In a Word: Empathy "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own." Henry Ford
As UX professionals, it is our imperative to create valuable and engaging experiences for our users. We often have to play the role of “user advocate” on project teams where other requirements and constraints can push our recommendations for more user-centric designs to the bottom of the list of priorities. In this article, I will discuss not only why empathy is critical—offering a truly competitive advantage when designing experiences for users—but also why this same ability is key to managing your project teams, your department, and your entire organization.
In the past, being empathetic in the professional world has been marginalized as being "too soft” or “too touchy-feely.” However, empathetic approaches should be implemented both internally and externally and do not fit into any pre-defined box.
In recent blogs, conferences and unconferences, there has been a good deal of emphasis on the importance of empathy in a business environment. And although empathy is definitely important, I just refused to believe that it is the holy grail that will automatically lead to success....
However, a business is not the same as a society, and I wondered if empathy would also make a business run better. After giving it thought, I'm afraid that beg to differ in that area. As a matter of fact, I have the feeling that both the corporate as well as the political world are perhaps dragged too much into "empathy thinking", with too much talk and too little vigor and progression.
An exercise that has students place themselves into the physical stance of another student, with implications for seeing another perspective. For further inf...
Remember the oxygen mask and get your needs taken care of first. Take exquisite care of yourself as the foundation for taking care of others...
For anyone in the helping professions, compassion fatigue is a common occurrence and a clear signal to take better care of your own needs. Compassion fatigue is when you find yourself challenged to care about your patients in the way you know is proper and expected in your position. One of the key components of quality health care is the ability for you to connect with your patients and for them to sense that connection. Compassion fatigue cuts you off from the people who need you the most, and it extends well beyond just your patients.
Cynicism, sarcasm and feeling put upon are the first signs.
Are we more excited by people who seem to care about us? Can being a good, caring listener feed the flames of desire? Research offers some clues to the answer...
Fascinatingly, only the secure and anxious listeners were excited by the empathy of their partners. The more caring their partners seemed, the less interested avoidants were in having sex with them. In other words, people who avoid intimacy are less attracted to a caring partner!
Which seems like a great thing, right? Wouldn't those of us who enjoy intimacy prefer that our empathy-phobic dates take a hike?..
In the meantime, the clearest take home lesson seems to be this: If you want a caring partner, your best bet is to be caring, and see who sticks around for more.
Dr. Craig Malkin
Author, Clinical Psychologist, Instructor Of Psychology for HMS
James Doty emerged from a disadvantaged background in the United States to become a neurosurgeon, an entrepreneur and a philanthropist—only to let his fortune go and dedicate his professional life to the scientific study of compassion and altruism.
We can help these girls in the usual way, by being ourselves empathetic. But here’s the problem. We, as a culture, are experiencing an “empathy deficit,” as Emily explains in her new book out soon, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.
To a doctor, the death (and even impending death) of a patient represents the ultimate professional failure...
But here's the problem: Experiencing empathy and even compassion becomes exhausting if you don't have the skills to maintain healthy mental boundaries and take care of your own stress. Those who work with the terminally ill often become numb when their grief, loss and helplessness feel overwhelming and become unproductive.
Compassion fatigue occurs when we try to care for everyone else and neglect our own needs. It happens when we get stuck in "feeling the patient's pain" and can't transform that emotional resonance into true compassion. Fortunately, the practice of mindfulness offers an antidote to this particular type of fatigue because it creates the mental conditions for the most powerful remedy available: compassion.
Deborah Schoeberlein Author, 'Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness'
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” -Herman Melville Connection.
“empathy,” the simple innate ability to “know what it’s like,” to actually understand. But what is it really? How does it work, and where does it come from?
The biological basis for empathy lies, like all emotions, in the brain. It might be more appropriate to substitute “synaptic” in lieu of “sympathetic” in Melville’s aforementioned quote, as empathy goes all the way down to the molecular level, generated by special brain cells nicknamed mirror neurons. These neurons were originally referred to as “monkey see, monkey do” neurons after their discovery by a team of researchers at the University of Parma, Italy.
Researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) recently revealed that doctors who have empathy could help increase their patients’ pain tolerance.
In particular, the findings of the study looked at how the brain changes to respond to stress and found that certain shifts in the brain result in elevated pain tolerance. The medical researchers discovered that doctors who listened attentively to their patients could help them have better health outcomes. However, the team of investigators is not entirely sure about the mechanism that causes this reaction.
Also see the Empathy in Health Care Conference How can we transform health care system to be more empathic and compassionate? http://j.mp/N98AoS
Introspection is out, and outrospection is in. Philosopher and author Roman Krznaric explains how we can help drive social change by stepping outside ourselves and devloping Empathy.
A doctor-patient relationship built on trust and empathy doesn't just put patients at ease -- it actually changes the brain's response to stress and increases pain tolerance, according to new findings from a Michigan State University research team.
Medical researchers have shown in recent studies that doctors who listen carefully have happier patients with better health outcomes, but the underlying mechanism was unknown, said Issidoros Sarinopoulos, professor of radiology at MSU.
The Empathy and Compassion in Society Conference held in London was very successful in allowing ideas sharing and affirming the attendants in their beliefs about empathy and compassion. Now we believe it is time to spark the debate beyond the walls of conference centres, to bring it to school boards and dinner tables, to social media, to classrooms, even pavements, and to ensure that any top-down efforts meets bottom-up readiness and action.
When we speak of empathy at Ashoka we always imply that it should be learned in a way that will lead to compassionate action rather than personal distress – but to get to the stage of positive change, learning to empathise is the first essential step. Ashoka’s vision is thus a world where every child masters empathy, which is why we have created the Start Empathy initiative to generate debate and action.
Previous research has shown that doctors who listen carefully have happier patients with better health outcomes, but the underlying mechanism was unknown. A release from the university quotes investigator Issidoros Sarinopoulos as saying, “This is the first study that has looked at the patient-centered relationship from a neurobiological point of view. It’s important for doctors and others who advocate this type of relationship with the patient to show that there is a biological basis.”
Just before the election, the Washington Post fluttered about what it described as “Barack Obama’s empathy edge.” The equally hardboiled reporters at Psychology Today pondered: “Is Obama empathetic to a fault?”
The Empath-in-Chief himself has said that empathy rather than such bewhiskered qualities as constitutional scrupulousness is his main concern when choosing Supreme Court justices, of whom he demanded that they have “the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young, teenaged mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”
Do Animals feel Empathy? This simple empathy experiment shows Bonobos freeing each other from captivity to share food with each other. This great Nova video shows rats and humans doing it to! Share this link widely!
How do children develop prosocial behavior - "voluntary behavior intended to benefit another" - and is there a way to encourage it?
Working with a child’s temperament, taking advantage of an emerging sense of self and increasing cognitive understanding of the world and helped by the reward centers of the brain, parents can try to foster that warm glow and the worldview that goes with it. Empathy, sympathy, compassion, kindness and charity begin at home, and very early.
Whenever I hear people talk about “ a difficult child,” I immediately wonder what is going on in that family. Kids react to their world and feelings with behavior without understanding the big picture. This is why we need parents to explain, teach, guide and help them understand. Well, of course, you say. Everyone knows that. But, I believe there is a piece of parenting that some don’t understand and that is the power of empathy.
The cornerstone of narcissistic parenting is lack of empathy and the inability to give unconditional love. Narcissists do not tune into the emotional world of their child and therefore are not in touch with the day-to-day feelings of their kids. Narcissists worry more about what the child does rather than who the child is. They see their kid’s behavior as a reflection of them.
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy Being a teenager has never been easy, but in recent years, with the rise of the Internet and social media, it has become exponentially more challenging. Bullying, once thought of as the province of queen bees and goons, has taken on new, complex, and insidious forms, as parents and educators know all too well.
No writer is better poised to explore this territory than Emily Bazelon, who has established herself as a leading voice on the social and legal aspects of teenage drama. In Sticks and Stones, she brings readers on a deeply researched, clear-eyed journey into the ever-shifting landscape of teenage meanness and its sometimes devastating consequences. The result is an indispensable book that takes us from school cafeterias to courtrooms to the offices of Facebook, the website where so much teenage life, good and bad, now unfolds.
The US election was defined as much by candidates’ perceived ability to empathise as economic policy, argues Mark Honigsbaum.
When Mitt Romney was caught on camera writing-off 47 per cent of Americans as tax avoiders, Democrats were quick to jump on his remarks as an example of the Republicans’ ‘empathy deficit’. Since Barack Obama identified a lack of empathy as the cause of America’s bitter partisan divides, a series of studies have shown that politcally engaged conservatives score lower on empathy than their liberal equivalents.
The social neuroscientific investigation of empathy has revealed that the same neural networks engaged during first-hand experience of affect subserve empathic responses. Recent meta-analyses focusing on empathy for pain for example reliably identified a network comprising anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex.
Moreover, recent studies suggest that the generation of empathy is flexibly supported by networks involved in action simulation and mentalizing depending on the information available in the environment. Further, empathic responses are modulated by many factors including the context they occur in. Recent work shows how this modulation can be afforded by the engagement of antagonistic motivational systems or by cognitive control circuits, and these modulatory systems can also be employed in efforts to regulate one's empathic responses.
MBCT stands for mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Now I know what you are thinking, what is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy? Essentially, it is a type of psychotherapy that involves many different types of treatment options. The therapy focuses mainly on cognitive therapy and meditation. The goal is to achieve a present oriented and nonjudgmental attitude in the patient. This is defined as mindfulness and it is something that is difficult to achieve, but can be accomplished through mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
More emphasis should be placed on nurses providing compassionate care in hospitals, industry leaders have said.
In a new campaign aimed at reassuring the public, chief nursing officer for England Jane Cummings said action must be taken to ensure the values nurses stand for are not betrayed...
With the launch of Compassion in Practice - a three year strategy for nursing - Ms Cummings will call for new ways of measuring patient feedback, getting trusts to review their culture of care and their staffing levels and explaining in public how they impact on standards.
A doctor-patient relationship built on trust and empathy doesn’t justput patients at ease – it actually changes the brain’s response to stress and increases pain tolerance, according to new findings from an MSU research team.
“We need to do more research to understand this mechanism,” he said, “but this is a good first step that puts some scientific weight behind the case for empathizing with patients, getting to know them and building trust.”
Published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling, the study was part of a broader effort at MSU, led by professor of medicine Robert Smith, to establish standards for patient-centered health care and measure its effectiveness.
Contact(s): Andy McGlashen , Issidoros Sarinopoulos
Can we be taught to care more about our fellow humans? Christina Patterson joins the scientists and thinkers who believe a true understanding of empathy could transform the world we live in.
Everyone smiled. The woman who greeted me on the door smiled and the woman who told me where to register smiled and so did the woman who gave me a badge. Perhaps these women always smile, or perhaps they thought they had to.
You might think "professionals in education, health and social care" don't need to be taught about compassion. You might think compassion was what got them into their jobs. You might, in that case, have been living in a world where you've never been in a hospital, or a care home, or a school. Compassion is what gets some people into nursing, teaching or social care. But compassion isn't easy to keep up. Compassion, as those of us who have had experiences of the lack of it, in hospitals, doctors' surgeries or relatives' care homes, know, can fade.
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