Empathy Circle Magazine

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a behavioural change intervention that is growing in popularity within physiotherapy practice.

William R. Miller, a distinguished Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry in New Mexico, wrote the first article about MI in 1983. 1991 followed the first common book “Motivational Interviewing” with Stephen Rollnick, a Professor for Health Care Communication in Wales, Cardiff. 

Miller and Rollnick[2] define the technique and introduce some of the language that is used to describe it.

 

Empathy is the ability to accurately understand your client's meaning and accurately reflect back to your client.

 

'Empathy is the listener's effort to hear the other person deeply, accurately, and non-judgmentally. Empathy involves skillful reflective listening that clarifies and amplifies the person’s own experiencing and meaning, without imposing the listener’s own material.' Rogers (1951) 

In a world of exponential change, we are confronted by an increasing number of complex inter-connected societal and environmental problems. Ensuring solutions will outpace problems requires effective collaboration at a scale never seen before.

 

Thriving and collaborating in this new world is only possible with deep empathy and social-emotional skills, the ability to understand and respond to the feelings of others. Today, cultivating our innate capacity for empathy in children and young adults is as fundamental and urgent as numeracy and literacy.

Resilience, empathy, and plasticity are important parts of the human experience, but how do these traits actually emerge biologically? Renowned scientists, Dr. Dorothy Kozlowski, Dr. Peggy Mason, and Dr. Janice Urban, will come together to discuss their groundbreaking work in neuroscience. Discussions will focus on the biology of empathy and helping behavior in rats, the incredible ability of the brain to repair itself following traumatic injury, and how the brain develops a stress response and resilience.

Join us at DePaul University for a discussion of what role the brain has in resilience, empathy, and plasticity. A panel discussion with the scientists reflecting on how these traits have assisted them in their careers as women in neuroscience will follow.

LISTENING WITH EMPATHY
I was a law professor before coming to the foundation. Asked about the educational mission of law school, most of my former colleagues would probably say something about learning fundamental legal concepts, coupled with the analytic moves needed to “think like a lawyer.”

 

But I have long believed that the most important skill we teach young lawyers is how to appreciate an opposing argument in its strongest light: how to hear it with tolerance and see it as it appears through the eyes of the person making it. Put simply, we help law students understand how an argument that seems completely wrong to them can seem right and reasonable to someone else.

Let’s call that “listening with empathy.”

Empathy is beneficial in the classroom
FOR STUDENTS: Empathy positively impacts school and classroom culture by prompting others to consider their actions and the consequences of said actions on others. It encourages everyone within the classroom and school to think beyond themselves and helps build meaningful relationships.

FOR EDUCATORS: Empathy allows teachers to understand the impact of the tasks and pressures placed on students and better “read the room”. It allows them to respond authentically and thus deepen teacher/student relationships. And, empathy helps to empower teachers to see and understand each student as an individual.

Should toilets in refugee camps have built-in lights? That might seem like a no-brainer – it certainly did to us when we were faced with this question. As it turns out, that’s a terrible idea.

This is an example that illustrates why we need to take the time to understand and build empathy for the people we’re designing for. Otherwise, we risk doing more harm than good.

In a powerful talk, writer-producer Wendy Calhoun inspires a worldview of inclusion, compelling each one of us to use the yardstick of empathy both for ourselves and others. She demonstrates the same through her on-screen characters, created to underline diversity and gender equality.

Is empathy facing extinction? 

Are mobile phones to blame? 

 

Multiple slam winning spoken word poet Rose Condo returns with a brand new show.

 

Embarking on a Day Of No Mobile Phones, Rose explores tech addiction and compassion using herself as the test subject…

 

With funding from Arts Council England , Rose is developing The Empathy Experiment in collaboration with artists

• Dominic Berry,
• Kirsten Luckins,
• Victoria Firth,
• Kate Morton and
• Eleonora Rosca,

 

and with support from the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Square

Chapel Arts Centre, the Brewery Arts Centre, and Harrogate Theatre.

e part in this anonymous online survey, please click here. 

 

 

Daniel Ravner (founder of The Perspective) explains that the work of depolarization is not just about empathy. It's about showing people that they do not need to be afraid of each other.

A Stanford psychologist offers a bold new understanding of empathy, and shows how we can expand our circle of care, even in these divisive times
 
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse.   
 
It doesn’t have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that we can all strengthen through effort. 
 

We share 99% of our DNA with the chimpanzee and the bonobo. And yet we're often surprised to learn that apes, like us, can be both kind and clever. Behavioural biologist and best-selling author, Frans de Waal has spent many years observing our closest living animal relatives. He pioneered studies of kindness and peace-making in primates, when other scientists were focussing on violence, greed and aggression.

 

Empathy, he argues, has a long evolutionary history; and he is determined to undermine our arrogant assumptions of human superiority. Frans talks to Jim Al-Khalili about growing up on the Dutch polders, chimpanzee politics, and the extraordinary sex lives of the bonobos.

Patient care outcomes depend greatly on not only the technical skills of their care providers, but also on their ability to understand, empathize, and educate. One of the major challenges that come with online education is a lack of face-to-face communication. It can be difficult to impart, and to test for, these soft skills in an online environment.

 

Luckily, online technology provides us with a number of teaching tools that not only offer students greater opportunities for participation, but also allow us to explore ideas like empathy.

 

Modern technology makes the delivery of material and collaboration over the internet much easier. Discussion forums, where students can share ideas and discuss coursework, are just the tip of the iceberg. Video conferencing and streaming make lectures and group work a great deal easier.

Let's say you tell your child that it's time for bed, and she ignores you or says NO! What are your choices?

Threaten or punish her. You have to keep escalating, it ruins everyone's evening, and it erodes your relationship with your child.

Let her do whatever she wants. You're compromising on what's good for your child and the rest of the family. Until you explode, eventually....Not exactly responsible or peaceful parenting!

Set a limit -- with empathy. Say "You really don't want to stop playing....I hear you. It's hard to stop. I bet when you grow up, you'll play all night, every night, won't you?  AND right now, it's time to get ready for bed....Do you want to fly your plane to the bathroom, or climb on my back and I'll gallop you there?"

So consciousness always has a sensory basis?

I claim that consciousness is always bound to a sensory modality, that there is inevitably some auditory, visual or tactile aspect to it. All kinds of mental imagery, such as inner speech or visual memory, can of course be conscious. We see things in our mind’s eye; we hear our inner voice. What we are conscious of are the sensory-based contents present in working memory.

Empathy is one of those things that can help in any part of life whether it’s your family, friends, that special person and even also at work. Understanding what empathy is and how it effects people…

What good will empathy do?

There are so many benefits of having empathy, so I’ll just state a few. The end result of it is

• a happy team
• a well groomed end-product
• good work culture.

So, like many other problems we face as software engineers, we tend to solve problems by devising an algorithm. Here is “pseudo code” for empathy.

 

• 1- better understanding of your colleagues: If you understand them better., you can help them better.
• 2- The unsaid things: Your team might not share everything with you. Based on their body-language, tone, voice, you will have a better idea of their situation.
• 3- Resolving conflicts: When you understand the unsaid things, you can address them and make your team members feel heard. This is the first step of resolving a conflict.

In our surreal world full of war, famine and disease, and increasingly blurred lines between fact and fiction, we need art to build empathy.

"Lead with empathy: It's a quality that we undervalue as a society, but often one of the biggest challenges in regards to crisis or conflict is that we rarely understand the existence or the experience in another (person's) shoes.

 

Often, times are so busy, that we don't take a moment to step back and see how it affects those with less privilege or power than we do. So, I'd ask (world leaders) to lead with empathy."

— Sinead Burke, academic, writer, and advocate for disability and design said in 2018, during a conversation on fostering inclusivity and what leaders should adopt.

“An Empathy Bridge for Autism” is a toolkit that includes three virtual sensory components, including peculiarly shaped lollipops that make it hard to speak clearly, headphones that produce loud, distorted sounds, and a headset that, when used in tandem with a smartphone application, simulates the experience of having double vision. In similar fashion, designer Di Peng created a virtual reality headset in 2016 that imitates the sensory changes experienced by people living with dementia.

Virtual reality activities may help cultivate empathy in people by creating the perceptual illusion of “embodiment,” or the feeling that a user is in the body of a virtual avatar, according to a 2018 article published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Moreover, researchers have found evidence that such may drive users to exhibit psychological responses comparable to tho

 

INTRODUCTION – WHAT IS ACTIVE LISTENING? A DEFINITION

Active listening is a style of listening where the listener is fully concentrated on the speaker. They focus on fully understanding the message before evaluating and responding to it.

Good listening is a key part of successful negotiation, influence, and conflict resolution.

Note: there is no single definition of active listening.

ACTIVE LISTENING VERSUS PASSIVE LISTENING: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Passive listening really only has one step – hearing.