Darwall: Empathy can mean various things. Cognitive empathy is what is sometimes called perspective taking — the ability to put yourself in someone else’s perspective. That’s utterly central to all the reactive attitudes and to the second-person standpoint. Another form is sometimes called emotional contagion. And that’s where people catch each other’s feelings without feeling them as if from the other’s point of view. For example, you walk into a room, and everybody is really down, and you find yourself feeling down. You don’t really know why. You catch the feeling without catching the object of the feeling. 

To continue to build our community around empathy, the Seattle Aquarium launched Empathy Café, a monthly web chat series that discusses topics of interest related to fostering empathy for conservation of wildlife.

Empathy Café sessions last one hour and include time to connect and hear updates from one another, engage with a presentation or facilitated discussion, and share opportunities for collaboration or workshop problems of practice. Empathy Café sessions are free for all participants and open to anyone interested in fostering empathy for wildlife. Feel free to attend regularly or when your schedule allows!

By Shirley Knowles

Why Active and Empathetic Listening Matter for Business Objectives
Active and empathetic listening is already second nature to most HR professionals. However, the usefulness of this kind of listening extends far beyond HR departments, reaching every tier of leadership.

The leaders who leave the most significant marks on their organizations are those who have mastered active and empathetic listening, cultivating this skill as bodybuilders cultivate muscle. They view their employees as fully-fledged individuals, with diverse concerns and rich lives outside of the workplace.

HR professionals will always be available to provide people skills as needed. However, leaders would be wise to view them as a safety net and to take it upon themselves to cultivate the fundamentals of active and empathetic listening. The benefits are immense —both on a business level and a human one.

The increasing demand for mental health services has highlighted the need for innovative solutions, particularly in the realm of psychological conversational AI, where the availability of sensitive data is scarce. In this work, we explored the development of a system tailored for mental health support with a novel approach to psychological assessment based on explainable emotional profiles in combination with empathetic conversational models, offering a promising tool for augmenting traditional care, particularly where immediate expertise is unavailable.

Radical Empathy in Leadership

Radical empathy is the willingness to show love and understanding to people whose actions toward you—and others who share your identity or belief—are the opposite of love. It requires us to offer empathy to those who may choose hatred or indifference. While this may seem like an arduous challenge, it is also the pathway to true transformation.

As leaders, it is our responsibility to cultivate an environment where empathy is not just a value, but a practice. We must recognize that everyone, regardless of their background or beliefs, has the potential for growth and change. By showing empathy to those who need it most, we create the conditions for deeper, more authentic connections that can lead to lasting change.

David Burns M.D
Empathy is considered by many to be a cornerstone of effective mental health treatment. American psychologist Carl Rogers achieved fame with his claim that empathy was the “necessary and sufficient condition” for change in therapy, and many experts agree that empathy creates feelings of trust, reduces negative feelings, and boosts self-esteem.

Can digital devices do the same thing?

Digital mental health apps are enjoying a true breakthrough moment, and AI shows great promise in mimicking human conversation. But can digital empathy compete with human empathy in terms of healing?

By Joseph Njau Kinyanjui

Empathy, often seen as a soft skill in personal development, is now being recognized as an essential driver of success in the corporate, branding, and strategic communication sectors. As we move deeper into an age dominated by digital interactions and data-driven decisions, the question of how to engage with customers, employees, and other stakeholders on a human level becomes increasingly important. This article explores the intersection between empathy and communication across various sectors, shedding light on how empathy can reshape corporate strategies, enhance branding efforts, and improve personal communication.

Empathy is the ability to notice and understand other people’s emotions. Not only does it allow you to take other people’s perspectives, but it can help you build relationships and resolve conflict, said Ann-Louise Lockhart, pediatric psychologist, parent coach and owner of A New Day Pediatric Psychology.

“Kids who practice empathy are more likely to show kindness, adapt to diverse environments and develop resilience,” she said. “These skills are crucial for their emotional well-being and contribute to their success in personal and professional settings later in life.”

Because we are in a digital-driven world and there’s less face-to-face connection, it’s especially important that we’re intentional about our kids cultivating empathy, added Michele Borba, educational psychologist and author of UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World.

EQ isn’t just contagious within families. Another recent study in PNAS scanned people’s brains and observed that when people observed empathy, they were more empathic themselves. 

Scientific American summed up this line of research like this: “Empathy is a socially motivated process… meaning that people won’t necessarily empathize just because they know how. Instead—much as kids with athletic peers often want to excel at sports—people want to understand others when they enter into communities where empathy is the established norm.”

The business takeaway is clear. If you want to raise your emotional intelligence, surround yourself with high EQ people. And if you want to raise the emotional intelligence of your team, model high EQ yourself.

By Mardoche Sidor, MD and Karen Dubin

Empathy is a powerful and essential component of healthy relationships. It involves the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, creating a deep emotional connection that fosters trust, compassion, and mutual respect.[2] In this article, we will explore the importance of empathy in relationships, how it contributes to emotional intimacy, and practical ways to cultivate empathetic communication.

Understanding Empathy
Empathy can be broken down into three main components:

Cognitive Empathy: The ability to understand another person's perspective or feelings intellectually. It involves recognizing what someone else is experiencing without necessarily feeling those emotions yourself.[3]

Emotional Empathy: The capacity to share and feel the emotions of others.[4] This type of empathy allows you to connect on a deeper emotional level and respond with compassion.

Compassionate Empathy: This combines cognitive and emotional empathy, where you not only understand and feel what another person is going through but also feel compelled to help or support them in some way.[5]

Researchers at MIT, NYU, and UCLA develop an approach to help evaluate whether large language models like GPT-4 are equitable enough to be clinically viable for mental health support.

Run by a group of friends in their 20s, Table and Stools is a listening community, which aims to lend a non-judgemental ear to anyone who needs it.

Run by a group of friends in their 20s, Table and Stools is a listening community, which aims to lend a non-judgemental ear to anyone who needs it. Started in Chennai in 2023, the group launched its Bengaluru chapter in June 2024. They set up an info...

Come see the riveting story of how students in Pasadena Unified School District put themselves in the shoes of others in order to learn empathy in this full length documentary, produced by KLRN Pasadena.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into mental health care is a promising frontier, offering scalable and innovative solutions to address the growing demand for psychological support.

The study "The Emotional Spectrum of LLMs: Leveraging Empathy and Emotion-Based Markers for Mental Health Support" by Alessandro De Grandi, Federico Ravenda, Andrea Raballo, and Fabio Crestani, available on arXiv, delves into this potential.

It introduces a groundbreaking conversational AI system designed to enhance mental health support by combining empathetic responses with emotion-based diagnostic tools.

In such a context, empathy is treated as an expendable commodity. The fate of the battery-run rickshaw pullers exemplifies this. These workers, often rural migrants, already navigate precarious economic realities. The ban on their vehicles, justified under the banner of urban orderliness and energy efficiency, ignores their lived realities. There is no robust plan to compensate for their losses or integrate them into alternative forms of employment. It is a classic example of neoliberal governance: tidy the streets, appease the urban middle class, and leave the marginalised to fend for themselves.

Cultivate empathy. One way authoritarians defeat democracy is by trying to destroy empathy. Their strategies depend on dehumanization, demonization, and division. One of the best ways to resist is to actively cultivate empathy. Do your best to understand other people’s feelings and perspectives. Empathy is a powerful antidote to fascism and hatred. Democracy depends on empathy – you can't have democracy without it.

As 2024 comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about the year , the challenges, the growth, and the habits that have changed my life. This year has been about being more empathetic, balancing work and personal life, and helping others grow. I’ve learned how to juggle a full-time job, volunteer work, mentoring people around the world, and still make time for my health and family. It hasn’t always been easy, but with good planning and focusing on what matters most, I’ve found a way to do it all.

"By Maria Ross

As someone who has dedicated my career to helping leaders infuse empathy into their work, I’m always fascinated by the practical tools that bring this concept to life. 

One such tool I’ve known about for quite some time is Empathy Circles—a structured approach to fostering understanding and connection. I first heard about Empathy Circles from Edwin Rutsch and his team at the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. Edwin and I met when he attended The Empathy Edge book launch party in Berkeley in 2019. He shared how his team has used Empathy Circles at the most divisive political rallies the U.S. has seen in recent years. They set up Empathy Tents at these rallies to get a person from each side of the political spectrum into a tent and facilitate listening to each other. Not to convert, but to LISTEN."