Click here to go to the Empathy Cafe Magazine Front Page Henry Evrard, a neuroanatomist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany has discovered a neuron linked to empathy and self-awareness in the brains of macaque monkeys. The cell, called the von Economo neuron, is found in the anterior insular cortex, a small brain region that plays a crucial role in human self-awareness and related neuropsychiatric disorders. It was previously thought that only humans, great apes and large mammals with complex social lives possessed the cell. Take a look inside The Mission Hill School, a Boston public pilot school, where education focuses on the whole child rather than the test. "We are not just including people, we are embracing people. This idea of empathy is just crucial."
[Video starts talking about collaboration and empathy from the 3 min mark onward. A revolution in learning. Students have more independence. The school has an open space. Focuses on life skills and not on memorizing facts. Creating a climate of trust, inclusion, support. They have five habits of mind, evidence, conjecture, connections, relevance, empathizing with the viewpoint of others. The science of mirror neurons. Students need to practice empathy. 
Inquiring Mind: Compassion training speaks to such a profound need in the world. How did this secular program come about?
I have two requests:
Whatever science you do, make sure that it is impeccable from a scientific standard.
And secondly, whatever program you develop for teaching compassion, make sure it is completely secularized and universalizable. 
[It's graduation time!! Will new graduates enter a world of greed or of empathy?? Here's a commencement address to UC Berkeley Psychology students by Dacher Keltner, director of the Greater Good Science Center.
Dacher basically talks about the importance of creating a culture of empathy and compassion. He contrasts a culture of greed v. a culture of empathy and reviews some of the latest science that supports empathy. I encourage you to read it. ]
"We can care because we have evolved the capacity to rise above the loud demands of the internal voice of self-interest, and imagine the minds, interests, and concerns of others. This empathic flight is enabled by mirror neurons and large portions of the prefrontal cortex of the brain...
We are separated by the boundaries of our skin, we are separate constellations of trillions of cells, but in the reaches of our mind we are connected to one another. Other people’s gains and costs can become our own. And in these acts of empathy, where we see the world through the eyes of others, we come to understand that we all suffer, we all yearn for the happiness of our children. We come to see that we share a common humanity."
The conversation explores how a transnational approach to feminist theory can uncover erasures of women’s experiences, and asks what happens when the current culture of commodification puts a price on everything – including empathy.
3) Your most recent work is on empathy and international development. Can you briefly outline the main premise of this work?
This work is part of a book I’m writing, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, forthcoming), that examines the potentialities and risks of figuring empathy as a tool for transnational social justice. The idea for the book started from an observation that ‘empathy’ today seems to be everywhere – and is everywhere presumed to be ‘good’.
By GWENDOLYN 
In his “The Antiquity Of Empathy” Perspective article in the May 18 issue of Science, Frans de Waal, PhD, Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, writes animal empathy is best regarded as a multilayered phenomenon and that empathy may be the main motivator of pro-social behavior.
To support this, de Waal transitions between historical information on empathy research, sharing that the evolution of empathy is thought to go back to mammalian maternal care, and the current research focus on the human species’ capacity for cooperation, empathy and pro-social behavior. He writes, “Developments in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics and animal behavior have begun to question the view, dominant until a decade ago, that animal life, and by extension human nature, turns around unmitigated competition.”
de Waal believes we are getting close to seeing the full spectrum of empathy-based altruism. Research has shown empathy is biased toward ingroups, which presents challenges in our modern world that seeks to integrate groups, ethnicities and nations. Still, he writes, empathy may be our only hope for advanced cognitive perspective-taking and pro-social behavior, and, therefore, warrants continued investigation of its neurological basis as well as its evolutionary antiquity. 
Researchers have uncovered rare brain cells in monkeys, which can be tied to self-awareness and empathy in humans.
Max Planck scientists found that the anterior insular cortex is a small brain region that plays a crucial role in human self-awareness and in related neuropsychiatric disorders. An exclusive cell type – the Von Economo Neuron (VEN) – is located there. 
BETSEY STEVENSON: "And then there's this other issue, which is portraying him as a guy who has no empathy for people. And that really resonates, because he comes across as a guy who has no empathy for people, in many different dimensions.
You know, you've got the gay-bashing thing when he was in high school. You've got his wife saying I don't feel rich, even though I'm richer than 99.99% of Americans. I mean, they come across as really having no empathy for people." 
Oxytocin is sometimes called the love hormone because it has a role in maternal bonding.
In a new ongoing, double-blind, placebo-controlled study at Yale School of Medicine, a team of researchers have reported that oxytocin can increase brain function in areas that are associated with the processing of social information in young people who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD)...
The study, which is the first of its kind, involves administering oxytocin in a nasal spray to the study participants and then observing their brain function using functional magnetic resonance imaging. 
Two years ago, at a meeting on science and education, Richard Davidson challenged video game manufacturers to develop games that emphasize kindness and compassion instead of violence and aggression.
With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor is now answering his own call. With Kurt Squire, an associate professor in the School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative, Davidson received a $1.39 million grant this spring to design and rigorously test two educational games to help eighth graders develop beneficial social and emotional skills — empathy, cooperation, mental focus, and self-regulation. 
Oxytocin, often referred to as a love hormone, boosts activity in brain areas of autistic children involving sight, hearing and understanding other people.
These are the preliminary results from an ongoing, large-scale study led by postoctoral fellow IIanit Gordon and Kevin Pelphrey, associate professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale School of Medicine.
img http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin
Compassion is one of the most important of character traits, yet its an attribute that comes from learning, mostly in the school of hard knocks. People who have compassion reflect the face of God, because He Himself is compassionate to all.
Compassion is what we feel when we identify with the pain, and suffering of others. It’s the ability to emotionally put yourself in someone else’s skin and feel what they feel. Its having empathy and sympathy for the suffering of others. Its one of the most important of the middot, yet its an attribute that comes from learning through our own experiences instead of by reading.
by drschiffman |
If we really want to care about online influences and behaviour and stem the tide of casual cruelty, anti-social behaviour and glamorisation of violence, we can't simply blame the tools or new interactive social media and games. No, what we need is to start to creatively rekindle our understanding of empathy for a connected e-world.
You can't download this as a plug-in, or a patch, Just as a programme like "Roots of Empathy" introduced a live baby to help children re-connect and gain an empathetic understanding and connect with their feelings so we now need a new understanding, a new "e-pathy" to remind us of our humanity and curb the actions of many internet users who risk becoming "comfortably numb."
by Stephen Carrick-Davies 
Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others' emotional expressions such as smiles triggers often the corresponding emotional response in the observer. Such synchronization of emotional states across individuals may support social interaction: When all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.
Although the term "compassion fatigue" is well-known, some psychologists are starting to argue that the term should be changed to "empathy fatigue."
Empathy can be defined as emotional resonance -- feeling what others are feeling. Our brains actually have specialized mirror neurons designed for this purpose. Mirror neurons evolved to help us quickly know if someone is friend or foe by registering feelings such as anger or friendliness in our own bodies.
by Kristin Neff
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StartEmpathy is a community of individuals and institutions dedicated to cultivating empathy in the 21st Century. This website is meant as a platform to facilitate empathy learning in our schools and in our homes.
We define empathy as the ability to understand the feelings and perspectives of others, and to use that understanding to guide one’s actions. Our premise is that empathy is critical both to individual human development and to our collective ability to solve problems and build a stronger society. 
David Levine offers online classes and conferences about Personal Development & Coaching, Personal Development & Coaching, Interpersonal Communication.
In this specialty session, David will present how to implement three specific classroom/culture building tools from his book Building Classroom Communities: The Listening Wheel, The Fishbowl, and The Community Meeting. Conflict resolution, planning and problem solving will also be explored. Although this service is offered on-line, you may wish to contact David through his Learn It LIve Inbox and request a workshop on-site for you school. 
This year’s Social and Affective Neuroscience (SAN) meeting felt like one of those times in history when it was clear that a field was about to explode, in size, reach, and importance...
Highlights for me included Jamil Zaki and Jason Mitchell’s discussion about when empathy is accomplished by each of two distinct brain systems. One system deals with simulating the other person’s experience, and thus vicariously feeling what another feels, and the other is more cognitive, having to do with inferring the other’s mental state. A lesson we might draw from their work is that because these strategies for empathy rely on different brain systems, it seems reasonable that they need not function optimally at the same time, and that there are at least two ways to get to the same social goal. 
Empathy affects your motivation to be helpful.
There is a lot of research suggesting that empathy increases people’s desire to help others. Empathy is the ability to share other people’s emotion. The better able you are to feel what someone else is feeling, the more likely you are to want to help them when they are in a difficult situation. This ability also extends to animals. We are able to project feelings onto animals like dogs, and that increases our need to help them.
But, what is it about empathy that promotes the need to help?
By Art Markman, Ph.D.... 
Dogs yawn when they hear people yawn, which suggests that canines may empathize with humans.
On average, canines yawned five times more often when they heard humans they knew yawning as opposed to control sounds. “These results suggest that dogs have the capacity to empathize with humans,” says Silva. 
So when someone at the second day of the Patient Experience Summit asked Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove where in his institution he's found the greatest resistance to creating empathically engaged connections with patients, he gave a quick and candid answer.
"The docs," he said. "The biggest problem is the docs."....
It was all part of a theme conveyed by many at yesterday's gathering, the third annual Patient Experience Summit, which focused on empathy and innovation in patient care...
"Entering a patient's room with a positive attitude, a caregiver can choose to be present with patients, and connect with them," Lyons said. "Patients are people: interesting, complicated, wonderful people.
By Evelyn Theiss 
Thousands of individual tragedies are playing out in Alabama among two separate groups: undocumented immigrants and those without health insurance.
Empathy clearly has no place in our legislative process. The only question our lawmakers believe we are asking is, “How does it affect me?” 
Max Planck scientists discover brain cells in monkeys that may be linked to self-awareness and empathy in humans.
The anterior insular cortex is a small brain region that plays a crucial role in human self-awareness and in related neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type – the von Economo neuron (VEN) – is located there. 
About the Program on Empathy Awareness and Compassion in Education (PEACE) in the PRC
PEACE supports interdisciplinary scholarly activities ranging from theoretical essays to basic research on the development of awareness, compassion and empathy, to the design and evaluation of interventions intended to foster these attributes in individuals and relationships. 
A Techwise Conversation with Paul Zak, author of The Moral Molecule...
The substance is oxytocin, and my guest is Paul Zak. He’s a professor of economics, management, and psychology—a combination we’ll be asking him about in a bit—at Claremont Graduate University, and he’s the author of a book being published this month by Penguin, entitled The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity....
So we have this sort of yin and yang of morality right inside our own beings. We have oxytocin that makes us care about other people, makes us feel empathy—it’s hard to hurt people you feel empathy for—and then we have testosterone, which lets us enforce the rules.
More about Paul Zak
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