For more than a decade, the literature has been dominated by the notion that medical students may paradoxically lose their empathy during medical school. However, medical curricula have significantly evolved, and the question is whether this is still the case. The present study aimed to describe the trajectories of different dimensions of empathy from the beginning to the end of a six-year medical curriculum and explore the influence of different psychosocial and health-related factors.

I wonder if as many Irish people wake up with a hangover on Good Friday as was once the case when the pubs were shuttered on this day sacred to Christians.

by Jamil Zaki
Empathy evolved as one of humans’ vital survival skills. Over millennia, we changed to make connecting easier. Our testosterone levels dropped, our faces softened, and we became less aggressive. We developed larger eye whites than other primates, so we could easily track one another’s gaze, and intricate facial muscles that allowed us to better express emotion. Our brains developed to give us a more precise understanding of each other’s thoughts and feelings.

As a result, we developed vast empathic abilities. We can travel into the minds of not just friends and neighbors but also enemies, strangers, and even imaginary people in films or novels. This helped us become the kindest species on Earth. Chimpanzees, for instance, work together and console each other during painful moments, but their goodwill is limited. They rarely give each other food, and though they may be kind to their troop, they are vicious outside of it.

This is the real danger of selective empathy. It turns human rights into conditional privileges. It turns vulnerability into a partisan talking point. And it corrodes the public’s understanding of justice, encouraging the idea that mental health or trauma are only real when experienced by the politically palatable.

Empathy skills include taking action, emoting, and disclosing. Taking action refers to intervening or helping on someone’s behalf, but only after carefully assessing whether they want support. When debating whether to step in, it is important to consider whether the person being validated has the resources to take action themselves, whether it is something they need to learn how to do to develop necessary skills, and whether the action actively conflicts with your values as the validator.

Emoting is expressing your own authentic emotional response, using language, tone, and body language to convey what you feel in reaction to the other person’s experience. Finally, disclosing is the most vulnerable and difficult skill: sharing personal stories or feelings that relate to what the other person is going through. When done authentically, self-disclosure can dismantle shame and build intimacy, showing someone they’re not alone in their struggle.

This week we’re talking about empathy. I recently read a new book by Joe Rigney – The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. This book has received a lot of criticism because, in our society, empathy is seen as being unquestionably good. But is it? Or is it possible for it to be corrupted? We’re going to consider this in our episode today.

Lately, empathy has become a point of political contention. While empathy is recognised as a fundamental human skill—one that helps people connect, collaborate, and make thoughtful decisions— it is now being reframed by some right-wing figures in the US as a liability rather than a strength. Critics argue that too much empathy leads to poor decision-making, emotional overreach, or policies that prioritise feelings over logic. However, this perspective often misrepresents what empathy truly is and how it functions in both personal and societal contexts.

Summary: A new study sheds light on how childhood maltreatment can lead to impaired empathy and increased risk of child abuse in adulthood. Researchers found that mothers who experienced abuse as children often struggle with emotional empathy and depressive symptoms, both of which negatively influence parenting.

Emotional overwhelm from their children’s feelings can increase stress, making them more likely to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. Targeted interventions that address mental health and emotional regulation in parents could help disrupt this intergenerational transmission.

Key Facts:

Empathy Link: Childhood abuse is linked to heightened emotional empathy, which can increase distress and hinder healthy parenting.

Mental Health Connection: Depression mediates the relationship between childhood trauma and parenting difficulties.

Cycle of Abuse: Addressing emotional empathy and mental health in at-risk parents may help prevent the continuation of child maltreatment.

The answer, Ringel decided, is a formal study of empathy he calls “Empathy in Practice.” The independent concentration includes 15 courses, none of which overlap with Ringel’s pre-med requirements. “That’s what makes this so much more fun,” he says, laughing. The course load draws upon more than half a dozen disciplines including anthropology, neuroscience, and literature to investigate the experience of empathy in everyday life.

Empathy is most often studied in psychology, Ringel says, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. His concentration turns to sociology and anthropology to capture the actual experience of empathy, influenced by social circumstance, identity, and even politics. 

Summary: Viewing stress as a potential motivator can improve productivity and wellbeing without reducing empathy or willingness to support others. Researchers developed a brief online intervention that teaches participants to reframe stress more positively using education and visualization techniques.

Despite concerns that this approach might lead to emotional detachment or less support for others, participants remained just as attuned to others’ distress and likely to help. These findings support the use of stress mindset interventions to enhance performance without compromising interpersonal relationships.

Key Facts:

Mindset Shift: Viewing stress as a challenge rather than a threat improves coping and motivation.

No Empathy Loss: Participants who reframed stress were equally likely to support others in distress.

Practical Tool: A 15-minute online intervention effectively shifted participants’ stress mindset.

Ben Shapiro

This week, Democrats decided to expend their quickly diminishing political capital in defence of deported Salvadoran illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

By Pol Allingham

Researchers found that those who regularly smoke marijuana find it easier to recognize and understand how others feel.

Chronic users are also more capable of sensing how others are feeling, according to researchers at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

The team argued this could be due to weed smokers feeling less “discomfort” around emotional people.

Brain scans also revealed cannabis users’ anterior cingulate – a region linked to empathy – was particularly active.

Empathy comes in multiple flavors
You might be wondering what, exactly, empathy is. You’re not alone. As of 2016, psychologists had 43 (!) different definitions for empathy, and more have been added since then.1 Confusion abounds.

What most experts agree upon today is that there are at least two kinds of empathy, and both are about understanding another person’s emotions. One kind is emotional or affective empathy, which is when you feel someone else’s joy or pain and share their emotional experience. The other kind is cognitive empathy, commonly referred to as perspective taking, which is when you perceive that someone else is feeling joy or pain and you’re able to infer how that might affect them.2

What is actual empathy in leadership, and why are we missing it?
We place empathy on the pedestal, like it’s the great white whale and ultimate achievement. And sure, in a world that seems to be increasingly nasty, aggressive, and frightening, we could probably do with a whole lot more of it. 

But here’s the thing: Sometimes we practice fear and politeness, and call it ‘empathy’. We spend so much time and energy in ‘meekdom’ – afraid of saying the thing that might make someone else uncomfortable, or might suggest there is another way to look at things than the prescribed idea the other person currently has (and how RUDE it is to suggest someone else is wrong, right?)

This meekdom – playing meek, being meek, holding back – is serving no-one. Especially if you are in a leadership role.

A useful framework for considering the needs of the “more-than-human world” when designing human-made systems is “ecological empathy,” the focus of Lauren Lambert, founder of Future Now, a sustainability consulting firm. Her research on the topic, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice, was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University, and she joins Mongabay’s podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutual benefit.

“Ecological empathy as I define it [is] essentially a framework of practice for how to use empathy as a guide to connect to the more-than-human world, and integrate our interdependence and relationships with the more-than-human world in everyday thinking, everyday practice, and specifically in the places where we work,” she says.

He is the author of The Sin of Empathy, a slender diatribe on how the scourge of empathy has infected American culture, politics, labor, and, most pertinent to his passions, the church. He argues that “[u]ntethered empathy, in tandem with a desire for respectability and credibility under the progressive gaze, is the means by which various aggrieved groups have been able to steer communities into catering to greater and greater folly and injustice” (emphasis mine).

There are two things to note here. The first is that Rigney is careful to qualify his denouncement of empathy as “untethered.” He’s inconsistent on this point — sometimes saying empathy is fine in small doses and only bad when it becomes untethered, other times seeming to think that empathy is always bad, invariably leading to compromise and crisis. “Since empathy entails a suspension of judgment and a more comprehensive sharing of emotion, then the danger of empathy is drowning in the pain and suffering of another,” he writes. “If a sufferer is sinking in quicksand, an empathic helper jumps in after them with both feet,” where they are “overwhelmed by the danger … swept away by the current.” Rigney argues that this untethered empathy leaves people vulnerable to manipulation.

Empathy is an obscenity in Elon Musk’s vocabulary. The words care, share and fair are not in the MAGA lexicon.  

The Tesla CEO exposed his contempt for compassion in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. The headline in the CNN digital story says it all, “Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy.” The hit 1960s song by Jackie DeShannon, “What the world Needs Now (is Love, Sweet Love),” is not in the rotation on Musk’s Spotify playlist but “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones probably gets lots of action. 

The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don't bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of Trump's loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is "an artificial virtue," calling empathy "destructive and manipulative."

"Empathy means never having to say no," Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen. 

Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk's crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as "suicidal" and the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization."

A planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will host a 2-day public virtual workshop that brings together leaders and experts across disciplines and sectors to explore the neurobiology of empathy and compassion and potential implications for treatments for brain disorders and other real-world applications.  
 
Invited presentations and discussions may:  

Consider the various definitions and measurements of empathy and compassion across fields.  

Examine evidence on the underlying neurobiological mechanisms of empathy and compassion, their evolutionary origin, and their role in brain functionality, including in some cases of brain disorders.  

Explore how factors such as genetics, environment, social interactions, and psychological states influence the development and expression of empathy and compassion. 

Discuss how different treatments (e.g., behavioral and pharmacological) for brain disorders affect empathy and compassion.