Psychology professor David DeSteno’s lab is the first to study the social implications of meditation, a practice well known to improve one’s physical and psychological well-being.
In a new study led by Condon, DeSteno’s team in the Social Emotions Group showed that even a brief period of meditation training is indeed enough to boost one’s compassion toward a suffering stranger more than fivefold. The results will soon be published in the journalPsychological Science.
With funding from the Mind and Life Institute, DeSteno’s team recruited more than three dozen individuals interested in pursuing meditation training.
Now DeSteno’s team is pursuing research on the mechanisms behind the observed phenomenon. For instance, it could be related to a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings or an increased sense of empathy.
This study seems of interest for two reasons: 1) it considers compassionate behavior in a more ecologically valid way than behavioral experiments to date, and 2) the increased probability of a compassionate response was observed in meditators who both did and did not have compassion explicitly integrated into their training. This latter effect indicates that attention training is sufficient to increase pro-social behavior. No special affective or ethical instruction was necessary to change participants' social norms; rather, the change fell naturally out of the attention practice.
Data of this sort suggests that explicit ethical training (sila) may not be necessary to elicit increased pro-social behavior, an important finding for those (like me) interested in teaching meditation in a secular fashion. My working hypothesis is that changes in ethical behavior and values are a predictable byproduct of the cultivation of attention and awareness, a lawful relationship that is highly probable even if not absolute. In western psychology we distinguish detached, cognitive capacities like attention from affective, value-laden ones like compassion or empathy. Perhaps, however, awareness is the real backbone of moral character, scaffolding the emergence of pro-social traits like compassion. I look forward to reading the actual paper when it's out and, fingers crossed, seeing it replicated and extended.
These one-to-one empathy sessions support; well-being, healing, practicing to be a better listener and supporting you in creating empathic environments in your relationships, family, school, work, communities and beyond.
Have you ever been told when making hard decisions you should put your emotions aside?
I know I have. However, Chade-Meng Tan in “Search Inside Yourself” said often the opposite is true. “In many situations, the best way to make tough decisions is with kindness and empathy … If we make tough decisions without empathy, we can more easily achieve what we want in the short term, but we also create resentment and mistrust, which hurt our own interest in the long term. If instead we treat the affected people with kindness and empathy, we create trust and understanding.”
But does that mean I have to side with them? Tan also quoted Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Follow these steps to feel more compassionate toward others and toward yourself. BY HOORIA JAZAIERI | APRIL 24, 2018
Would you describe yourself as a compassionate person?
Even if you don’t necessarily see yourself that way, I bet you’re compassionate at least some of the time (e.g., when you’re well-rested and not in a hurry), or with certain people in your life (e.g., with your closest friends). Compassion can be thought of as a mental state or an orientation towards suffering (your own or others’) that includes four components:
Bringing attention or awareness to recognizing that there is suffering (cognitive)
Feeling emotionally moved by that suffering (affective) Wishing there to be relief from that suffering (intentional) A readiness to take action to relieve that suffering (motivational) Contrary to what many may believe, compassion is considered to be like a muscle that, as any other, can be strengthened with relevant exercises—or can deteriorate and atrophy. In other words, your capacity for compassion can expand, if you choose.
Our review suggests Cochrane and Anne’s empathy aren’t just the stuff of stories. Empathic and positive communication seems to improve conditions ranging from lung function and length of hospital stay, to pain, patient satisfaction, and quality of life. From related research, we also understand more and more about how positive empathic communication works.
First, you need empathy to make the right diagnosis. Without it patients may not share symptoms, especially embarrassing ones. Next, an empathic practitioner will help put a patient at ease and reduce their stress. Dozens of trials suggest that relaxation reduces pain, depression and anxiety, and even lowers the risk of heart disease. Also, by being positive (which is part of empathy), activates the patient’s brain in such a way that the patient makes his or her own painkilling endorphins.
A Spectrum of Artificial Emotional Intelligence Merriam Webster's primary definition of empathy is:
"The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also: the capacity for this."
To achieve artificial empathy, according to this definition, a machine would have to be capable of experiencing emotion. Before machines can do that, they must first be able to recognize emotion and comprehend it.
Non-profit research institute SRI International and others have succeeded with the recognition aspect, but understanding emotion is more difficult. For one thing, individual humans tend to interpret and experience emotions differently.
An individual's capacity for compassion and empathy is portrayed as a powerful tool in “The Compassionate Connection: The Healing Power of Empathy and Mindful Listening,” written by University of New Mexico Professor and Chair for Family and Community Medicine David Rakel, M.D.
Throughout the book, Rakel tells a series of stories from the medical field, delving into the power of empathy and expanding on the relationships individuals create with those they meet both medical professional and patient.
“Even though these are lessons learned in the medical field, these can be translated to any relationship,” Rakel said.
I FEEL YOU The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy By Cris Beam 251 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.
Depending on your point of view, Cris Beam’s “I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy” might seem either laughably behind the times or naïvely, maybe even willfully, ahead — so far beyond our collective horizon as to be pretty darned invisible. After all, ours is an age when the president is more concerned with building walls than feeding and educating poor kids, Congress is polarized to the point of paralysis and just about everyone else is seemingly focused on getting theirs first.
We’ve become a nation of hard cases, armed to the teeth, with fury battling cynicism for primacy as the default emotion. In this world, a book with a cover featuring one bonsai tree leaning lovingly toward another does not appear likely to find much of a place. And yet here is Beam passionately asserting that “the pendulum is swinging back toward feeling, back toward love and the communal. Back toward empathy.”
Make a concerted effort to understand your colleague’s perspective and feelings.
Engage in acts of kindness and compassion toward your annoying colleague.
Learn to recognize clues that you’re having a negative emotional reaction toward your colleague. Take deep breaths and stay calm.
Don’t:
Take your colleague’s behavior personally and lash out. Instead, look inward and ask yourself: What’s causing me to react this way?
Focus on the differences between you and your colleague. Rather, concentrate on similarities and things you share in common.
Shy away from having a conversation with your colleague about how you can best work together. If they drive you crazy, it’s likely that you drive them crazy, too.
3. EMPATHY CARDS Use this when you want people to share something very vulnerable, and realize they aren’t alone; it’s a technique Hossain learned from the coaching firm Reboot. During the cocktail hour, have everyone write anonymously on index cards one thing that worries them about their work or that causes them anxiety–something they feel like they can’t share with many people. Shuffle them thoroughly and place a card at each seat at the table. Ideally everyone receives someone else’s card, and can see that everyone else has fears and vulnerabilities just like them. It generates a ton of empathy and goodwill at the start of the conversation, and opens up candid sharing much earlier.
Empathy Empathy is the capability to share and understand another's emotions and feelings. It is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes,"
Empathy does not necessarily imply compassion, sympathy, or empathic concern because this capacity can be present in context of compassionate or cruel behavior.
The study, which combined data from 28 clinical trials involving over 6,000 patients, adds weight to the argument that patient outcomes can be improved when doctors enhance how they express empathy and create positive expectations of benefit.
From the Universities of Oxford and Southampton in the UK, with the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research and Lithuania's Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, the research team analysed a series of randomised clinical trials that looked at the effects of empathy or positive communication in healthcare consultations. These trials included data from consultations on a wide range of clinical conditions including pain, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, osteoarthritis and recovery after surgery. The researchers also reviewed the effects of positive communication on quality-of-life and patient satisfaction, based on reports from patients in these trials.
Jeremy Howick
Jeremy Howick et al. Effects of empathic and positive communication in healthcare consultations: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2018). DOI: 10.1177/0141076818769477
This is the last article in our series on understanding others’ feelings, in which we examine empathy, including what it is, whether our doctors need more of it, and when too much may not be a good thing.
Every day, doctors, nurses and other health professionals are presented with situations that demand empathy and compassion.
Whether telling a 40-year-old man with cancer he doesn’t have long to live, or comforting an elderly woman who is feeling anxious, the health professional needs to be skilled in understanding what the other person is going through, and respond appropriately.
During conversations with a prospect the goal of an independent consultant should be to monopolize the listening. A good rule of thumb is to listen 80 percent of the time and talk 20 percent.
These are the three proven steps for success when it comes to listening carefully and responding appropriately:
Identify the issue. What is on their mind? Why did they reach out to you? What is their goal, what assets do they have in place, and what are their roadblocks? Ask questions to find out and listen carefully.
Listen for the prospect’s mindset? This is not about good and bad people; actually, this is about how they view the world at this point in time. Are they a thinker, a doer, a struggler, or an achiever? Again, ask questions and listen carefully.
Dr. Brian Goldman is the host of CBC Radio's White Coat, Black Art and the author of The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy is Essential in Everyday Life. (HarperCollins/CBC)
What is empathy? It includes perspective taking and recognition of your parents view as their truth, staying out of judgement, recognizing the emotions of your parents and communicating that understanding to them. It is feeling with another person. It is being vulnerable to that same hurt or loneliness or loss they are expressing.
Being empathetic takes time and effort. In our busy days as we balance our needs with the needs of our parents, it can be lost. Sharing feelings can bring more to their life in ways you never knew.
Opinion: research shows that the development of empathy is essential to healthy social and emotional functioning
By Pat Dolan and Cillian Murphy, UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre
This year, we mark 50th anniversary of the horrific assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. In the six months prior to his death, Kennedy had said that he discovered what it meant to empathise and this came directly from his witnessing the poverty of, and prejudice towards, African Americans in the deep south of America. He said he had "walked in their shoes" and it had a very deep effect on him personally, leading him to become a stronger campaigner for civil rights.
Regardless of any view of him or the Kennedy family dynasty, what is key is the fact that by seeing and understanding the experiences of those who were oppressed he "self discovered" empathy. Interestingly, many years later, former US President Barack Obama has also referred to "empathy deficit" as a major problem in the US.
One theory about why compassion fatigue sets in is that high empathy causes greater levels of emotional arousal and distress, so the reduction of empathy is simply a survival mechanism to cope with experiencing long periods or extreme emotional stress. This theory has been used to explain why medical students and doctors report lower levels of empathy as they progress through medical school and their post-graduate medical training. It might also explain why doctors’ brains show a reduced response to witnessing people experience pain, compared with people who aren’t doctors.
Men and women burn out differently As well as the differences in risk of burnout, the way female doctors burn out appears to be different to the ways male doctors burn out. Identifying and understanding these differences might be important for recognising when doctors are developing burnout and getting help and support for them in time.
The nameless protagonists, Him and Her, are a couple struggling with Her depression. Desperate to understand each other, the couple tries Empathitrax, a new drug that allows users to experience their partner’s feelings by touching their skin.
“I think there’s something in this play that sets up our American fascination with pharmaceuticals as a fix, as finite. This will fix the problem,” Drew Wall, who plays Him, said. “In this case, they’ve figured out how to monetize empathy,” Jenny Ledel, who plays Her, said. “What if you could buy this thing that would make you be better at empathy?”
Emad Rahim shares his story of being raised in a violent environment, and overcoming hardships with compassion, community and by making connections with people by sharing his story.
Dr. Emad Rahim is an award-winning author, educator and entrepreneur. He currently serve as the Kotouc Endowed Chair at Bellevue University and JWMI Fellow at the Jack Welch Management Institute. He co-authored the book ‘Leading through Diversity: Transforming Managers into Effective Leaders’ and wrote the article ‘The Growing Epidemic of Islamophobia in America: Social Change through Appreciative Inquiry.’
It’s just common sense that doctors who have empathy make better doctors. However, until now, the benefit to patients has not been quantified, which makes it difficult for doctors and quality controllers to put a value on being nice.
For our research paper, which is published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, we looked at 28 clinical trials involving more than 6000 patients and focused on the effects of empathy or positive communication in healthcare consultations.
These trials included data from consultations on a wide range of clinical conditions including pain, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, osteoarthritis and recovery after injury. What we found was that in pain trials, when enhanced empathy expressed by doctors was compared with usual care, patients reported, on average, and additional half point reduction in pain , on a ten-point visual scale.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker makes the case for reading as a “technology for perspective-taking” that has the capacity to not only evoke people’s empathy but also expand it. “The power of literacy,” as he argues “get[s] people in the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points” while “creating a hothouse for new ideas about moral values and the social order.”
The first major empathy technology was Guttenberg’s printing press, invented in 1440. With the mass production of books came widespread literacy and the ability to inhabit the minds of others. While this may sound trite, it was actually a seismic innovation for people in the pre-industrial age who didn’t see, hear or interact with those outside of their village. More recently, other technologies like television and virtual reality made further advances, engaging more of the senses to deepen the simulated human experience.
This is not “identity politics.” If anything, it is empathy politics. And I am not talking about the shallow empathy of those who only seem capable of identifying with people who they perceive to be their own kind. True empathy is the ability and willingness to put ourselves into other people’s shoes, especially those who are different from us — not in a presumptive way, but to sincerely listen to what they have to say, to understand their circumstances, concerns, frustrations, and fears.
Our empathy for one another may also be enhanced by our shared experiences dealing with discrimination.
Abstract Background: Practitioners who enhance how they express empathy and create positive expectations of benefit could improve patient outcomes. However, the evidence in this area has not been recently synthesised.
Objective: To estimate the effects of empathy and expectations interventions for any clinical condition.
Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials.
Data sources: Six databases from inception to August 2017.
Study selection: Randomised trials of empathy or expectations interventions in any clinical setting with patients aged 12 years or older.
Review methods: Two reviewers independently screened citations, extracted data, assessed risk of bias and graded quality of evidence using GRADE. Random effects model was used for meta-analysis.
Jeremy Howick, Andrew Moscrop, Alexander Mebius, Thomas R Fanshawe, George Lewith...
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This study seems of interest for two reasons: 1) it considers compassionate behavior in a more ecologically valid way than behavioral experiments to date, and 2) the increased probability of a compassionate response was observed in meditators who both did and did not have compassion explicitly integrated into their training. This latter effect indicates that attention training is sufficient to increase pro-social behavior. No special affective or ethical instruction was necessary to change participants' social norms; rather, the change fell naturally out of the attention practice.
Data of this sort suggests that explicit ethical training (sila) may not be necessary to elicit increased pro-social behavior, an important finding for those (like me) interested in teaching meditation in a secular fashion. My working hypothesis is that changes in ethical behavior and values are a predictable byproduct of the cultivation of attention and awareness, a lawful relationship that is highly probable even if not absolute. In western psychology we distinguish detached, cognitive capacities like attention from affective, value-laden ones like compassion or empathy. Perhaps, however, awareness is the real backbone of moral character, scaffolding the emergence of pro-social traits like compassion. I look forward to reading the actual paper when it's out and, fingers crossed, seeing it replicated and extended.