Simon Baron-Cohen, the eminent researcher into autism, has set himself a mission. He wishes to convince us to jettison talk of "evil", and focus instead on the concept of empathy deficiency. For him, this represents a shift from a position that is woolly and permeated by theological assumptions towards something much more objective and scientific...
Baron-Cohen concludes by saying that "unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone". The trick lies in that phrase "by definition". From whose standpoint is oppression to be judged? Who decides what is the correct response to another person's thoughts and feelings? He is grappling with one of the most important questions for our times, and although his answers are partial, they are sophisticated. The debate will certainly continue. Joanna Bourke
Background Empathy is essential for effective doctor-patient communication. It enables doctors to understand patients' emotions and concerns, facilitating personalized care and support. Empathy can be cultivated through various methods and training programs.
Quiet, attentive listening doesn’t always come naturally to professionals, which can make it harder to do their job. Doctors who talk over their patients might miss out on information they need to diagnose them.
Financial advisors, tutors, or managers who don’t take a few minutes to listen might waste a few hours — or months — guiding their clients, students, and teams astray. Why, then, is it so natural for professionals to dominate conversation? One reason is that many of us have the wrong idea about what it means to be socially skilled.
The letters point the districts’ leaders to TeachKind’s kindness-to-animals educational materials, including “Empathy Now,” a guide to preventing violence by young people, and “Challenging Assumptions,” which helps students examine discrimination and other social justice issues.
TeachKind is also offering the districts’ high schools copies of Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries About Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassionby PETA President Ingrid Newkirk.
A recent study found that regular cannabis users “have a greater understanding of the emotions of others”. These findings “highlight positive effects of cannabis on interpersonal relationships and potential therapeutic applications.” The study compared measurements of empathy between a group of 85 regular cannabis users and 51 nonconsumers.
The study found that “cannabis users showed higher scores in the Emotional Comprehension scales” of the test. Those focused on the ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions. Researchers said the results suggest a potential association between marijuana use and empathy. The team of neuroscientists attempted to explain the findings.
They noted that a part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), is prone to the effects of cannabis consumption and is greatly involved in empathy.
Empathy is beneficial for nurses and patients alike, but nurses who experience repeated, prolonged exposure to patients' trauma and suffering can develop empathy exhaustion (also known as empathy fatigue or compassion fatigue), which can have serious effects on the nurses' mental, emotional, and physical health.
Empathy is a core component of nursing practice. In nursing, empathy is commonly defined as recognizing, understanding, and feeling from the patient’s perspective, and experiencing emotions such as care, concern, or distress as a result of being exposed to a patient’s situation.
In the face of rapid socio-political changes, the need for empathy in professional settings has never been more pronounced. Empathy, often misunderstood and underutilized, is not just about understanding another's feelings but believing in the validity of their experiences as equally important as our own. This subtle yet profound distinction is crucial for fostering an inclusive, supportive, and effective workplace.
Researchers from Cornell University, Olin College and Stanford University tested this theory by prompting CAs to display empathy while conversing with or about 65 distinct human identities.
The team found that CAs make value judgments about certain identities—such as gay and Muslim—and can be encouraging of identities related to harmful ideologies, including Nazism.
"I think automated empathy could have tremendous impact and huge potential for positive things—for example, in education or the health care sector," said lead author Andrea Cuadra, now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford.
Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder marked by a wide range of emotional deficits, including a lack of empathy, emotion dysregulation, and alexithymia. Previous research has largely examined these emotional impairments in isolation, ignoring their influence on each other.
Thus, we examined the concurrent interrelationship between emotional impairments in psychopathy, with a particular focus on the mediating role of alexithymia. Using path analyses with cross-sectional data from a community sample (N = 315) and a forensic sample (N = 50), our results yielded a statistically significant mediating effect of alexithymia on the relationship between psychopathy and empathy (community and forensic) and between psychopathy and emotion dysregulation (community).
This Empathy Summit is built around the launch of Dr. Judith Orloff's new book, The Genius of Empathy: Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self, Your Relationships, and the World. Speakers will talk about, Empaths: Why Empathy is Genius and how to use empathy to heal yourself and the world?
=========== CONTENTS =========== 9:00 PT Introduction - Edwin Rutsch and DJ Chandler
9:10 Keynote Speaker: Judith Orloff (20 min) Is author of the newly released book, The Genius of Empathy: Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self, Your Relationships, and the World and has been called “the godmother of the empath movement.”
9:50- Speaker: Michelle J. Howe (10 min) Michelle J. Howe is the founder of Empath Evolution and an educator who empowers teams and leaders to value sensitivity, intuition, and empathy.
10:00 - Speaker: Michael R. Smith (10 min) Dr. Michael R. Smith is a spiritual guide, medium, and author whose pioneering work to connect empaths with their Divine potential has helped many worldwide over the last 20 years.
10:10 - Speaker: Tom DiNardo (10 min) Tom "Two Men Fighting In One" DiNardo is a renunciate, mystic, and healer. He follows the "Red Road" and the sacred Heyoka (empath and Contrarian) path.
10:20 - Speaker: Cynthia Higgins, (10 min) Cynthia is an empath, physician, spiritual life coach, and online course creator of Cracking the Dharma Code, an online course for those seeking to share and deepen their spiritual experiences as Empaths. 10:30 am PT: Empathy Circle - A participatory dialogue using the Empathy Circle process. Speaker: Edwin Rutsch (10 min) Is the director of The Empathy Center in Santa Barbara California.
One of the most effective aspects of Dr. Roberts’ approach has been the weekly empathy messages he sends to the district. These missives share a story related to an event that’s happening in the real world––a school board member losing her battle with cancer, or Women’s History Month––and end with what Dr. Roberts refers to as a “radical empathy quote,” something they can “carry in their toolkit throughout the week.”
research showing that greater empathy leads to decreased drug and alcohol use.
by Greg Glasgow Does an adolescent’s level of empathy influence whether or not they will use drugs or alcohol?
It’s a question that Drew Winters, PhD, director of the Affective Social Cognition, Executive Functioning, and Neuro-Development (ASCEND) lab in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Colorado School of Medicine, set out to answer in research published this month in the Journal of Drug Issues.
“The idea was, if you are less attuned to other people's emotions or have less capacity to understand the perspectives and emotions of those close to you, maybe it is less likely one will stop engaging in harmful activities like substance use,” he says. “Typically, there’s a point where social consequences of substance use becomes apparent — your family's had enough, you’ve lost friends — but what if you just don't register those people’s emotions and feelings?”
Dialogue is critical to defusing the crisis at Columbia University and improving relations between Jews and Palestinians. Absent dialogue that engages students in a process that works towards common ground, the conversation will be dominated by extremists with little interest or empathy towards “the other”. A historical dialogue focuses on the past to promote mutual understanding about what happened and thereby mollify passions in the present. It is a tested technique in conflict resolution relevant to today’s stand-off on campus.
War in Gaza has been raging for six months now, the result of a long-running and deeply entrenched conflict with nuances difficult to capture. Students across the nation are protesting. Many people are shouting. But is anyone really listening? How do we listen to one another in times of intractable conflict?
At the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, the humanistic psychotherapist Carl Rogers brought Protestants and Catholics together for what was known as an “encounter group.” The goal was to facilitate dialogue across the divide.
Vicki King Empathic leadership has gained increasing attention in studies examining successful and healthy organizations over the last two decades. The shift away from commanding and controlling leadership styles to more trusting and caring leadership styles is becoming increasingly critical for leaders hoping to attract and retain highly qualified employees in a thriving organization.
There is a growing awareness that leaders who demonstrate empathy are not soft or nice; rather, they possess a highly refined skill that can, and data suggests should be cultivated. In this article, I review research on the impact organizations with empathic leaders have experienced and strategies leaders can implement to develop and practice sustainable empathy.
by Bonnie McClure and Chalaire Miller What if artificial intelligence (AI) could augment our ability to really listen and truly relate to others? What if technology could draw upon our collective lived experiences and help us be more human to each other? These are the questions Dr. Grin Lord, clinical psychologist and founder of conversation analytics company mpathic, has spent the last 15 years chasing.
Active listening is a learned behavior and not easy to master. But what if artificial intelligence (AI) could augment our ability to really listen and truly relate to others? What if technology could draw upon our collective lived experiences and help us be more human to each other?
Empathy is defined as understanding, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of others, without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated. Sympathy is sharing a feeling with someone else, while empathy is truly appreciating what the feeling must be like. In other words, empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and taking action from that place.
Putting empathy at the forefront of your company’s values will help open the door to honest conversations, and research has shown that building a culture of empathy creates more confidence among employees, boosts productivity and employee retention, and most importantly, improves mental and emotional well-being all around.
Here’s the takeaway. Empathy at work is important because it facilitates a deep connection to another living being (human or canine). Raffi and I were besties, but more than that we were connected — understood each other’s flaws, tuned in to each other’s concerns and responded to each other’s needs.
Conversational agents (CAs) such as Alexa and Siri are designed to answer questions, offer suggestions -- and even display empathy. However, new research finds they do poorly compared to humans when interpreting and exploring a user's experience.
CAs are powered by large language models (LLMs) that ingest massive amounts of human-produced data, and thus can be prone to the same biases as the humans from which the information comes.
When people are ill, they feel less empathy for others than when they are healthy. This has been confirmed by a study conducted by Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
The researchers investigated "sickness behavior," a process in which the body reorganizes its biological priorities in the context of an acute infection. So far, it has mainly been researched in connection with social withdrawal and feelings of social disconnection. But how does illness affect our empathy?
In the arena of politics, empathy seems to have met its untimely demise, crushed beneath the weight of relentless bipartisan warfare. The once noble virtue of understanding and resonating with the feelings of others has been eclipsed by the toxic culture perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this battleground of ideologies, hate and bad rhetoric have become the weapons of choice, leaving empathy discarded in the rubble of partisan discord.
The polarization between the two major political parties has reached unprecedented levels, with each side demonizing the other to the point where empathy is perceived as a weakness rather than a strength.
Regarding the empathy argument, I see its merit. There is substantial psychological research around empathy, both cognitive and emotional, suggesting by observing others we are able to mimic their emotions in our Mirror Neuron System, thereby better understanding other’s mental states and emotion.
This theory has been applied to the emotional response elicited when you view photos, where visual storytelling enhances people’s ability to envisage and observe emotion (Joshua Sarinana articulates this really well in his article “Photography and the Feelings of Others: From Mirroring Emotions to the Theory of Mind”.)
In recent years, mental health issues have shed their taboo status and are now gaining the recognition, acceptance, and treatment they deserve worldwide.
Across familial, social, educational, and occupational settings, attitudes toward mental health are evolving positively, with professionals increasingly undergoing advanced training to develop skills and empathy.
Globally, there was a sharp increase in the number of people impacted by depressive symptoms (193 million to 246 million) and anxiety disorders (298 million to 374 million). In 2022, 23.1% of the adult population in the USA was found to suffer from a mental health condition.
Confronted with these stark realities, the urgency for transformative education through immersive learning for mental health professionals has become evident.
Empathy: We all aspire to it, but does it really make a performance difference in the workplace? Definitely, according to Jamil Zaki, a research psychologist at Stanford University and author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (Crown, June 2019).
In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Jamil joins McKinsey talent leaders Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle, with global editorial director Lucia Rahilly, to make the case for investing in empathic behavior—for reasons including higher productivity, a stronger workplace culture, and better organizational health—as well as to discuss how to go about cultivating kindness at work.
Embark on a transformative journey of “empathic resilience” with this course designed for empathy professionals like you who want to forge deep connections with clients while safeguarding themselves against burnout.
In this immersive experience, participants delve into the Six Essential Aspects of Empathy model crafted by the insightful Karla McLaren, MEd.
Imagine unlocking the secrets to make empathy not just accessible but fully manageable in your practice. And this isn’t merely about understanding empathy; it’s about crafting a workplace environment where empathy is not just healthy but intentional and enduring.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
