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As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline...
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.
By Daisy Grewal 
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No matter the circumstance, the greatest tool to help others cope with their difficulty is empathy. Empathy is different than feeling sorry for a person — it’s putting yourself in their shoes, and trying to understand their situation and what brought them there.
Our frontline workers at Siloam Mission know that when it comes to helping people experiencing homelessness, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. At the basic level, everyone needs food, shelter and the basic needs.
But helping people who are stuck move forward requires much more than meeting basic needs. It requires empathy and patience....
Ultimately, none of us want pity. We want empathy.
BY FLOYD PERRAS, WINNIPEG SUN
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It turns out that the milk of human kindness is evoked by something besides mom's good example. Research by psychologists has found that at least part of the reason some people are kind and generous is that their genes nudge them toward it...
Oxytocin promotes maternal behavior, for example, and in the lab, subjects exposed to the hormone demonstrate greater sociability. An article in the usually staid Science magazine even used the terms "love drug" and "cuddle chemical" to describe oxytocin,...
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[a rather muddled view of empathy and sympathy]
Empathy vs. Sympathy - Today's advice, as you can tell from the title is about empathy versus sympathy. This is a really CRITICAL lesson for me to learn because, as I develop down my path with understanding socio-dynamics more clearly, as well as my spiritual path with meditating, I begin to notice a lot of the pains of the world.
's comment April 12, 2012 4:14 PM
Sounds a bit pessimistic. Why should one empathise only with people when they're depressed? One can empathise with happiness also. Compassion without empathy runs the risk of a righteous, misguided charity - thinking someone needs something, just because you want that same thing, when that may just worsen their quality of life. It is a common mistake made by Western industrialised nations in thinking they're helping developing countries, by turning them into a country more like themselves. Ideally, in a therepeutic situation the therapist empathises, but keeps that empathy separate from his own emotions, so as not to get bogged-down in the psychological afflictions of others. It is like reading a book, empathising with the main character, and at the end of the chapter closing it and acknowledging you and the book's character are distinct entitities.
Edwin Rutsch's comment,
April 13, 2012 11:55 AM
yes,, this is quite a muddled understanding of empathy.. he is confusing empathy and sympathy.. etc.
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In general, I’m a numbers and concepts guy, not a feelings guy; when I go after someone like Paul Ryan, I emphasize his irresponsibility and dishonesty, not his evident lack of empathy for the less fortunate.
Still, there are times — in Ryan’s case and more generally for much of his political tribe — when that lack of empathy just takes your breath away. Harold Pollack catches Ryan calling his proposed cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and more welfare reform round two, and suggests that our current suite of safety net programs is “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency”.
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From
vimeo
Talk: "The Place for Compassion in a Modern Age" Jim Doty, CCARE, speaks at the 2012 Wisdom 2.0 Conference.
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Following (Heinz) Kohut, empathy has been widely construed as an aspect, or at least a precondition, of talking therapy. For self psychologists and others who draw on Kohut’s insights, the ability to sympathize with the patient has given way to a higher-order ability to feel what the patient is feeling, to “feel with” the patient from the inside out.
And this process of empathic immersion, in turn, permits the therapist to “observe” the patient’s psychological interior and to comprehend the patient’s “complex mental states.” For Kohut, the core of psychoanalysis, indeed of depth-psychology in general, was employment of this “empathic mode of observation,”
by Paul E. Stepansky
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The intention with this web page is to stimulate and engage people in the transformation of earth into an empathic civilisation. By understanding the present time, the fantastic potential of the future, and possible transformation bridges, mankind have a true chance to mobilize at a crucial moment in history.
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From
www
If you have not heard of mirror neurons then you will be blown away by this TED talk. Mirror neurons seem to be directly connected to empathy in a very direct way.
With the advances by neurologists like RV Rama, previously inexplicable human traits are now quite easily integrated into a more humanistic understanding of what it means to be a human at this critical time.
Ramachandran suggests that simply mimicking movement is not an effective learning tool. if we can put ourselves in the shoes of the teacher and understand 'why' we learn quicker, we attach meaning to our teacher's actions and mirror neurons make this empathy integral to how we experience EVERYTHING.
The implications of RV Rama's work are far reaching and profound, I am sure you will enjoy the video.
ps. This view of the function of mirror neurons seems to be widely accepted at this time, however other researchers are less convinced of the profound implications which RV Rama puts on mirror neurons. It is early days in our understanding of neurology and empathy.
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A D.C. therapist argues that if we want to be good parents, we need to be good to ourselves.
This is because we live in a culture that equates happiness with being the best. Pushing through no matter what is considered ideal. But what are we left with whenwe stumble in our pursuit of the perfect result?
More and more I find myself turning to a new area of psychology research called self-compassion. It appears to go a long way towards reducing symptoms of stress and unhappiness.
By Jennifer Kogan
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Is Kristin Neff's idea of self-compassion the solution?
Last week, we at Greater Good explored the impact of stress and the power of self-compassion through our Science of a Meaningful Life speaker series.
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Unfortunately in some of the wider follow-ups–such as the piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the idea of empathy as a key component seemed to drop out. Empathy is crucial, not just for teaching, but for anthropological inquiry.
Anthropologists have long been thinking about empathy as a human characteristic, our perhaps uniquely-developed (if not always used!) ability to imagine from the place of another. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues human empathy is part of our evolution as cooperative breeders, a key component of our humanity, but which could also evolve away.
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In a study published in the open access journal PLoS ONE, researchers found that watching live performances of dance resulted in muscle-specific motor responses in viewers, even when those viewers had no formal training in these movements. Study participants were either frequent dance spectators of ballet, Indian dance, or ‘‘novices’’ who never watched dance.
The so-called “empathic” ability of participants was also tested.
By Joan Raymond
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International Online Conference on:
Panel# 002-A: How does The No-Fault Zone Game teach and support creating a culture of empathy in schools
The No-Fault Zone Game helps create a culture of empathy in schools by providing hands-on materials that students and teachers use throughout the school day to: understand themselves, empathize with others, solve problems, resolve conflicts collaboratively.
The Game is also used to enrich academics, helping students understand characters in literature and history, and strengthen their own story-telling and writing. Conference: Education
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Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.
Ted Talk
See more talks, intervews and trasncripts for Frans De Waal
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Presidential elections are rarely won and lost on policy. Voters instead tend to choose the person they most want to be president based on who they like. And that feeling is heavily influenced by which of the candidates they believe best understands their hopes and dreams. Call it the empathy factor. And it matters. A lot. New national polling done by the Washington Post and ABC News shows that President Obama has a significant edge over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on the empathy question...
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Is it possible to teach empathy? That question sparked the president of Capital University to start the "Empathy Experiment."
It's an interesting question: Is there a way to make the next generation care more about social issues -- care enough to make changes?
Experiment participants (all student volunteers) are paired up with local businesses such as Columbus Public Health and Whole Foods.
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Compassion is a deep-seated value in every religious tradition. Judaism teaches that the world stands on Torah, on prayer and on acts of loving kindness. Christians celebrate the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke. And a major reason the Dalai Lama is so honored is because of his Buddhist teachings on compassion.
But compassion can also be studied scientifically, and one of the foremost researchers on compassion is Professor David DeSteno, author of the book Out Of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us and the director of the Social Emotions Lab at Northeastern University.
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From
vimeo
Compassion:
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Scientists have found that a man's libido was improved when he sniffed a nasal spray containing the hormone oxytocin.
The oxytocin group showed significantly higher emotional empathy levels than those men who had taken the placebo,' said Dr Rene Hurlemann, of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn. In fact, he added, they reached the 'levels of sensitivity usually found in females'.
by By EMILY ALLEN
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The 14th Dalai Lama, speaks on Can compassion be trained or taught?
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When President Obama was pushing for "empathetic judges" in 2009, Major Garrett, then of Fox News, turned to constitutional scholar Wendy Long for comment.
Like the Founders, Long advocates impartiality instead of favoritism.
As Long wrote on April 16, 2009 in "What's the Matter with Empathy? Obama's criterion for picking federal judges would turn equal justice on its head" (www.nationalreview.com/articles/227308/whats-matter-empathy/wendy-long):
"What's wrong with being empathetic to...any group or individual in general?
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So what’s wrong? In short, the common thread I see throughout all the failures is quite simply a lack of empathy. There is no authentic encounter with students, or what Martin Buber called “a genuine meeting.” When we use all the right methods, and we still fail, it is most likely because we are encountering our students as objects and not as the rich and complex individuals that they are. When we do not bring our authentic selves to the classroom and open up to an authentic encounter with our students and the topic at hand we fail, regardless of the methods we choose. “Methods” and “techniques” need to grow out of an authentic encounter with students and the material.
by Prof Wesch
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Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of empathy in the Pacific region. More specifically, the volume examines significant regional patterns in the experience, enactment, recognition, and limits of empathy that challenge many assumptions of contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific treatments of the topic.
The variations described in this book do not necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological, and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of practice.
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Anthropology report is running a round-up piece on empathy in anthropology and its centrality to our discipline. It’s a timely subject, given the recent edited volume on the topic. In this post I wanted to point out another article having to do with empathy, in this case an oldie-but-goodie: Robert Lowie’s “Empathy, or, Seeing From Within” which appeared in a massive festschrift for Paul Radin that appeared back in the day. Check it out — it’s a classic.
It’s a great piece which puts empathy, not ‘cultural relativism’ (whatever that is) at the center of our endeavors.
by Alex Golub
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