During the last decades, animal assistance in therapy, education, and care has greatly increased. Today, the value of animal-assisted interventions [AAI, including animal-assisted therapy (AAT) and activities] is widely acknowledged. In the light of the rapid development of the practice of AAI, research evaluating the effects of AAIs as well as studies investigating the basic effects of human-animal interaction (HAI) and the underlying mechanisms seem to lag behind.
Still, there is already quite a body of scientific literature on this topic. However, this is spread out over a number of journals and fields, constraining an integrative view. In the following, we will provide an overview of studies assessing effects of AAI as well as pet ownership which meet certain scientific criteria.
Compassion is essentially the wish that beings not suffer – from subtle physical and emotional discomfort to agony and anguish – combined with feelings of sympathetic concern. You could have compassion for an individual (a friend in the hospital, a co-worker passed over for a promotion), groups of people (victims of crime, those displaced by a hurricane, refugee children), animals (your pet, livestock heading for the slaughterhouse), and yourself. Compassion is not pity, agreement, or a waiving of your rights. You can have compassion for people who’ve wronged you while also insisting that they treat you better.
Compassion by itself opens your heart and nourishes people you care about. Those who receive your compassion are more likely to be patient, forgiving, and compassionate with you. Compassion reflects the wisdom that everything is related to everything else, and it naturally draws you into feeling more connected with all things.
Empathy, the capacity to recognize and share feelings experienced by another individual, is an important trait in humans, but is not the same as pro-sociality, the tendency to behave so as to benefit another individual. Given the importance of understanding empathy's evolutionary emergence, it is unsurprising that many studies attempt to find evidence for it in other species. To address the question of what should constitute evidence for empathy, we offer a critical comparison of two recent studies of rescuing behaviour that report similar phenomena but are interpreted very differently by their authors. In one of the studies, rescue behaviour in rats was interpreted as providing evidence for empathy, whereas in the other, rescue behaviour in ants was interpreted without reference to sharing of emotions.
Evidence for empathy requires showing that actor individuals possess a representation of the receiver's emotional state and are driven by the psychological goal of improving its wellbeing.
by Marco Vasconcelos, Karen Hollis, Elise Nowbahari and Alex Kacelnik
TACTICS commonly used by schools to deal with cyber bullies, such as asking them to show empathy towards their victim, are ineffective in dealing with some of the worst offenders, new research has found.
Despite the millions of dollars spent on programs to stamp out cyber bullying in schools, no research has been conducted to assess whether they are successful
I have recently begun collecting stories of empathy experiences from around the world for a new book I am writing. Here is one of the latest, in which Antonina Elliott, a graphic designer who lives in New Zealand, describes a memory from a family visit to Samoa when she was five years old.
I have never truly stopped to consider the importance of empathy in my life until now. In recent events, my actions and words have hurt family and friends and left a trail of broken relationships in my wake, resulting in me seriously doubting whether I ever possessed any empathy at all.
Appreciation for our good qualities is really an expression of gratitude for all who have shaped us as individuals. Self-appreciation humbly honors those who have helped us become the person we are today.
So how do we celebrate our admirable qualities in a healthy way? I believe the answer is self-compassion, which involves treating ourselves with kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness when considering our perceived inadequacies -- though in a different guise. I like to call it "self-appreciation." When we can enjoy what's good about ourselves, acknowledging that all people have strengths as well as weaknesses, we allow ourselves to revel in our goodness without evoking feelings of arrogance or overconfidence.
Theory of Mind” (ToM) is a concept of the cognitive sciences that defines our ability to understand the intentions of others.
“Theory of Mind” (ToM) is a concept of the cognitive sciences that defines our ability to understand the intentions of others. Comprehending language requires reading in between the lines of spoken word. In comparison, ToM is a science that focuses on our adeptness at deciphering the meanings and intentions of conversation. ToM incorporates verbal and nonverbal elements of communication, from body language to voice inflections.
Recently, the neural network of ToM responsible for interpreting the full meaning behind a single remark has been identified.
Mirror neurons represent the hard-wired brain circuitry that animals possess for the function of empathy. Empathy is not an emotional faculty. It's a feature of our motor skills. Our brains are designed to allow us to know how other beings might be feeling and thinking as we observe them acting. Studies reveal that this isn't a psychic link, but rather something of a remote personal experience. We mentally experience vicariously with others as they experience physically.
Empathy is a healthy natural mental function in humans and other animals. There is no species barrier that prevents one species from empathising with another. In fact, empathy is known to arise quite naturally toward inanimate objects too. Being concerned about the environment isn't sentimental. It's the natural response of a healthy brain. Knowing how others might feel is a biological faculty and not a manmade moral option any more than equality is. Neither can be excluded from our conduct on the basis of personal choice. If a person chooses to live, they automatically enlist themselves into taking empathy and equality affirmative actions.
Humans have evolved a genetically-controlled drive to help weaker individuals fight back against a bully. The drive to help the weaker group members led to a dramatic reduction in group inequality and eventually enabled humans to develop widespread cooperation, empathy, compassion and egalitarian moral values, according to the paper which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Studies of how rats and ants rescue other members of their species do not prove that animals other than humans have empathy, according to a team led by Oxford University scientists.
Empathy – recognising and sharing feelings experienced by another individual – is a key human trait and to understand its evolution numerous studies have looked for evidence of it in non-human animals
The article, entitled 'Pro-sociality without empathy' is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Studies of how rats and ants rescue other members of their species do not prove that animals other than humans have empathy, according to biologists.
The ability to rescue another individual in distress, a typical empathic response of humans, appears in several other animals. Two recent laboratory studies led by US and French researchers looked at how rats and ants will attempt to free individuals of the same species they share a cage or nest with which have been restrained. However, writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the Oxford-led team argues that such studies are not rigorous enough to separate examples of 'pro-social' behavior, the tendency to behave so as to benefit another individual, from genuine empathy.
A friend sent me this older NY Times article about teaching at risk youth empathy by exposing them to and asking them to consider the well-being of babies. Why this works, no one knows for sure, but it seems to trigger in them a natural inclination to help altruistically, also shared by primates:
We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion.
Whether we feel empathy or not, we are all connected. You are connected in innumerable ways to Kevin Bacon but also to someone halfway around the world living in utterly different conditions.
Want to learn more? Empathy: Design tool and outcome describes additional background on the concept of empathy and answers design-related questions like:
How can decision makers get a better intuitive sense of their customers to complement the faceless data?
What are some creative ways that working teams can get a deeper sense of walking in their customers’ shoes?
How can you recognize when there is an opportunity to increase empathy among customers?
How does technology act against empathy today and what can we do about it?
We have thus created a society of enormous individual freedom and success, but it has been paced by a sense of empathy.
Today, though, that sense of empathy is disappearing in the ranks of the Republican Party. For the most extreme conservatives, empathy is no more than liberal claptrap. It was Mitt Romney, after all, who said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”
Even staunch conservatives like Barry Goldwater had more integrity than that. And George W. Bush popularized the term “compassionate conservatism,” even if his presidency did not put it into practice as often as he might have wanted to.
Compassion toward criminals is cruelty toward their victims. That was Fielding's insight, and never in modern times was it made more blindingly obvious than when CNN anchor Bernard Shaw asked the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis if he would support the death penalty were his own wife Kitty to be raped and murdered. Dukakis coolly replied: "No I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life."
Dukakis met Shaw's plea for empathy with the victims of crime by flatly refusing to show empathy even with his own nearest and dearest.
Empathy is a distinctly human trait, despite suggestions that other animals are capable of recognising and sharing the feelings of another individual of the same species, according to researchers from four institutions in America, Britain, France and Portugal.
In a paper describing their research, published in the journal Biology Letters, the authors say empathy is not the same as pro-sociality, which is the tendency to behave so as to benefit another individual.
“Given the importance of understanding empathy's evolutionary emergence, it is unsurprising that many studies attempt to find evidence for it in other species,” the researchers write.
You are invited to participate in the 2012 Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest. Challenge and inspire your neighbors to make our community a safer, kinder, more just and better place to live by participating in the Compassion Games!
The Compassion Games begin on Friday September 21st with the United Way Day of Caring, and end on Sunday October 21st, the last day of The Next Fifty at Seattle Center. Anyone can play!
If you could take the necessary steps to better connect with your audience; you'd drastically improve conversions. Making sales is all about knowing your audience. Understanding what they're going through.
One of the most useful exercises for gaining a better understanding of your audience is creating an empathy map. An empathy map is essentially a map of someone’s point of view. Your ideal buyers point of view or your target audience’s point of view.
It’s what your target buyers see, think, feel and hear. It’s about creating a map and avatar of their perspective allowing you to better understand them. That’s all it is, an exercise to help your understand your audience, their emotions, thoughts and beliefs.
The Empathy Map is applicable to any business, as it provides insight into key players who are necessary for your company’s success. Learn how to provide a better user experience by viewing the perspective of your stakeholders and identifying how to improve what they see, hear, think, gain, and are challenged by. Through the extensive collaboration and visual organization involved in this game, players are able to form a deeper understanding about what customers and business partners truly want from your company.
"I said that it was a challenge to game manufactures to develop games to cultivate compassion and kindness rather than games that promote aggression and violence.” Dr. Richard Davidson (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
The team is developing two kinds of games. One is to cultivate attention and the other to cultivate empathy, kindness, and pro-social behavior. Davidson said that ¬attention is a building block for learning. “If you can learn to focus your attention more skillfully and concentrate, that will have ripple effects on all kinds of learning,” he said.
Being successful in life may be achieved by being emotionally intelligent and thinking of others, according to Davidson. “Empathy,” said Davidson, who places empathy as a core part of emotional intelligence, “is actually a better predictor of life success than cognitive intelligence.
Compassion does not imply ducking our responsibilities or shirking our power. Instead, it is a potent tool for transformation since it requires us to step outside of our conditioned response patterns.
I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion. So many times people have approached me and said something along the lines of, "I don't know about developing greater love and compassion. Surely that will consign me to only saying 'yes'/ refusing to take a stand/ letting other people be treated unjustly/ being a wimp."
I believe that differences between individuals from relatively upper- and lower-class backgrounds lead to differences in empathy. This prediction is derived from the fact that the environments of lower-class individuals are relatively dependent on the social environment and on others. Disposed to reduced social and economic resources, lower-class individuals' outcomes are more likely to hinge on outside forces....
Research supports this prediction. For instance, in one illustrative study, University of Toronto employees from different educational backgrounds took an emotional intelligence test where they attempted to guess the emotions displayed in others' facial expressions.
We can reduce violence in our families and communities if we pay more attention to the abuse of animals, says a prominent US expert.
The internationally acclaimed lecturer and author is also to deliver the conference’s keynote speech on ‘Empathy Education’.
"There’s no doubting the link between animal abuse and violence towards our own species. Study after study shows a high incidence of animal abuse in the childhood histories of violent criminals and in the lives of families affected by violence, be it towards partners, children or elders.
"It’s also increasingly clear that animal abuse can act as a ‘red flag’ for the likelihood of violence towards humans..
"This year’s conference will be devoted to ‘The Link’, a term covering both the empathetic relationship between animals and ourselves and the much darker connection between animal abuse and violence to humans,"
Sanatana Dharma is an ancient code of conduct originating with the Vedic culture some 8,000+ years ago.
While the work of Roots of Empathy represents the immunisation campaign to stem the spread of psychopathy, the need to quarantine already infected individuals and sanitise our social, economic and political institutions still remains unfulfilled. Nevertheless, time will eradicate psychopathy. Beings who cannot adapt to a changing environment become extinct and leaders who think and act without empathy will one day retire and die.
This national election has now become a referendum on whether we will choose the value of selfishness or of compassion.
Yes, Ryan’s attachment to the works of Ayn Rand is revealing of his own views and it’s deeply problematic. But the problem of selfishness as a virtue is far more widespread and corrosive in American society than the views of any one person.
Through decades of conservative ideology, the concept of freedom itself has been narrowed to mean simply ‘it’s okay to be selfish.’ In fact, caring for our fellow citizens is regarded as the antithesis of our own individual freedom.
Biblical truth teaches us that selfishness is profoundly destructive. The extreme of the “freedom agenda” is actually a counsel of despair....
Freedom isn’t selfishness. My freedom ultimately depends on my capacity to feel compassion for you, and the freedom we achieve together in mutual responsibility.
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