hurt someone else for as long as possible.” 2009-08-19 - The Scottish government made a miscalculation as it weighed justice and mercy in the case of this terrorist. The Scots forgot to temper mercy with empathy for the victims' loved ones. How must the families and friends of the victims have felt, seeing the pictures of the 'hero's' welcome for al-Megrahi at the airport in Libya? Cold comfort that this unseemly demonstration violated a condition for his release. I believe Scotland failed to take empathy into account in adjudicating its civic values of justice and mercy.
Video - - Video Empathy and healthcare. Using fine arts to tap into empathy. (very well done video - a good person to interview) Teaching Med students empathy through fine arts. In ' Primary Practice Family Medicine Queen Lane Campus Queen 2009-09-21 - Article - Empathy is the Key to Creating a Positive Experience I had a recent experience that illustrated the point that it does indeed take empathic listening and understanding to create the appropriate experience. My mother was recently diagnosed with lung cancer after a long bout of pneumonia. This experience brought back the memory of being in a similar position with my father 13 years ago. 2009-09-17 - Article - The Importance of Empathy in Nursing Brent McNutt There is a difference between empathy and sympathy.
Empathy allows you to feel for the patient in a way that helps you to understand their fear and concern about what they are going through. Sympathy is just feeling sorry for them but not extending you past that point. Empathy in nursing is very crucial because nurses spend a majority of time with their patients and sometimes it’s the only interaction that patients have with another person. Empathy is communicating to a patient that you feel for them and want to help them through their hospital stay or through their time while dealing with medical issues. 2009-08-19 - Article - Employees are more productive when they feel valued.
By Julie Fuimano, MBA, RN, CSAC What is Empathy? Empathy is the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another person. The positive psychology definition is: The quality of feeling and understanding another person's situation in the present moment - their perspectives, emotions, actions (reactions) -- and communicating this to the person. So you know what they are feeling, or at least you suspect you know what they are experiencing, and you communicate that to elicit further discussion or clarification. Is an Emotional Intelligence (EI) competency. In the field of Emotional Intelligence, there are four clusters of competencies and 18 competencies.
The four clusters are: • Self-Awareness • Self-Management • Social Awareness • Relationship Management Empathy falls under Social Awareness. This skill reflects a person's ability to connect with others and to relate to them which is essential skill in building and managing healthy relationships.
2009-09-14 - Article - Harvey Black - Patients benefit from a dose of empathy Study finds colds lasted a day less with caring professionals Going to a doctor who understands how you feel and encourages you to get better can do more than boost your spirits. It can also be good for your health.That's the message of a study by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Fla.
Patients with colds whose clinicians showed empathy toward them in an office visit suffered one fewer day of misery than did patients whose clinicians took a just-the-facts approach. The research was published in the July/August issue of the journal Family Medicine..The study is important for another reason, Mercer said. 'It adds significantly to the literature that practitioner behavior does have health consequences.' 2009-11-19 - Article - Empathy, Immunity, and the Common Cold The results of Reference 1 are part of a larger study, called the PEP trial, which stands for Physician, Empathy, and Placebo. Six clinicians (five family physicians and one nurse practitioner) and 350 patients participated in this part of the study.
The measure of empathy was a questionnaire called CARE (Consultation And Relational Empathy), about how well the clinician paid attention to the patient and communicated helpfully. Eighty-four patients reported perfect CARE scores. These patients were sick for an average of 7.10 days, compared to the remaining patients, who were sick for an average of 8.01 days.
2009-11-23 - Article - Connecting with patients Ask Dr. Ship to define compassion and she hesitates, reluctant to reduce its complexity to a greeting-card sentiment. She has just won the Compassionate Caregiver Award from the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, a Boston-based foundation that honors clinicians for humanizing medical care. Ship practices internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where her patients and their families say her warmth and loyalty have helped them cope with chronic illnesses through the years. Can you teach empathy? I don’t know if you can teach empathy, but I think you can encourage connecting with people.
Empathy comes from finding a piece of oneself in somebody else. 2009-12-02 - article - - Many authors who write about empathy in medicine are careful to draw a bright line between sympathy and empathy. For example, Hojat in his excellent survey of research on Empathy in Patient Care, considers the two concepts as almost dichotomous, albeit with a small area of overlap. Arguing that the process of medical education tends to diminish our openness to others' feelings and experience, Spiro believes that enhancing clinical empathy is more of a restoration project, rather than a pedagogical one. I take sympathy to mean an emotional state in which we desire to 'feel another person's emotions better' (Hojat's language, 1, p. In clinical medicine this translates to 'connect with' another person's suffering. In other words, to have sympathy for a patient is to have genuine care or compassion for that patient.
Empathy in Patient Care. New York, Springer, 2009, pp. Empathy: Using resonance emotions in the service of curiosity. In: Spiro H et al (Eds.) Empathy and the Practice of Medicine, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. What is clinical empathy?
J Gen Intern Med. 2003; 18: 670-674 4. What is empathy and can it be taught? In: Spiro H et al (Eds.) Empathy and the Practice of Medicine, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992 2009-08-12 - article - Volunteers share empathy for aged The Nicholls State University nursing faculty developed “Take a Walk in My Shoes,” which takes volunteer nursing students into the community at large to teach caregivers and others how to help and relate to elderly patients. The tight vest and the bright yellow jumpsuit teaches the wearer about some of the problems her patients face every day.
“It’s not about making these people feel sorry for the older adults,” said Lacey Eschete, a 22-year-old from Thibodaux. “It’s about being empathetic.” 2009-06-25 - Empathy Training for Physicians - Video Research shows good communication between doctor and patient is an essential part of a positive medical experience. Theater VCU partnered with the VCU School of Medicine in a program that teaches doctors how to effectively connect with their patients. 2010-01-05 - Empathy isn’t a course you can sign up for. It’s a way of looking at other people and trying to imagine what it would be like to be them. This is a teachable skill.
Empathy is a particularly human ability, and those that don’t show much of it are not well liked. We are born with our brain chemistry wired for a particularly great amount of it, or maybe a lesser amount in some people. Some have an intuitive skill and some don’t. I’ve seen this in children: some find it easy to sense a playmate’s feelings, and some seem oblivious. Can we teach it?
2010-02-18 - Empathy in the Doctor’s Office - audio The Cleveland Clinic is hoping to increase empathy among its physicians. Studies have shown that doctors who are more empathic are less likely to face malpractice lawsuits and more likely to have patients that comply with their treatments. Doctors who agree to participate in this pilot project will take part in reflective writing exercises. If it's successful it's a program that could be used at hospitals across the country. Eric Wellman sat down with Dr.
Anita Misra-Hebert who's heading up this project at the Cleveland Clinic. Garland - Extended Essay - 2010-05-02 - Ugo Uche - Are Empathetic Teenagers More Likely To Be Intentionally Successful? Is There A Positive Correlation Between Empathy And Success? But what about empathy? Can teenagers who are more empathetic intentionally succeed? Also, how can students be taught to be empathetic?
The very nature of being empathetic, involves looking past one's own perspective in any given situation and understanding as best as possible the needs and experiences of another person. Teenagers who are empathetic tend to be more purpose driven and they intentionally succeed in their academics not because they are looking to make good grades, but in most subjects their goal is to understand the subject material and to utilize the knowledge as one of their ever increasing tools. Teenagers who struggle with being empathetic, tend to be more self absorbed and less caring towards others, and ironically themselves Empathy and Mirror Neurons: Or, Monkey See, Monkey Yawn; Baby See, Baby Dance **** More germane to this blog’s brain-based focus, however, I was struck by how each video demonstrated qualities of empathy.
Recently, some politicians have publicly scorned empathy – perhaps because they mistakenly equate it with weakness. Yet, as a third video explains, leading neuroscientists say that our society depends on empathy. In other words, the smart money is on nourishing empathy, not castigating it.
I’m no neuroscientist, but I have read about mirror neurons, most recently in Marco Iacoboni’s book. The way I see it, this baby possesses an extraordinary ability to “mirror” these dancers. • emotional contagion • • 2010-05-18 - Art McFarland - Video The 'Teaching Empathy' anti-bullying program is helping kids to understand each other at one city school. Part of a program to prevent school bullying is simply talking about it. David Levine created the weekly program, which he runs at P.S./M.S.
20 and at several other schools in the city and the suburbs. He calls it, 'Teaching Empathy'. 'Empathy is the capacity to imagine what someone else is going through, as a first step, and then making a choice to offer support,' said David Levine, a behavior specialist.
2010-04-17 - Maia Szalavitz - How Not to Raise a Bully: The Early Roots of Empathy Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person's shoes — has suggested that it is key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality. Without empathy, we would have no cohesive society, no trust and no reason not to murder, cheat, steal or lie. At best, we would act only out of self-interest; at worst, we would be a collection of sociopaths. 2010-03-26 - Julie Smith - Teaching children empathy One of the best gifts a parent can give a child is to teach them to have empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand what another person is feeling in order to get along better.
It requires a person “put their self in another’s shoes.” Not only does is help an individual understand another’s feelings, it helps a person understand his or her own feelings. Research has shown that children who are empathetic and able to emotionally connect in more positive, loving ways are more likely to succeed in life. They are better equipped to get along with people. As a result, they tend to do well in school, handle negative moods effectively and have fewer behavioral problems. Empathy is a complex skill that is learned over time.
It involves a constant process that lasts throughout childhood. The most powerful ways to teach children empathy is to be empathetic yourself in your parenting. 2010-03-31 - Virginia Prescott - No More Bullying, Teaching Kids Empathy - Audio (schools implement empathy curriculums, good to listen to!) Nine high school students were indicted Monday on felony charges in the suicide case of a 15-year-old Massachusetts freshman.
And her family had moved to the country from Ireland last year. The young teen hanged herself in January after relentless bullying from peers. So what does an empathy curriculum look like? We asked these questions last spring. 2010-03-29 - Maia Szalavitz - One of the least-praised pleasures in life -- and yet one that is probably most likely to bring lasting happiness -- is the ability to be happy for others. When we think about empathy, we tend to think of feeling other people's pain -- but feeling other people's joy gets short shrift That must change if we want to have a more empathetic society. While working on our forthcoming book, (my co-author is leading child trauma expert Bruce Perry, MD, PhD), one of the most common questions I've gotten is, 'What can parents do to raise more empathetic children?'
Book: The Teaching Empathy resource set (book and CD) focuses on teaching the pro-social skill of empathy by naming and practicing it, and by modeling and encouraging it. The four sections of this resource set will help you build a culture of caring in your school: 2009-10-15 - Article - Learning Empathy From Apes has audio KPBS in touch with others emotions. Maternal care. 2009-09-21 - Article - Children in the “blue room” at the Stroum Jewish Community Center feel anything but blue. They're participating in a new program that aims at helping young children develop emotional health and empathy. The larger hope is that children, like Ava, who get in touch with their own emotions, will go on to be a little more sensitive to other peoples’ feelings.
It could come in handy any time another student looks like they’re feeling blue. Listen carefully to your child's experiences, asking questions to help them understand their feelings and thoughts. This will help them relate to others on a deeper level. Encourage them to act on empathetic feelings by listening, assisting or being generous. Emotions are key to empathy, so help your child name what they're feeling - frustration or sadness - to help them make sense of their emotional world. I’ve been reading about how to teach empathy to children. I came across some good advice.
Among the ideas are common-sense suggestions such as teaching politeness and talking about feelings. - Mary VanClay At around 8 or 9, children begin to develop the cognitive skills necessary to understand the concept of empathy. But even 6-year-olds are preoccupied with fairness and concerned about being treated well, and they want others — friends, strangers, even characters in books — to be treated well too. Here's how to nurture these budding displays of empathy. • Label the feeling.
• Praise empathetic behavior. Encourage your grade-schooler to talk about his feelings — and yours • Point out other people's behavior.
• Teach nonverbal cues. 2008 - Gwen Dewar, Ph.D. - Empathy and the brain Human empathy depends on the ability to share the emotions of others—to “feel” what other people feel. It is regarded by many people as the foundation of moral behavior.
But to some, the concept seems rather airy-fairy. What does it mean to say “I feel your pain”? Isn’t that just a fanciful flight of the imagination? Well, not really. For one thing, it turns out nonhuman animals—-even rodents-—show evidence of empathy. For another, it appears that empathy has a neurological basis.
2009 - Gwen Dewar, Ph.D. - The case for teaching empathy: Why we shouldn’t expect empathy to “just emerge” Oxytocin. Experiments report that adult men who inhaled oxytocin (the “cuddle” hormone) performed better on tests requiring them to “read the emotions” of other people by looking at their eyes (Domes et al 2008). Studies suggest that both males and females produce their own oxytocin when they are engaged in pleasant social interactions—including “small talk” and hugs.
So kids who grow up in “oxytocin-friendly” environments might have an easier time learning to interpret nonverbal cues of emotion. 2009 - Gwen Dewar, Ph.D. - Teaching empathy: Evidence-based tips for fostering empathy in children 1: Address your child’s own needs, and teach him how to “bounce back” from distress 2: Be a “mind-minded” parent 3: Seize everyday opportunities to model—and induce—sympathetic feelings for other people 4: Help kids discover what they have in common with other people 5: Teach kids about the hot-cold empathy gap 6: Help kids explore other roles and perspectives 7: Show kids how to “make a face” while they try to imagine how someone else feels. 8: Help kids develop a sense of morality that depends on internal self-control, not on rewards or punishments 9: Teach (older) kids about mechanisms of moral disengagement 10: Inspire good feelings (and boost oxytocin levels) through pleasant social interactions and physical affection 2009-12-09 - Article - Ben Porat Yosef fourth-graders study empathy Is it possible to teach empathy? Can a teacher instill positive character traits along with reading and math skills? Jewish day-school educators continually seek effective approaches to this challenge.
At Ben Porat Yosef in Paramus, two initiatives recently were launched with the goal of fostering empathy for people who are different because of age or ability. “I think modeling is the key,” said fourth-grade teacher Michal Kahan. “You can talk to children about disabilities, but if they don’t see how you deal with people who have those disabilities, they won’t know what to do.” 2009-06-22 - Article - “In light of these convergent findings from separate research groups in three different countries, it seems increasingly likely that exposure to children’s storybooks (and perhaps movies), helps them to develop an understanding of other people and their internal states.” We discuss quite a bit on this site, particularly the hypothesis that reading can improve our capacity to feel and understand the emotions of others. Much of the research that has been done on this issue to date, including our own, has been correlational in nature. This means that we don’t know whether reading causes increased empathy, or whether people who are more empathic are more likely to seek out fiction. 2009-06-10 - Article - A Compelling Empathy One of the most fascinating aspects of fiction film is that it enables us not just to see how empathy can happen in a drama, but to experience how it can work strongly in ourselves. Four months, three weeks, and two days shows us the workings of empathy both in its plot and in our experience as we watch the film.
Set in Romania, the film was written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, who based it on a real story he heard which, he said, affected him for more than fifteen years. The plot revolves round a student, Gabita (played by Laura Vasiliu), who is pregnant. 2009-08-21 - Article - Research Bulletin: Differences in Empathy Empathy is feeling with another person.
It's important in life, and important in the psychology of fiction because it seems to be a basis for theory of mind and for indentification with fictional characters. What is its opposite? There are two ideas. The first is that its opposite is interest in things rather than people. The second is that its opposite is contemptuous violence towards others.
On both these dimensions, girls and women have, on average, more empathy than boys and men. Simon Baron-Cohen, Rebecca Knickmeyer and Matthew Belmonte (2005) argue that empathizing is the capacity to predict and to respond to the behavior of people by inferring their mental states and responding to these with an appropriate emotion. Systemizing is the capacity to predict and to respond to inanimate systems by analyzing input-operation-output relations and inferring their rules. On average, females are stronger empathizers and males are stronger systemizers. (The authors further argue that autism is an extreme male pattern.) 2009-06-02 - Article - The Role of Empathy in Fiction The role that empathy plays in the comprehension and experience of fiction has been debated at least since Adam Smith’s The theory of moral sentiments was published in 1759.
These ideas continue to have currency in such recent books as Suzanne Keen’s (2007) Empathy and the novel and Lisa Zunshine’s (2006) Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. You can find references, and micro-reviews for both these books in our list of books on the psychology of fiction. We regard identification with a character as the literary application of empathy, and we think that it is one of the most important of the psychological processes that are at work during our engagement with fiction.
2009-12-12 - Article - - Empathy and What It Teaches Us We all know that a guiding principle of positive psychology is that “Other people matter.” What is it that makes other people matter to us? On November 13, 2009, I attended at the 92nd Street Y (www.92y.org) in New York City. The theme of the conference was Building Empathy and Resilience: The Role of the Early Educator. It was meaningful to me that early educators are exploring how, or if, empathy is teachable.
When I think about all the good positive interventions we know, I realize there are few that exercise our empathy. 2009-12-22 - Article - Nine ways to foster empathy 1. Listen carefully to your child's experiences.
2010-01-01- Article - - Five ways to expand your empathy It is usual, at this time of year, to make a series of earnest New Year’s Resolutions which – by tradition – you resolutely fail to keep. Why not try promising yourself some New Year’s Explorations instead and widen your personal horizons. Expanding your empathy might offer just what you are looking for. Empathising is an avant-garde form of travel in which you step into the shoes of another person and see the world from their perspective. It is the ultimate adventure holiday – far more challenging than a bungee jump off Victoria Falls or trekking solo across the Gobi desert. Here are my five top tips for transforming yourself into an empathetic adventurer over the coming months. 1.CULTIVATE CURIOSITY ABOUT STRANGERS 2.LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES 3.TACKLE YOUR FAMILY EMPATHY DEFICIT 4.TAKE AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY 5.CHALLENGE YOUR PREJUDICES 2010-01-07- Article - - games I love the new focus in education on the skills and dispositions needed for our students to succeed in the years to come.
It feels like a return to many of the fundamentals that have been passed over since the inception of NCLB which spawned a concentrated refocusing on test scores. While teachers do need to be accountable, it is not simply for student achievement on test scores but for how well the students are prepared to take on the challenges that the world presents. The question then follows, how do we teach many of these skills? How does one teach a student to think critically or be empathetic?
Looking at empathy, the most valuable way I have seen comes from experiences; from the participation in and exploration of the student’s own ideas and feelings in the context of real and meaningful experiences. 2010-01-07- Article - Definitions may be helpful here. If you have sympathy for someone, you are sorry for them, and show this in the way you behave towards them. If you sympathize with someone, you agree with them. If you take an action in sympathy, you are supporting someone. Some synonyms are: pity, commiseration, and condolences.
On the other hand, empathy is the ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own. Someone who empathizes is imagining the same sensations as that of those actually experiencing them, and someone who sympathizes is thinking, 'God, I'm glad that's not me.' Empathy recognizes that we are all have something in common; Sympathy implies a kind of distinction between human beings, based on luck, intelligence, or social class, or race, or other justification or defensive measure. - AngerCoach Online - Empathy - video anger and empathy. Understanding Empathy - Seven Tips For Raising Compassionate Children Empathy is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes and trying to relate to what they might be feeling. Out of empathy comes caring, consideration, compassion and even remorse (if you are unable to think how your actions might hurt another person, how can you possibly feel bad for what you have done?).
Some people purposely try to turn off empathy to eliminate getting hurt and others are not stimulated to create the brain pathways for empathy in the first place. Seven tips for encouraging empathy: 2010-01-20- Annye Rothenberg -Teaching Empathy to Children Many parents are noticing that their children don’t seem very empathetic. Parents and teachers are concerned that too many children don’t appear to notice others’ feelings or care if others are upset. Empathy is the cornerstone for meaningful, close, and satisfying connections between people – both children and adults. We want our children to care about others. We want them to be able to look at things from the other’s perspective – not just from their own.
Seeing only your own perspective makes you more self-centered and selfish and less likely to take responsibility for your actions. People who understand how their actions affect others are likely to choose more appropriate behavior, show better judgment, and repair rifts in their relationships with others. 2010-01-28 -Dr.
Joan - In my mind, empathy is probably the most difficult, yet the most vital quality a child can possess. While no one can always be kind and empathic, I think it’s important to teach your child that empathy is a trait that your family values from an early age. The development of empathy in your kids may not come easy.
Think about it – children, by their very nature tend to be self-absorbed creatures, looking after their own interests without much concern about what other people think. (My guess is we all know numerous adults with the same characteristics! ) For kids, it is more natural to not fully grasp why empathy is such an integral part of a healthy life, and yet without empathy they run the risk of growing up to be self-absorbed, narcissistic, selfish adults. Remember that Empathy Can be Taught: • 2. Let Kids Know That the World Doesn’t Revolve Around Them: • 3.
Point Out How Other People Around You are Feeling: • 4. Talk about What’s Happening in the World: • 5.
Teach Empathy by Being Empathetic: 2010-02-15 - - Empathy’s Natural, but Nurturing It Helps Empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and recognize and respond to what that person is feeling, is an essential ingredient of a civilized society. Lacking empathy, people act only out of self-interest, without regard for the well-being or feelings of others. The absence of empathy fosters antisocial behavior, cold-blooded murder, genocide. The capacity for empathy seems to be innate, and is evident even in other species — the adult elephant who tried to rescue a baby rhino stuck in the mud despite being charged by its mother, as recounted by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy in “When Elephants Weep” 2010-02-17 - - How to Teach Kids Empathy While research suggests we're born compassionate, we can cultivate our empathetic tendencies. Research suggests that empathy may be an innate human characteristic. We just can't help it; our hearts go out to those who are suffering. However, some say that the amount of compassion we're born with is not all we can achieve.
Psychologists say that it's possible to cultivate children's natural empathetic tendencies, reports the. Somewhat ironically, the way to make kids relate to others better is to help them feel good about themselves.
2010-03-01 - David Elkind - - Child development Empathy is the earliest social disposition to appear in the course of human life cycle. Toddlers will try and comfort another child who is obviously unhappy or in pain. Young children are, however, not yet able to empathize with those who do not give any obvious signs of emotional distress. Preschoolers might, to illustrate, comment loudly on the size of stranger's nose, or ears, totally unaware of the impact this might have on the other person.
This is not cruel, it just represents the fact that young children do not yet understand what another person might be feeling if they have no visual clues to guide them. 2010-03-09 - Modeling kindness and empathy Barbara Coloroso, author of several books on parenting, bullying, and conflict resolution, says parents must model behavior to create kind, empathetic children. In her book “The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander,’’ Coloroso lists seven steps to stop bullying: 201-06-10 - 'Roots of Empathy is about supporting children and nurturing kindness. Our students are privileged to take part in such a wonderful program. The Ministry of Education is proud to support an initiative that fosters emotional literacy - creating more welcoming and caring classroom environments.'
Nearly 3,350 children in Toronto and 18,000 in Ontario participated in the program in 2009-10 with the support of the Government of Ontario. 2010-05-24 - - When kids are able to watch an interaction that's empathic, empathy isn't just being taught; it's being demonstrated,' says Dr. Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.
ROE is unique, he notes, because it 'combines the direct observation of babies and their mothers, weekly time devoted to talking about the internal world of mind and watching a baby grow up over time.' Among the program's many big-name fans: the Dalai Lama, who has twice appeared publicly with Gordon and thinks ROE can help spur world peace.
Although human nature has historically been seen as fundamentally selfish, social neuroscience suggests otherwise. Researchers are finding that empathy is innate in most humans, as well as in some other species. Chimps, for instance, will protest unfair treatment of others, refusing to accept a treat they have rightfully earned if another chimp doing the same work fails to get the same reward. 2009-11-24- Amanda Jeffery - Planting the seeds The Early Childhood Development Centre is helping children express their feelings at a younger age thanks to a program called Seeds of Empathy. Like Roots of Empathy, a program already offered in several schools in the Drayton Valley area, Seeds of Empathy brings babies into the classroom to interact with the children.
Through this interaction the children learn how to empathize with others. 2009-09-13 - Article - Baby steps toward a more peaceful world Mary Gordon wants to change humanity by rewiring a child's brain — one child at a time. A noble idea, but is it possible? Whether she is speaking on a panel with the Dali Lama or to students at Harvard University's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, Gordon's theme is the same: the world will be a better place if children grow up understanding the other's perspective. There will be no more genocides, no more wars, no more racism or violence, she declares.
She has built what she believes is a road map to achieve a kinder, gentler humanity. But it wasn't until she came up with her Roots of Empathy program, an offshoot of her parenting and literacy work, that she began to see how a simple idea could transform the world. Her book, Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child, has just been published in the United States, following publication here four years ago. It was a Canadian bestseller, winning praise from the likes of Fraser Mustard and Michael Fullan of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Since then she has won the endorsement of the Dali Lama, who has embraced her program as a way to build world peace. Gordon spoke on a panel with the Dali Lama in both Vancouver and Seattle in 2006 and 2008.
Teaching kids to care about others: Experts are divided as to whether empathy is innate, learned or both Chris Zdeb, Edmonton Journal The Roots of Empathy, a national and international organization whose mission is to build caring, peaceful and civil societies through development of empathy in children and adults, uses babies in classrooms to achieve its goal. A parent and baby visit once every three or four weeks through the baby's first year. Carolyn Parkes, provincial manager for Seeds of Empathy in Alberta, a program aimed at children in preschools and day cares, says the program uses babies 'as a lever for discussions about social and emotional concepts. Extract Tarma Installer Pro there. ' 2009-12-22 - Article - Video - Learning for Life: Teaching your child empathy towards others Linda Filley-Bentler from the Roots of Empathy program explains how teaching your children how to feel compassion will help their emotional development. 2009-05-29 - Babies teaching empathy The youngest teachers in Western Washington are being honored for teaching empathy by 'cooing and crawling.' KING 5's Mimi Jung has a look at the 'Roots of Empathy' program.
2010-01-09 - Article - Roots of Empathy founder will speak in Langley The woman who created one of the most successful programs to encourage children to understand and demonstrate empathy will be the guest speaker at Seeds of Success later this month. Mary Gorton, an internationally recognized educator, advocate for children and expert on parenting, is the founder of Roots of Empathy and Seeds of Empathy, two groundbreaking programs which help in children’s development. 2010-02-18 - - We are building our world on a social fault line where we have failed to realize the greatest minds alone will not solve social problems. We also need great hearts at the table.
'The Empathic Civilization' shines light on evidence from neuroscience that shows human nature is empathic. The basis for solving all of the problems we face is empathy.
If homo empathicus can get that right, we allow for the viability of our physical and social universe. And yet our ecosystems are withering on the vine without empathic input from a globalized, interconnected, citizenry. We may be on the verge of the Age of Empathy, but we still have a long journey ahead.
In fact, I would argue that we are in still in our infancy, and that we live in an emotionally illiterate North America. 2005 - Taking Lessons from a Baby The program rests on the premise that by forming a collective attachment to “their” baby, children in each classroom will strengthen their relationships with one another and learn “emotional literacy”—the ability to identify emotions, explain why people feel these emotions, and develop ways for handling their own emotions. It draws upon years of research suggesting that when children can understand how others feel, they are less likely to hurt them by bullying, exclusion, and aggression, and are more likely to be kind and altruistic. At the same time, Roots of Empathy helps the next generation of parents appreciate the emotional and practical demands of raising children. 2009-09-13 - Article - Thomas B.
Edsall - Democratic Fault Lines Open Up Values disputes are beginning to pit the party's 'empathy' wing against its more tightfisted 'discipline' wing. The Democratic coalition's ability to bridge its economic, regional, and class differences is endangered by values conflicts threatening to emerge over a wide range of domestic issues, including health care, global warming, labor rights, and consumer protection. Such values disputes may well complicate regional and class tensions, pitting the party's ' empathy' wing against its less liberal, more tightfisted ' discipline' wing. 2009-10-06 - Article - - Instead of Bombs and Bribes, Let’s Try Empathy and Trade Sadly, one thing that has entirely escaped modern American foreign policy is empathy. Without much humility or regard for human life, our foreign policy has been reduced to alternately bribing and bombing other nations, all with the stated goal of 'promoting democracy.'
But if a country democratically elects a leader who is not sufficiently pro-American, our government will refuse to recognize them, will impose sanctions on them, and will possibly even support covert efforts to remove them. Democracy is obviously not what we are interested in.
It is more likely that our government is interested in imposing its will on other governments. This policy of endless intervention in the affairs of others is very damaging to American liberty and security. 2009-01-18 - That's where Hope 2.0 comes in. If the votes aren't there, the people need to create them. Just like King did.
They need to build a movement. And to make that happen, we need to adopt another of the great lessons of Dr. King's life: elevating the role empathy must play in our society. We've seen a great outpouring of empathy this past week, spurred by the wrenching scenes of devastation in Haiti.
With the rare exception of the likes of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, empathy comes naturally to most people. Indeed, 16 years ago I wrote a book -- The Fourth Instinct -- about the instinct that compels us all to go beyond our impulses for survival, sex, and power, and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring beyond our selves and our families to include people we may never meet, and parts of the world we may never see.
It's an instinct that, if harnessed, can have powerful political implications. King showed that for a movement to become broad-based enough to produce real change, it must be fueled by empathy. And that's exactly what his nonviolent direct action sought to do. King understood that he needed to tap into the empathy of whole constituencies that would not themselves be the direct beneficiaries of the civil rights movement. And so he set about making a compelling moral case by bringing the 'ugliness' and 'injustice' front and center -- forcing many in white America to see for the first time that millions of their fellow citizens were effectively living in a different reality than they were. He created pathways for empathy and then used them to create a better country for everybody. While taping last week's, I was discussing Jeremy Rifkin's.
Tony Blankley teasingly retorted: 'Evolution, cruel as it is, determined that empathy is not a survival trait.' And if you watched the on the Hill last week, you would agree that empathy has not been a trait necessary for success, let alone survival. But if we are to continue to survive -- maybe not as a species, but certainly as a thriving democratic society -- human evolution has to, well, evolve.
And we are going to need all the empathy we can get. Without it, we'll never be able to create the kind of national consensus required to tackle the enormous problems that face us. Watching the CEOs, I was stunned by the utter lack of even a feigned sense of empathy for those whose lives the banks have destroyed.
Only a complete inability to feel empathy could explain the fact that the bankers are not just back to operating at their old bonus levels, but at their old smugness levels as well. 2010-01-25 -George Lakoff - - The majority vote campaign gives us a chance to talk not only about this particular issue, but about democracy as it affects all issues.
The clearest articulator of what democracy is about has been Barack Obama - the campaigner we cheered for, campaigned hard for and voted for. Democracy, he has observed, is based on empathy - on citizens caring about one another. That's why we have principles like freedom and fairness, for everybody, not just for the rich and powerful. True empathy requires responsibility, not just for oneself, but also for others.
And since we, as individuals and as a nation, are far from perfect, empathy demands an ethic of excellence, of making oneself better, one's family and community better and one's nation better. If you live in California (one out of eight Americans does), then join the California Democracy Movement. If you live elsewhere, form your own democracy movement and unite with us.
The principles are simple, and they are Obama's: Democracy is about empathy - caring about your fellow citizens, which leads to the principles of freedom and fairness for all. Empathy requires both personal and social responsibility. The ethic of excellence means making the world better by making yourself better, your family better, your community better, and your nation better. Government has two moral missions: protection and empowerment for all.
To carry them out, government must be by, for, and of the people. - A Series of articles on empathy • Empathy or the ability to appreciate someone else’s emotions and express this emotional awareness is a capacity that differs amongst individuals.
• Responsiveness to the emotional state of another plays a fundamental role in the patient doctor relationship (PDR) as well as in other human interaction. Sympathy and empathy are not the only responses in the PDR. Other responses can be consolation, kindness, politeness, compassion, and pity. • A number of studies suggest that women may be more empathic than man, on average this is obviously true. From experience alone this statement seems reasonable. Nevertheless, some men can be more empathic than women but overall women are more empathic. A number of brain regions have been suggested to be involved in empathy.
Two recent studies were published on brain regions and gender differences in empathy. • No I don’t think so.
For several reasons. Empathy is a process with different steps. Especially feeling what the patients feels is a quality not every doctor has. And if they do it is not always appropriate nor possible to be sensitive enough to use it. Moreover this process not only needs the quality it is also costs energy, depends on the relationship with the patient, and needs experience.
• There are patients with this is a rare condition. They don’t feel pain, cognition and sensation is otherwise normal; for instance they can still feel discriminative touch (though not always temperature), and there is no detectable physical abnormality. They offer a unique opportunity to test the model of empathy.
Does the lack of self-pain representation influence the perception of others’ pain. • In a prior post on this blog about sometimes a distinction is made between cognitive and affective empathy. These two concepts refer to our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another person, be it in their mental or emotional shoes. These concepts are difficult to differentiate. Especially for cognitive empathy this is a simplification since mental states could in principal also include feeling and emotional states. The ability to infer what another person is thinking is an essential tool for social interaction and is known by neuroscientists as ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM), but how does the brain actually allow us to do this? We are able to rationally infer what someone knows, thinks, or intends, but we are also able to ‘slip into their shoes’ and infer how they feel, and it seems that the brain processes these different types of information in different ways, as confirmed by a new report in the June 2010 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex.
Empathy at • 2010-03-19 - Helen Thomson - HORROR films are simply a disconcerting watch for the majority of us, but for Jane Barrett they are literally torturous. She writhes in agony whenever the actors on the screen feel pain. 'When I see violence in films I have an extreme reaction,' she says. 'I simply have to close my eyes. I start to feel nauseous and have to breathe deeply.'
Brain regions responsible for relating to others lit up when volunteers watched a robotic hand • 2. Evidence continues to show that animals (including humans) are naturally cooperative - so why do we cling to the idea that nature is red in tooth and claw?
Marc Bekoff 15 September 2009 • 3. New research suggests empathy requires no specialised brain area, meaning there is no reason why monkeys and other animals cannot empathise too Helen Phillips 24 April 2004 • 4. Fifty years after she began studying chimps, the conservationist explains why emotional involvement helped her understand them – and could save them Charlotte Uhlenbroek 24 February 2010 • 5. THE ability to empathise is often considered uniquely human, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. But it might in fact be an incredibly Helen Phillips 24 April 2004 • 6. Implicated in empathy, language, and even consciousness itself, mirror neurons have now been directly observed in people for the first time Gordy Slack 12 November 2007 • 8. Physicians damp down feelings of empathy and regulate their emotions to remain professionally detached, brains scans reveal New Scientist - Health 06 October 2007 2010-03-11 - Ray B.
Williams - We may be moving into the Age of Empathy, reconciling conflicting concepts of faith and reason and tapping into the latest brain science. This Age of Empathy will have a significant impact on the preparation of leaders and how they act in organizations.
Greed is out. Empathy is in.
That's how Frans de Waal begins his book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons For A Kinder Society. De Waal is a biologist, professor of psychology and director of the Living Link Center at Emory University. In 2007, Time magazine selected him as one of the world's most influential people. 2007-07-24 - Article - David Dobbs - Do animals feel empathy? Do animals feel empathy? This question could draw scoffing dismissal from many scientists only a few decades ago.
Now it receives marvelously productive attention in neuroscience, psychology, and the burgeoning field of. Below, two leaders in these fields, Emory University primatologist and University of Chicago neurobiologist, review both the history of animal studies of empathy and a particularly thought-provoking recent mouse study from the McGill University lab of Jeffrey Mogil. As de Waal and Mason note, this clever study holds surprises about both the baseline and the limitations of empathy in these small, 'simple' rodents. One can't read these reviews without seeing one's own empathetic capacities and limitations in a new light.
2009-09-15 - Article - Review: The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal MANY people have argued that humans are naturally cooperative. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Russian zoologist and anarchist, neurobiologist and psychologist, among many others, have all made the case that our animal nature is characterised as much by kindness and collaboration as it is by competition and carnage. Now, the prolific primatologist joins the fray to convince people that we are not such nasty creatures after all. Empathy, de Waal explains, is the social glue that holds communities together, and if humans are empathetic animals it is because we have 'the backing of a long evolutionary history'. 2009-07-11 - Article - That a candidate for the Supreme Court needs empathy, as Obama emphasized, is almost too obvious to pay attention to. Because apart from psychopaths, all humans are endowed with empathy, which is the capacity to be affected by the emotional states of others, and to become part of their situation.
I can see how conservatives won't see much need for it, because their ideology tries to operate without empathy, such as when Rush Limbaugh mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms or when Missouri Representative Cynthia Davis opposed school lunches, opining that 'hunger can be a positive motivator.' These are great examples of what happens when empathy is in short supply. 2009-12-01 - Article - De Waal - How Bad Biology Killed the Economy An unnatural culture of greed and fear has brought the global economy to its knees. We need to start playing to our pro-social strengths, says Frans de Waal The CEO of Enron - now in prison - happily applied ‘selfish gene’ logic to his human capital, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Assuming that the human species is driven purely by greed and fear, Jeffrey Skilling produced employees driven by the same motives. Enron imploded under the mean-spirited weight of his policies, offering a preview of what was in store for the world economy as a whole. 2009-12-01 - Article - We May Be Born With an Urge to Help But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. Tomasello “Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative. Much the same conclusion is reached by Frans de Waal in another book published in October, “The Age of Empathy.” Dr. De Waal, a primatologist, has long studied the cooperative side of primate behavior and believes that aggression, which he has also studied, is often overrated as a human motivation. “We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr.
De Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s situation, he notes, are psychopaths. Indeed, it is in our biological nature, not our political institutions, that we should put our trust, in his view. Our empathy is innate and cannot be changed or long suppressed. “In fact,” Dr. De Waal writes, “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.” 2009-10-24 - Article - Empathy is natural to animals Empathy, an emotional tuning to others' feelings, and the altruism that accompanies it, seems in short supply in the human world.
With bankers greedily re-amassing fortunes, wars for oil, and rogue states on the hunt for nuclear muscle, humanity seems close to the dog-eat-dog vision of Thomas Hobbes, the war of all against all, in which 'man is wolf to man'. There is a widely held assumption that humans are hard-wired for relentless and ruthless competition, locked into a Darwinian struggle for survival and individual success.
For centuries some economists and biologists have argued that nature, red in tooth and claw, requires us to be selfish too. The Dutch psychologist and primatologist Frans de Waal sees nature differently: as a biological legacy in which empathy, not mere self interest, is shared by humans, bonobos and animals in general. In his new book, The Age of Empathy, De Waal cites an amazing array of evidence to show that altruism, self-sacrifice, co-operation and even notions of fairness abound not just among our close primate relatives but throughout the animal kingdom. Frans de Waal - Russian Doll Model of empathy Empathy: The capacity to a) be affected by and share the emotional state of another, b) assess the reasons for the other’s state, and c) identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective. This definition extends beyond what exists in many animals, but I employ the term “empathy” even if only the first criterion is met as I believe all of these elements are evolutionarily connected.
Frans de Waal - Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism:The Evolution of Empathy Waal (2008).pdf Evolutionary theory postulates that altruistic behavior evolved for the return-benefits it bears the performer. For return-benefits to play a motivational role, however, they need to be experienced by the organism. Motivational analyses should restrict themselves, therefore, to the altruistic impulse and its knowable consequences. Empathy is an ideal candidate mechanism to underlie so-called directed altruism, i.e., altruism in response to another’s pain, need, or distress. Evidence is accumulating that this mechanism is phylogenetically ancient, probably as old as mammals and birds. 2009-11-14 - Roman Krznaric - In search of our inner ape: An interview with Frans de Waal In an exclusive interview for OUTROSPECTION, I speak to the renowned Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal about his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.
De Waal, voted by Time Magazine as one of the 100 World’s Most Influential People Today, is Professor of Primate Behaviour at Emory University in the US. Author of numerous books on social cooperation in primates, he is famous for arguing that empathy is a natural trait in humans and many animal species. 2009-11-09 - Steven E.
Levingston - Animal empathy and its political implications Primatologist Frans de Waal has some surprising news about human empathy: among the beasts of the animal kingdom, we are not alone in this emotion. De Waal says research shows that both lab rats and elephants, among other creatures, have an instinctual tendency toward empathetic behavior. Instead of killing this laudable tendency toward empathy with arguments based on a faulty understanding of the natural world, I just hope we will give it room to be expressed. In the end, everyone will be better off if we join forces the way our ancestors and their ancestors have done for millions of years. 2009-10-19 - The Science of Empathy (good for newsletter) Frans de Waal, professor of primate behavior at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, says kindness is just as innate as competition, in his new book.
2009-10-01 - Alan Boyle - What chimps can teach us De Waal: Well, empathy is sometimes defined by psychologists as a high-level cognitive feat – you put yourself in the shoes of somebody else. But actually, the core of empathy is an emotional tie between A and B: You see someone crying and this makes you feel sad.
I see you smiling and that makes me happy, or I smile myself. That’s a very basic connection you can observe in many other animals. I’m not saying that you will necessarily see it in fish or birds, or reptiles, but certainly in mammals. There are now even studies in rodents indicating this capacity. When you get to our closer relatives, you get to more complex relationships that are more similar to ours. They're not just connected with each other and affected by each other's emotions.
They are also interested in figuring out what is going on with the other and understanding it, and maybe helping in a particular way. And so in the primates especially, our close relatives, you get more forms of behavior that are more similar to what we call empathy.'
2009-10-10 - Article - Without God, we will live like animals! After listening to the between Bill O'Reilly and Richard Dawkins, it struck me again that the resistance to evolutionary theory largely stems from the illusion that without God there can be no morality. Some believers feel threatened by evolutionary theory not because the theory is right or wrong -- the evidence doesn't seem to matter much to them -- but because accepting it would mean accepting that we have been created by natural processes including our morality. The final part is what bothers them the most. 2009-10-19 - Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors Ardi casts doubt on the notion that we have an innate killer instinct Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another? The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate.
But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became the poster boys for our violent origins and aggressive instinct. The empathy literature on animals is growing fast, and is no longer restricted to such anecdotes. There are now systematic studies, and even experiments that show that we are not the only caring species. At the same time, we are getting used to findings of remarkable human empathy, such as those by neuroscientists that reward centers in the brain light up when we give to charity (hence the saying that 'doing good feels good') or that seeing another in pain activates the same brain areas as when we are in pain ourselves. Obviously, we are hard-wired to be in tune with the emotions of others, a capacity that evolution should never have favored if exploitation of others were all that mattered. 2009-09-xx - Article - By Frans de Waal - Contagious laughter, yawns, and moods offer insight into empathy’s origins.
That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s “shoes.” And yet empathy is often presented as a voluntary process, requiring role taking, higher cognition, and even language. Accordingly, most scholarly literature on empathy is completely human centered, never mentioning other animals. As if a capacity so visceral and pervasive could be anything other than biological! To counter such widespread views, I decided to investigate how chimpanzees relate to and learn from one another. 2009- Gary Olson - The Age of Empathy Corrects Prevailing Notions About Human Behavior The next time you find yourself in a contentious conversation with someone who’s arguing that humans are inherently selfish, embrace killing and war, and (mis) using terms like “Social Darwinism,” give them a copy of Frans de Waal’s latest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons For A Kinder Society (Harmony, 2009).
Only continue the discussion after they’ve read it. 2009-09-24 - Article - Chimpanzees' Caring Behavior Toward Others Hints at the Emotion's Antiquity; the Mystery of the Contagious Yawn In his new book -- 'The Age of Empathy' -- Dr. De Waal, director of Living Links Center at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, traces the origins of our ability to put ourselves in another's place. Drawing on his experiments and studies by other animal behaviorists, he highlights how chimpanzees and other primates console each other, prefer to share, and nurse the injured. There are no fossils of feelings, but as our closest living relatives, Dr. De Waal believes these primates are reminders of empathy's antiquity.. Human empathy has evolved into a divining rod that enables us to understand other people's feelings and sensations even if we have never experienced them ourselves.
2009-08-27 - Article - Max Fisher - Does Capitalism Work If Humans Are Altruistic? Altruism, or selfless acts that benefit others, have long been a of human behavior.
The closest thing to conventional wisdom has been that selflessness is only an illusion of self-interest; we act altruistically because we expect reciprocation. But some anthropologists now argue that millions of years of evolution have hard-wired us for altruism, not self-interest. This theory is the subject of a new book ' by primatologist Frans de Waal. What de Waal is challenging is the very idea that our default is Thomas Hobbes's brutish ',' or perhaps that the state of nature even really exists 2009-08-07 - Article - The evolution of empathy - Less brutish, still short BOOK: The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.
By Frans de Waal. Crown; 304 pages;, His new book, “The Age of Empathy”, looks at altruism and sympathetic fellow-feeling in both humans and other animals. Click here to find out more! His title has a double-meaning: empathy is both very old and freshly topical. It is as ancient as the entire mammalian line, he argues, engaging areas of the brain that developed in our distant ancestors over 100m years ago. And we are also entering a new age of empathy, he thinks, brought on by the financial crisis (the product of a selfishly oriented system), and marked by America’s election of President Barack Obama, who has re-emphasized the importance of compassion and helping one’s neighbor. The book is a polemic, and its main target is what Mr de Waal takes to be a distorted idea of human life as relentlessly selfish and ruthlessly competitive.
2009 September 29, Contagious yawning in gelada baboons as a possible expression of empathy Communicated by Frans B. De Waal, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, September 29, 2009 (received for review May 9, 2009) Yawn contagion in humans has been proposed to be related to our capacity for empathy. It is presently unclear whether this capacity is uniquely human or shared with other primates, especially monkeys. Here, we show that in gelada baboons ( Theropithecus gelada) yawning is contagious between individuals, especially those that are socially close, i.e., the contagiousness of yawning correlated with the level of grooming contact between individuals. This phenomenon, here demonstrated in monkeys, could be a building block for full-blown empathy. 2009-08-07 - Article - Darwin on empathy Frans de Waal says Darwin was insightful in his writing on empathy. He knew animals intimately and understood their emotional lives.
And he drew lines from this to human behaviour and empathy. Empathy is a mammalian characteristic. The simplest form of empathy is being emotionally affected by the emotions of somebody else. If you are caring for offspring who are vulnerable you need to get upset when they are hungry or endangered. This could explain why human females have more empathy than males.
2009-09-24 - Article - Eric Michael Johnson - Survival of the Kindest In his latest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that social darwinists like Skilling have learned the wrong lessons about the natural world. The nasty, brutish existence dominated by “savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit” that Dawkins describes is far from the norm for animals that live in social groups. They thrive because of the cooperation, conciliation, and, above all, the empathy that they display towards fellow members. The support and protection they receive from living in a group more than compensates for any selfish advantage they might have achieved on their own.
Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of humans—known as psychopaths—no one is emotionally immune to another’s situation.” Furthermore, many of these same characteristics can be found in the primates he’s studied for more than 20 years. 2009-12-28 - Article - STRANGE BUT TRUE: Animals show kindness Q. When Belgian biologists studied about 2,000 dogs that got into spontaneous fights, they noted that nearby dogs would come to comfort the contestants, especially the losers, licking, nuzzling, playing with them.
So 'dog-eat-dog' doesn't even hold for dogs. What are a few other of Nature's lessons for a kinder society? Countless stories are told of human swimmers saved by dolphins or whales, sometimes protected against sharks or lifted to the surface for safety, says Frans de Waal in 'The Age of Empathy.' There are also cases of apes saving birds or of a seal 2009-12-28 - Article - The Age of Empathy. Kinder Society.
If you're not familiar with Frans De Waal, he's a primatologist possibly most famous for his book Our Inner Ape, which I also received as a gift over the holidays this year. My introduction to De Waal was in one of my favorite books, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. He's featured in the NOVA special 'The Last Great Ape', which I highly recommend. De Waal's books have a consistent theme: That the common perception is that human morality is a triumph over our animal nature; that morality comes from somewhere else – from the church, from the law, from God – and that we need this external source of morality to conquer our competitive, selfish nature. 2010-01-03 - Article - Reviewed by Jennifer Curry - The Age of Empathy For more than a decade now, primatologist Frans De Waal has examined the evolutionary origins of morality among humans and other primates. In his latest book, The Age of Empathy, he takes a more overtly political approach than in his previous works, though the foundations of his arguments are still deeply rooted in biology. Empathy, according to De Waal, is not only the foundation of ethics and morality but also an adaptation 'as old as the mammalian line.'
It is not soft-hearted whimsy, it is a robust evolutionary trait that has ensured the longevity of our species. - Video (Society becoming more empathic, Supreme Court example, from maternal care, Oxytocin, cross species empathy, conservatives see Social Darwinism, competition v. Empathy, degrees of empathy in many animals ) 2010-01-16 - - Frans de Waal & David Berreby - Video Outline • ( 04:11) • ( 06:54) • ( 18:48) • ( 12:48) • ( 04:08) • ( 08:14) 2007-00-00 - - video Research into the innate capacity for empathy among primates: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society,' and Carl Zimmer, Discover magazine. Clips • • • • • • • • • Discussion between and. ( 11:26) 2007-01-17 - - The predominant opinion used to be that humans are rational profit-maximizers. Society was built around this principle, with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as its political champions.
Biology supported it, by talking of 'selfish genes,' which some mistook to mean that we must by definition be selfish, too. In the meantime, primatologists were debating altruism, too, and found the same or similar outside of our own species. Monkeys and apes sometimes take great risks to help each other, for example against predators (chimps in the forest defend each other against leopards) or enemies (females defend each other against violent males). Chimpanzees spontaneously share food with each other, and in recent experiments it was found that primates will secure rewards for others even if this does not benefit themselves in any way. Since they didn't need incentives to do so, it is possible they were doing it for some internal reward. Perhaps other primates, too, derive pleasure from giving. 2010-01-00 - Frans de Waal.- The Evolution of Empathy Empathy's not a uniquely human trait, explains primatologist Frans de Waal.
Apes and other animals feel it as well, suggesting that empathy is truly an essential part of who we are. Once upon a time, the United States had a president known for a peculiar facial display. In an act of controlled emotion, he would bite his lower lip and tell his audience, 'I feel your pain.' Whether the display was sincere is not the issue here; how we are affected by another's predicament is.
Empathy is second nature to us, so much so that anyone devoid of it strikes us as dangerous or mentally ill. At the movies, we can't help but get inside the skin of the characters on the screen. We despair when their gigantic ship sinks; we exult when they finally stare into the eyes of a long-lost lover. 2010-02-02 - Frans de Waal - I Have Seen My Shadow, and It's Human! After many of such tests it has now been concluded that, yes, primates other than humans love to help each other.
They do care about the welfare of others as much as humans do, which is to say, some of the time. This has implications for, because all too often politicians start from the assumption that society needs to be structured around competition, given that this is how nature works. Their dismal, inaccurate view of the natural world thus informs their view of human society. Too bad if some people have no health insurance, so the argument goes, so long as those who can afford it do.
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona went one step further by voting against coverage of maternity care, because, as he explained, he had never had any need for it himself. I feel that we should hold Senator Kyl and others of his species aloft in the glaring daylight and see what their shadow tells us. If they don't see the sun soon, there will be a never-ending winter. 2010-02-10 - Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat - Book Review - The Age of Empathy Frans de Waal is a Dutch-born biologist who's one of the world's best known primatologists.
He is a professor of psychology and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. In this well-written book filled with anecdotes and stories, de Waal makes the case that human beings are not nasty, brutal creatures looking out only for ourselves but empathetic beings often animated by compassion. Drawing from his own research on animal behavior, he reveals that we are 'preprogrammed to reach out.'
Human empathy has 'the backing of a long evolutionary history.' 2009-11-16 - Article - Samanth Subramanian - Understanding the triggers of empathy - Video ok Vilayanur S. Ramachandran If you look at the properties of mirror neurons, they’re involved obviously in empathy, involved in taking another person’s point of viewall of this corresponds quite preciselyto the known deficits in autism. So it can’t be a coincidence if you say this is the main core deficit of autism. But this is still controversial, because we’ve proposed this and there’s a lot of evidence in its favour, but I wouldn’t say it’s conclusive. 2009-11-00 - - Video ok The neurons that shaped civilization 2009-08-27 - Article - Marco Iacoboni on imitation Imitation and empathy He spoke about 'the chameleon effect'--some people are more imitative than others, and a tendency to imitate is correlated with a tendency to be more empathetic.
He showed two photographs of President Jimmy Carter and his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, at two different times at the same event; in both cases the chief of staff was in the same physical position as Carter, standing next to or slightly behind him. When feeling what others feel, the mirror neurons simulate facial expressions, which then feed through the insula to the limbic system, where you feel the emotion. He referred to research on imitating and observing facial expressions proposing a neural model of empathy in humans (Carr et al., PNAS, 2003). We are 'wired for empathy,' he said, and notes that he used to quote a French phenomenologist on this point, but since that's not popular among U.S. Philosophers he needed to find a champion of the analytic school of philosophy.
He offered two quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, one which began 'We see emotions. We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom.
We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features.' 2009-12-26 - Article - Why we wince and gasp in empathy with TV heroes WHEN watching horror films or thrillers, people wince and gasp when seeing characters hurt or terrified. When watching an exciting football game, people feel surges of elation or disappointment, just like the players who score a goal or miss a shot. These feelings of empathy are triggered by mirror neurons -- 'the brain cells that fill the gap between self and other by enabling some sort of simulation or inner imitation of the actions of others,' explains Marco Iacoboni in his book 'Mirroring People.' ' Mirror Neurons, mirroring, imitation. Studies on monkeys show they value fairness Author: Mirroring People 1. 2005-01-25 - - Video ok This excellent video explains the scientific and physiological basis of Empathy 0 006-08-24 - - Video ok Mirror neurons as source of empathy, Story of boy with Aspergers Syndrome, Interviews VS Ramachandra, Image of cheerleaders in mirrored room.
- Video ok 2009-10-01 - Cassie Wierenga - Empathy may lead to altruistic motivations, researcher reports The answer to whether a person can unselfishly value the welfare of another may be found in current research on empathy, a University of Kansas researcher told a meeting in Chicago Wednesday. Daniel Batson, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, maintained that people can value things outside of themselves. “The more we value the welfare of others, the more likely we are to feel empathic concern, which then results in the altruistic motivations,” he said. 2009-10-01 - Cassie Wierenga - Empathy may lead to altruistic motivations, researcher reports During a first-of-its-kind academic conference on empathy, held Wednesday at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center downtown, Batson presented his research on the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
He shared the results and implications of his research in this Q&A with Medill Reports. 2007- - Video ok Dan Batson delivers an address on “' at the 2007. He mentions his definitions starting at 10:00. 2009-12-09 - Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive. 2009-02-12 - Dacher Keltner - Two hundred years ago today, Adam Gopnik writes in, two pebbles — Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln — were dropped into the sea of life. Their ideas and forms of eloquence have redirected the currents of humanity.
One current of Darwin’s thought is well-known. His theory of evolution by natural selection would require new genesis stories about the origins of life forms, less arrogant notions about man’s place in the great chain of being, and a rethinking of our species as one in flux—and with rather hairy relatives. Less well-known is a second current of Darwin’s thought — his conception of human nature. Think of Darwin and “survival of the fittest” leaps to mind, as do images of competitive individuals — collections of selfish genes — going at one another bloody in tooth and claw. “Survival of the fittest” was not Darwin’s phrase, but Herbert Spencer’s and that of Social Darwinists who used Darwin to justify their wished-for superiority of different classes and races. “Survival of the kindest” better captures Darwin’s thinking about his own kind.
Dacher Keltner The Compassionate Instinct Dacher Keltner reveals the compassionate side to human nature. Topic: Compassion & Altruism 2010-05-21 - Liz Ozaist - Lemondrop: Where did you get the idea for this experiment? Professor Kendrick: It all started with research I was doing with sheep in the 1980s. I found that oxytocin was released in the brain when females gave birth or suckled their young, allowing them to form emotional and empathetic bonds with their offspring. Over the last decade, further research has confirmed that it's also important for promoting pro-social behavior, including trust and generosity.
Going into the study, we knew that certain recreational drugs, such as Ecstasy, have pro-social effects on people because they're involved in the release of oxytocin. But what we wanted to uncover is whether oxytocin by itself can act as an empathogen 2010-05-02 - Jeffrey Kluger - - time.com Both schizophrenia and autism are defined by a lack of social feeling and an inability to read facial and other cues. In a study last February at the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive in Lyon, France, investigators administered oxytocin spray to 13 children with mild autism.
After treatment, the participants were better able to read body language cues during a game of catch and, when looking at photographs of faces, spent more time studying the images — especially the eyes — than they would have otherwise. 2010-05-01 - Nasal Spray May Make Men More Empathetic Modern medicine may have found the answer for the insensitive jerk. Researchers in and the claim it’s possible to make men more empathetic and caring by using a nasal spray which increases the level of oxytocin in the human body. Oxytocin, sometimes called the “cuddle hormone,” promotes bonding between mothers and their children, among other things.
A study involving 48 men showed that those who received oxytocin attained levels of empathy normally associated with women only. It also showed that the spray boosted the men’s ability to learn from positive feedback.-Noel Brinkerhoff •.