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The Dalai Lama spoke for about 40 minutes and then took questions from the audience of about 15,000 at the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville Sunday afternoon. The Dalai Lama kicked off his long-anticipated visit to Louisville by blessing the temple at the Drepung Gomang Institute in St. Matthews Sunday morning. by Peter Smith
The Dalai Lama says people should practice tolerance and forgiveness to have a more compassionate life, which was the theme of his speech Sunday to an estimated crowd of 14,000 at the KFC Yum Center. The Dalai Lama is on a three-day visit to Louisville, where he’s already blessed the Drepung Gomang Institute, which is helping to host the events.On Sunday, the Dalai Lama told the crowd that this is the century of compassion.
My life partner Igor calls me his robot. I’m an INTJ, a libertarian, and fairly privileged, all of which come together to produce someone who is not naturally a bastion of empathy. . So I read “The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy” in the New Yorker, with keen interest. The piece seemed to help explain why libertarians sometimes seem to have trouble with empathy (and why that might not always be a bad thing). So why aren’t libertarians seen as empathetic? “The key to engaging empathy is what has been called ‘the identifiable victim effect.’” Perhaps it’s not that libertarians aren’t empathetic, it’s that we, like most people, empathize best with victims who look like us. Perhaps this helps explain why so many libertarians spend more time talking about marginal tax rates than the drug war. by Cathy Reisenwitz
A Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) study shows a mind-body class elective for medical students helps increase their self-compassion and ability to manage thoughts and tasks more effectively. The study, published in Medical Education Online, also discusses how this innovative course may help medical students better manage stress and feel more empowered to use mind-body skills with their patients. Allison Bond, MA, a third-year medical student at BUSM, served as the paper’s first author. The course was designed and taught by co-author Heather Mason, MA, founder and director of the Minded Institute.
Vivian Bohl is an Estonian philosopher at Tartu University. She is a PhD student and her doctoral work is in the field of social cognition.
We talked about the definitions of Empathy. "Defining empathy has always been a tricky issue and up to now, the conceptual issues surrounding 'empathy' are causing more and more confusion in scientific and philosophical literature. It's about time someone did something to solve these complex conceptual issues. I see that in your project, you are also interested in compassion. This is a very important empathy-related topic, in my opinion.
For me, the best definition of compassion is a Buddhist definition: it is the wish to alleviate the suffering of others and to eliminate the causes for suffering. Since I'm quite happy with that definition, we could discuss what this definition exactly means and also talk about how to become a more compassionate person."
Melanie Sears has been a trainer for the Center of Nonviolent Communications since 1991. She works with businesses, hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, individuals, couples and parents in transforming their usual way of operations, interpersonal interactions and dealing with conflict to one which is more compassionate, conscious and effective. Melanie presents Nonviolent Communication at conventions, at universities, and at churches. She has been interviewed on the radio and on TV and is the author of several books including: Humanizing Health Care with Nonviolent Communication.
Lou Agosta is on the faculty of the Illinois School of Professional Psychology. He practices psychotherapy in the Chicago. His area of concentration includes the dynamic containing and transforming of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse. Lou is author of Empathy in the Context of Philosophy which is an exploration of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations. He also writes extensively about the nature of empathy on his websiteListeningWithEmpathy.com.
When I first heard that autistic people didn't have empathy, I assumed my son Mickey must be an exception. He was not yet 2 when the developmental specialist told us all the things our child would never do. Pretend play. Eye contact. Empathy. I remember sitting on the floor of his bedroom days later, hugging my knees to my chest and watching Mickey build block towers, thinking, who was this child? Had he suddenly become a stranger?.. So why does this myth that autistic people lack empathy persist? The reasons are complicated -- a convergence of media, popular culture, and ignorance. Liane Kupferberg Carter
Women’s rights advocate Lisa Shannon called on graduates of the College to exercise empathy as a means of empowerment at commencement Saturday. “I’d like to talk about power. It’s a tricky thing because it so often lurks in the moments that we least expect to find it,” Shannon said. “The empathy switch, flip it on, keep it on, it will fuel you over the threshold of doubt, of fear, of discomfort to find power.”
Shannon discussed her efforts to lobby Congress to pass a bill to combat the use of conflict minerals in 2010. She said empathy helped her protest and confront people opposed to the bill.
“Some people talk about compassion fatigue as though empathy wears you down. I’ve actually found the opposite to be true,” she said. “I found empathy to operate more like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the more power it gives, the more reflexive it becomes. It’s not that stepping up become more comfortable. It’s just that comfort becomes less relevant in the face of this sort of empathy override.” By Eitan Sayag
Jan Birchfield, Ph.D. writes about the basis of a shared ethic in leadership—happiness—and why we should look inward before trying to solve the world’s problems.
Social entrepreneurship has given me, and many others, a great deal of hope. With the overwhelming number of social ills in virtually every sector of our society, it is heartening to see the growth of a movement that combines the discipline, rigor, flexibility, and innovation of the entrepreneurial business sector with the core mission of delivering social value above all else, including wealth creation. The movement, in part, challenges innovators to ask, how can we better meet the enormous challenges of the world around us, or, how can we better serve?
Sensitive men are incredibly attractive. They are path-forgers in the new paradigm of the evolved man. Strong and sensitive. Intuitive and powerful. They're able to give and receive love without ambivalence, being "unavailable," or commitment phobia. In my book Emotional Freedom, I write extensively about the power of empaths and describe strategies for how empaths can stay centered and strong in an overwhelming world. Since I'm an empath and worship sensitivity, I want to help empathic men (and women) cultivate this asset and be more comfortable with it. Empathic men often have a harder time than women because in Western culture sensitivity may be seen as a weakness or too "feminine." This is a huge misconception. The new evolved man is skillful in balancing both the masculine and feminine in himself, embodying his full power. Judith Orloff MD
In the May 20, 2013, issue of The New Yorker, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom agreed with my point. In reviewing a spate of recent books advocating the importance of empathy, Bloom concludes that empathy can only get us so far. He points out that empathy works to move us out of ourselves, but its range is quite limited. We can often feel empathy for specific individuals who have suffered terribly – such as James “Bim” Costello whose picture showing him staggering from the Boston Marathon bomb site was plastered in newspapers and the web.
But it’s a lot harder to feel empathy for nameless victims who are only reported in the news media as statistics. This is why Bloom rejects empathy as an adequate grounds for morality.
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There’s a reason why being kind to others is good for you — and it can now be traced to a specific nerve. When it comes to staying healthy, both physically and mentally, studies consistently show that strong relationships are at least as important as avoiding smoking and obesity. But how does social support translate into physical benefits such as lower blood pressure, healthier weights and other physiological measures of sound health? A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that the link may follow the twisting path of the vagus nerve, which connects social contact to the positive emotions that can flow from interactions. By Maia Szalavitz
http://j.mp/12NrDMv They held posters depicting their dead family members, waved small yellow “compassion” flags and wore T-shirts that said: “Put down the guns; we want our city back.” A few hundred people participated in a “compassion walk” along Broadway in the West End on Saturday. The purpose, according to organizer Christopher 2X, was to support about 2,000 people who have survived gunshot wounds in Louisville in the last decade, including two women and a young girl who inspired the march and helped lead it
Consider the words of Henry David Thoreau; “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” These are the words that begin a powerful and profound must-see video on YouTube that has been posted by the folks at the Cleveland Clinic simply titled, “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care.”
I heard about this video from a hospital administrator who was referred to it by a nurse who said she sometimes “forgets why she does what she does” and in those cases tends to communicate in a less than empathetic fashion with her patients and their families.
By Steve Adubato
We are thrilled to share with you The Justice Project’s Third Place Winner for our Writing Competition: Empathy Gone Nature: A Paradigm Shift
by Johannes Kleiner The preacher looks at her congregation. After a short pause she begins to speak, “One day all of you—this entire congregation—will be dead!” Silence. Again, “One day, everyone in this congregation will be dead!” Just what you want to hear Sunday morning. But apparently it strikes a chord with a laughing gentleman in the back. He must be crazy. People are mumbling, turning around, staring. On his way out, the pastor greets him: “Welcome! You seem to be a happy camper. The entire congregation went silent, but you just burst out laughing.” High spirited he replies, “Of course, I’m not a part of this congregation.”
Teaching medical students about mind-body approaches could help boost their compassionand decrease their stress, according to a small study from the Boston University School of Medicine . Published in the journal Medical Education Online, the study showed that medical students who underwent a mind-body class -- where they not only learned about the neuroscience behind techniques like meditation and yoga, but also how to do them -- had improved self-compassion, as well as slight decreases in stress and increases in empathy.
The role of empathy in policing, both empathy for and by the police, is gaining attention from criminal justice researchers and practitioners. While research on the effectiveness and importance of empathy in policing is limited, the existing research indicates that empathy increases perceptions of legitimacy and trust in the police. This panel discusses a range of issues related to the role of empathy in criminal behavior, punishment, and policing with a specific emphasis on training police on how to incorporate empathy into their work. Panelists Chad Posick
Joe Brummer
Michael Rocque
Edwin Rutsch Chad Posick has a B.S. degree in criminal justice and an M.S. degree in public policy from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He just finished his Ph.D in criminal justice from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He has worked with Project Safe Neighborhoods in the Western District of New York as well as the Department of Criminal Justice Service’s Project Impact. His research areas include restorative justice, cognitive behavioral interventions and action research.
Marco Iacoboni, Lidewij Niezink and Edwin Rutsch discuss Definitions, Measurements & Metrics of Empathy.
Marco Iacoboni is Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Director of the Marco Iacoboni Lab, UCLA Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is author of, Mirroring People: The New Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. Marco says, "I think what's interesting to me most is to define metrics of empathy. How can I measure this thing? Why it matters? If we want to design interventions to improve empathy we need to agree upon ways of quantifying it. People do get bogged down in debates on definitions and don't even get to the point of trying to discuss metrics of empathic behavior. This slows down progress, I think" Sub Conference: Science
Compassion is a response to suffering—our own, and to the pain of others. The word comes from the Latin meaning to co-suffer. Compassion is noticing pain, feeling it with another person, and then responding to it n some way. What an exciting-mind-blowing week I’ve had! I have “Skyped” with people from all over the world, participated in Google Hangouts, recommended materials for a peace education project in Indonesia, introduced a few European schools to Canadian child advocate Mary Gordon’s Roots of Empathy, tuned in teachers to the work of Sugata Mitra, the 2013 TED award winner, and his experiment, “Hole in the Wall”, and started work with a number of schools who would like to create an action plan to become compassionate schools.
Most of us would agree that one strong example of a "not-good" person is the psychopath. Psychopathy is "a psychological condition in which the individual shows a profound lack of empathy for the feelings of others, a willingness to engage in immoral and antisocial behavior for short-term gains, and extreme egocentricity." [1] This "profound lack of empathy" means he only cares about what he wants and feels no guilt about manipulating or using aggression to get it. These folks scare us. And they teach us something important about the path to goodness: it must include empathy.
Cindy Wigglesworth
So I would plead with researchers to take great care when labeling the conclusions of this kind of research. Because if the researchers don't keep in mind that people with autism may not understand the Sally-Anne story, or that autistic children may have different ways of expressing their empathy, it's the researchers who truly lack empathy -- and compassion
In our efforts to solve difficult social problems in particular, we rely too heavily on reason and numbers and econometrics, and not often enough on empathy. Empathy," writes Paul Bloom in The New Yorker this week, "is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're often at our best when we're smart enough not to rely on it." We'd be better off were we to supplant our flawed empathetic sensibilities with reason (that most flawless of human capacities). His central argument is a utilitarian one: empathy is an often irrational emotional response that plays favorites, he says. It is thus a poor mechanism for solving real problems and making tough choices -- whether distributing international aid or making sacrifices today so that we don't warm our planet to oblivion tomorrow.... But to truly empathize is not easy. In this sense Bloom is right: we're more likely to do so with those who look and think like we do. So rather than dismiss empathy, why not commit ourselves to practicing it more deliberately and more often, and expanding our spheres of empathy to those who are not just different but who challenge some of our very own moral foundations? by Michael Zakaras
For the fifth consecutive year, Sapienza University of Rome will host artists, performers, filmmakers, scholars and neuroscientists from different research centers in Europe and the United States on the occasion of the International Conference Dialogues between theater and neuroscience . neuroestetica the theatrical anthropology, from studies on empathy to research on intersubjectivity, moving from studies of motor cognition, memory, emotions, on mirror neurons and alternative therapies.
There's an interesting discussion of empathy in a column by Paul Bloom at The New Yorker. Bloom begins by summarizing the generally good press that empathy gets these days, because it is seen as humanizing our responses to the sufferings... I think Bloom's point must be taken. But what, really, is this point? That empathy isn't self-sufficient? It certainly isn't. To operate effectively it needs the assistance of reason and the weighing of empirical evidence. I agree with him too - as I've argued on my own account in a recent paper - that 'it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers'. At the same time, how damning is it of empathy to point out that it is not all we require? Reason is also not all we require, but it is no less precious for all that. Empathy, in conjunction with other human faculties, is an invaluable way towards solidarity with others and humane action.
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