Activating Social Empathy is a practical classroom resource designed to help teachers promote empathy skills and understanding among young people in Senior Cycle. The programme was developed by researchers at the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre at University of Galway, along with colleagues in the University’s School of Education, working closely with a Youth Advisory Panel from Foróige. It is endorsed by the National Council for Curriculum Assessment.

Dr Charlotte Silke is a lead researcher with UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre at University of Galway. She said that the fundamental aim of the programme is to "support young people in becoming more attuned to the feelings and perspectives of others" and to become "more confident in expressing empathy across a variety of real-world contexts".

Most heart-led leaders are celebrated for their empathy, and with good reason. Empathy builds trust and fosters connection, building blocks of high-performing teams. As a strength, empathy enables leaders to "connect to the emotions that underpin an experience," Brené Brown writes. But when leaders begin to feel those emotions as their own, that asset can quietly (and quickly) become a liability.

Over-empathy occurs when a leader absorbs their team members’ emotions, experiences and performance. They cease knowing where their job ends and their direct report’s job begins. Boundaries blur, leaders’ feedback softens or stops and their responsibilities multiply. Leaning too far into empathy, they often end up depleted, with a low-performing team.

• by Ben Rein, Mari Tavares

Empathy is ancient. For millennia, it has helped us understand what others feel by simply observing them. We are wired to detect signs of emotion from one another, and to take on similar emotions in response. We tear up when a loved one cries, smile when a friend laughs, and frown when a teammate hangs their head. This is empathy.

Yet, as social media platforms grow more central to how we connect, we’re spending more time sharing emotions in digital worlds through likes, shares, and comments. This shift in how we engage with one another does not go unnoticed by the molecular systems in our brains. In fact, we believe it is fundamentally altering the neurochemistry behind our interactions. We presented our case in a recent paper, arguing that our brains may not properly respond to others’ emotions in online environments. We call this new theory the “Virtual Disengagement Hypothesis.”

The other side: "In the Christian tradition, to have anybody argue that a spirit of empathy is somehow a vulnerability... is insane," Father Brendan Busse, pastor of Dolores Mission Catholic Church in Los Angeles, tells Axios.

Busse said the suffering of Jesus on the Cross invokes empathy, as does the call to help "the least of these" in the Gospels.

Empathy drives the mission of Homeboy Industries, the Los Angeles-based (and world's largest) gang intervention organization, founded by Catholic priest Greg Boyle.

The North Carolina-based Repairers of the Breach, founded by Bishop William J. Barber II, uses empathy to fight poverty and economic inequality.

By Amanda Marcotte
Thanks to Elon Musk, most Americans learned earlier this year that MAGA thinks empathy is evil. Cruelty isn’t the problem, the Tesla CEO claimed in an attempt to justify his turn toward authoritarian politics. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

As the billionaire was decimating much of the federal bureaucracy devoted to serving Americans, he said it was good to be heartless, comparing “the empathy response” to a computer bug. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” he said, arguing counterintuitively that caring about others will somehow bring ruin to the entire human species. 

The Empathy Gap: Why Algorithms Can Simulate Understanding But Cannot Replace Connection

Despite the rapid advancement of these tools, the consensus among service leaders remains that AI hits a hard ceiling when it comes to genuine emotional connection. While an LLM can simulate empathetic language, it lacks the shared human experience required to de-escalate a truly distraught customer. As highlighted in broader industry discussions by Harvard Business Review, customers can instinctively detect the difference between a scripted apology and genuine concern. The "uncanny valley" of customer service is real; when a machine tries too hard to sound human, it often alienates the user. Therefore, the goal of Amazon Connect’s architecture is to make the human agent more human, not to make the AI pretend to be one.

In this video we discuss with Alastair Howcroft his meta-analysis review paper on the empathy of chatbots versus human doctors.

Empathy is a crucial skill for public servants because they need to contextually understand who they are designing policies for, a researcher tells GN.

“Empathy can be used in decision making by understanding exactly how the program or policy will actually affect the person,” says Assel Mussagulova, from the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney.

Applying empathy to policymaking can be achieved by collecting more data, engaging with the data “and empathetically trying to understand how the policy will affect different cohorts based on their individual circumstances”, says Mussagulova.

AI journaling app Rosebud attempted to quantify chatbots’ empathy by testing 25 popular models across various mental health-related scenarios, scoring them based on how well they could recognize a crisis, prevent harm, and intervene.

Why Empathy Matters in Leadership
For organizations committed to developing the next generation of leaders, one truth is becoming impossible to ignore: the technical excellence that drives early-career success is not enough to carry executives into enterprise-level roles.

Increasingly, boards and executive teams want leaders who can build trust, inspire alignment, and elevate the performance of others. And among all the capacities required to do that, empathy stands out as one of the most strategically valuable — yet least developed. In The Six CEO Fundamentals, we outlined how personal readiness is just as critical as professional readiness. Empathy sits squarely at that intersection.

We've built a modern world that is flourishing with advanced technologies, but certainly not with values. We've built a world where almost everybody is obsessed with materialistic gains, often at the expense of humanity. In fact, Dr. Brianna J. Migliore (@dysregulationnation), a neuroscientist, believes that we, particularly Americans, have built a world that lacks empathy, and it all comes down to one underlying cause. In her video posted on December 1, Dr. J. Migliore explained why America is in an empathy crisis, and no, it's not because people are becoming more cruel.

For years, philosophers and psychologists have debated whether empathy helps or hinders the ways people decide how to help others. Critics of empathy argue that it makes people care too narrowly – focusing on individual stories rather than the broader needs of society – while careful reasoning enables more impartial, evidence-based choices.

Our new research, forthcoming in the academic journal PNAS Nexus, a flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this “heart versus head” argument is too simple. Empathy and reasoning aren’t rivals – they work together. Each one on its own predicts more generous, far-reaching acts of assistance. And when they operate side by side, people tend to help in the fairest ways – not favoring some over others – and in ways that touch the most lives.

As AI gets smarter, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that humans can't rely on their brains alone to succeed at work.

AI Can’t Do Empathy—That’s What People Do
DeMaio said, “People aren’t really looking for technology to form that emotional connection when they’re trying to achieve an outcome.” While AI can talk to a customer and sound like a human, the customer knows it’s just a machine. It can say, “I’m sorry,” and sound empathetic, but it’s not, and the customer knows it. Authentic empathy is a human-to-human experience.

The question I have for you, Mark, is what role, if any, does this feeling of empathy have in the evolutionary process of humankind?

Mark: Frank, I believe that empathy functions in a way similar to a muscle: It requires constant conditioning, strengthening and continuous use. Without such regular development and deployment, it will quickly atrophy and fall into disuse.

The question you ask operates on a very macro level. On the broad stage of human drama and human history, one can make the argument that each successive generation has made us gradually more empathetic to the needs, concerns, rights, and freedoms of others. This holds true, especially within Western democracies within the past two hundred and fifty years. Even then, one can argue, the development of empathy to the civil rights and liberties of others — minority groups in particular — has not come without struggle and often setbacks.

We discuss AI chatbots versus human healthcare professionals and the ability to show empathy by reviewing studies investigating empathy.
 

Some autistic people have too much empathy -
what does this mean and how does it impact us?

A new empathy education programme developed at University of Galway is to be rolled out for Transition Year (TY) students in secondary schools nationwide.
‘Activating Social Empathy’ is a classroom resource designed for helping teachers to promote empathy skills and understanding amongst students.

The programme was developed by researchers at the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre at University of Galway alongside colleagues in the University’s School of Education, working closely with a Youth Advisory Panel from Foróige.

His point reflects a deeper clinical truth: empathy only functions when both parties are psychologically invested in resolution.

This essay examines, through an academic lens, why empathy collapses in intimate relationships, with specific attention to gendered patterns in emotional communication, avoidant attachment dynamics, and the role of reciprocity.

I. Tactical Empathy: A Theoretical Overview
Tactical empathy is defined in negotiation literature as the process of accurately understanding and articulating the emotions, needs, and perspectives of another person to reduce defensiveness and facilitate cooperation (Voss & Raz, 2016).

A first-of-its-kind empathy education programme from the University of Galway is being rolled out to Transition Year students nationwide, aimed at boosting compassion and emotional skills in schools across the country. 

We discussed this with  Brendan Kelly, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin.