When you have senior parents who need increasing support, empathy is critical. You try hard, and not always with success, to understand what they are experiencing. That’s called empathy.
The concept of empathy has received a bit of a bad rap the past year or two with politicians actually taking the time to deliver statements against looking at the world through an empathic lens (I could write an entire post just on these tactless quotes). During some U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for judges questions on empathy played a central, and I think somewhat silly, role.
Remember compassionate conservatives? It wasn't that long ago when Republicans attempted to portray themselves that way. The phrase had a nice ring to it, but now it seems the GOP has given up on any nice-guy pretensions....
Soak the poor is an easy maxim to run against. Republicans might want to think about that and get a little compassion back into their message.
Empathizing and systemizing in the Autism Spectrum Conditions Simon Baron-Cohen Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC), Cambridge, UK vice-president of vice-president of INSAR. (video is translated and difficult to hear, but you can see the slides) .
Putting empathy under the microscope he explores four new ideas: firstly, that we all lie somewhere on an empathy spectrum, from high to low, from six degrees to zero degrees. Secondly that, deep within the brain lies the ‘empathy circuit’. How this circuit functions determines where we lie on the empathy spectrum. Thirdly, that empathy is not only something we learn but that there are also genes associated with empathy. And fourthly, while a lack of empathy leads to mostly negative results, is it always negative?
As a scientist, Baron-Cohen dislikes the term “evil” and proposes “empathy erosion” as an alternative. One has to confess that it doesn’t quite have the same resonance. “The empathy-eroded Count Dracula sank his fangs into her neck” lacks a certain elan. Why swap terms anyway? Because empathy erosion is more measurable than evil, and thus more congenial to the white-coated technicians of the mind. But why should being able to measure something in the laboratory be the key factor?
Children like David develop empathy effortlessly, and the benefits are both immediate and enduring. They tend to be more popular, better at communication, have higher self-esteem and do better academically. Throughout their lives they find socialising and relationships easier. The benefits of empathy affect others as well. Those in their orbit feel understood, appreciated, valued and included.
Further down the spectrum, children like Thomas have trouble developing empathy, and difficulties ensue.
Guest PJ Manney joins Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon in a discussion of how empathy may prove a critical factor in determining what sort of future we experience.
Topics include:
- What to make of recent findings concerning the physiological nature of empathy.
- Why empathy exists in so many animals, including humans
- Why as the world becomes more complex, we may need it more and more
The participants were also asked to rate how embarrassed they would feel if they were in the person's position -- and also whether they were feeling chagrined for that person -- and then took another survey intended to rate the participants' empathy. Not surprisingly, empathetic folks were more likely to experience secondhand embarrassment, proving what we already suspected:
Empathy is one of the most important aspects of creating harmonious relationships, reducing stress, and enhancing emotional awareness – yet it can be tricky at times. I consider myself to be quite empathetic, but notice that with certain people (especially those I don’t like or agree with and also with myself at times) and in particular situations, my natural ability and desire to empathize can be diminished or almost non-existent.
Kornrath argues that part of the explanation for decreased levels of empathy for young people may be as a result of changes in parenting styles in the 1980's, when parents focused on nurturing if not spoiling children, and focused on success and competition. The researchers observed that young people today "may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don't have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited.
A conversation between Frans de Waal, author of "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society," He says, a torturer needs empathy to know how to inflict pain.
Carole Jahme reviews two new books about the science of empathy, Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baron-Cohen, and Pathological Altruism edited by Barbara Oakley.
Where you sit on the empathy spectrum will have an effect over the sorts of things that make you cry. More significantly, how much or how little empathic understanding you possess will shape the course of your life.
Empathy is a powerful ability that most mammals possess to a greater or lesser extent. Strange then that science only started tuning in to empathy in the 1960s. Simon Baron-Cohen is one of a few scientists who have continually focused on the genetic and environmental factors involved.
I recently returned from Peter Breggin's Empathic Therapy Conference in Syracuse, NY. It was a phenomenal event, attended by nearly 200 physicians, psychologists, recovered mental health consumers, authors and advocates. It was inspiring to be surrounded by so many people who are dedicated to a humane and hopeful approach to help those who struggle with mental and emotional distress.
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.
Click here to go to the Empathy Cafe Magazine Front Page http://bit.ly/dSXjfF Empathy and: Animals, Art, Compassion, Education, Empaths, Health Care, Learning, Justice, Teaching, Work, Self-empathy, Self-compassion, etc
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“The trouble with sanctions: Organizational responses to deviant anger displays at work,” co-authored with University of Baltimore’s Lisa T. Stickney, stated that “when companies choose to sanction organizational members expressing deviant anger, these actions may divert attention and resources from correcting the initial, anger-provoking event that triggered the employee’s emotional outburst.”
Managers who recognize their potential role in angering an employee “may be motivated to respond more compassionately to help restore a favorable working relationship,”
Empathy is the drive to identify another person’s thoughts and feelings and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. We now know quite a lot about which parts of the brain are used when we empathise and how empathy grows in typically developing children. We also know that hormones in the womb, specific genes, and your early environment all influence how much empathy you have. There are several ways in which one can lose one’s empathy, and this is clearly seen in psychiatric conditions such as personality disorders.
Simon Baron-Cohen is a controversial figure in the autism community due to his theories about what is behind autism and that there is a failure of theory of mind in autistic children (and a failure of empathy). He has a new book coming out in the US in May, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, which is already available in the UK under the title Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty
Baron-Cohen has made a major contribution to our understanding of autism. Autistic people lack any comprehension that other people have feelings. They do not understand what empathy is. Like most psychologists, he loves categorising and measuring. He describes how our degree of empathy can be measured, and how our scores form the familiar shape of the bell curve. If you want to find your Empathy Quotient (EQ), the questionnaire is in the book.
"We are wired for empathy," says Dr. Marco Iacoboni, professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. "Human instinct is to be empathic. We can't help it." For centuries, he says, scientists thought of empathy upside-down: that we were animals fighting for survival and it was only our higher brain functions that allowed us to feel cooperative emotions such as empathy. Neuroscientists are now finding that our brains are wired on a very basic level to feel empathy for others, though obviously the capacity for empathy varies from person to person.
In general, however, neuroscientists are finding that the more empathic a person is in general, the higher the level of embarrassment and discomfort they feel for others when they see another's embarrassing situation.
My five-year-old niece recently saw a girl bullying one of her classmates. The teacher intervened and made the bully put on her victim's pair of shoes. This curious punishment was a literal rendering of the Native American saying: "Walk a mile in another man's moccasins before you criticise him." It was also an instance of creating empathy – the art of stepping into the shoes of others and seeing the world from their perspective.
The power of empathy has been recognised for millennia, at least since theatre audiences in ancient Greece wept at the tragic suffering of the heroes on stage.
In two consecutive studies, using behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors show that the experience of vicarious embarrassment is linked to empathy and neural activations in brain areas constituting the affective component of the pain matrix: the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula.
The authors generated four kinds of everyday life situations eliciting vicarious embarrassment.
People diagnosed as psychopathic have difficulty showing empathy, just like patients who have suffered frontal head injury, according to a new study from the University of Haifa.
"Our findings show that people who have psychopathic symptoms behave as though they are suffering frontal brain damage," said study author Simone Shamay-Tsoory, PhD.
The benefits of altruism and empathy are obvious. These qualities are so highly regarded and embedded in both secular and religious societies that it seems almost heretical to suggest they can cause harm. Like most good things, however, altruism can be distorted or taken to an unhealthy extreme.
Pathological Altruism presents a number of new, thought-provoking theses that explore a range of hurtful effects of altruism and empathy. Pathologies of empathy, for example, may trigger depression as well as the burnout seen in healthcare professionals.
researchers found that those holding conservative views tend to have larger amygdale, the almond-shaped organ in the center of the brain that's linked to fear, anxiety and emotion; and a smaller-than-average anterior cingulate, a region of the brain linked to sorting through conflicting information and maintaining a more optimistic outlook. The opposite was true for subjects identified as liberal.
Many psychological reports published over the years have also shown conservatives to be more sensitive to threats in the face of uncertainty, while liberals tend to be more open to new experiences.
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