Science in Context is an international journal edited at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, with the support of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Table of Contents - Volume 25 - Issue 03 (The Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History) - September 2012
The new English term “empathy” was translated from the German Einfühlung in the first decade of the twentieth century by the psychologists James Ward at the University of Cambridge and Edward B. Titchener at Cornell. At Titchener's American laboratory, “empathy” was not a matter of understanding other minds, but rather a projection of imagined bodily movements and accompanying feelings into an object, a meaning that drew from its rich nineteenth-century aesthetic heritage. This rendering of “empathy” borrowed kinaesthetic meanings from German sources, but extended beyond a contemplation of the beautiful to include a variety of experimental stimuli and everyday objects in the laboratory....
Susan Lanzoni
Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship
The Strength of Weak Empathy
The Social Brain and the Myth of Empathy
Einfühlung and Abstraction in the Moving Image: Historical and Contemporary Reflections
One group of the most neglected people in the aftermath of a traumatic incident is often the team who went in to work with all the survivors. They often fail to recognize the full impact the event has on their own lives. Caregivers spend the majority of their focus on the people directly involved and impacted by the incident and fail to pay attention to their own needs. There are many people who have technical skills that are helpful in times of need. However, in dealing with individuals who are traumatized, the first critical factor that comes to the forefront is the mental health of the person who would be a helper.
A counselor who has difficulty dealing with the rawness of feelings or who is put off with severe emotional pain is unable to function adequately, let alone effectively, in such circumstances. Therefore, it is crucial that in a crisis situation a counselor be ready physically, mentally, and behaviorally.
There is a serious lack of listening going on in our world. Would you agree? I’m pretty confident that if humans were listening more, we wouldn’t still be using bombs and guns to try to solve our conflicts.
I’m pretty sure that if we were listening more, we wouldn’t be spending so much time fighting wars, big and small, external and internal. I truly believe that if we were listening more, we’d have more peace...
(Phys.org) -- 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 has been proposed as the motivation behind the sort of ‘pro-social' rescue behaviour in which one individual tries to free another,' said Professor Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, lead author of the article, 'however, the reproductive benefits of this kind of behaviour are relatively well understood as, in nature, they are helping individuals to which they are likely to be genetically related or whose survival is otherwise beneficial to the actor. 'To prove empathy any experiment must show an individual understands another's feelings and is driven by the psychological goal of improving another's wellbeing. Our view is that, so far, there is no proof of this outside of humans.'
As an entrepreneur, you are responsible for building an effective team and enabling your employees to do their best work. To do that successfully, you need to cultivate empathy, or the ability to imagine yourself in another's shoes.
"For leaders in particular, empathy means understanding how you come across to others and how you're perceived by others," says Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss..
How to Start Conversations That Make Instant Connections.. Stop and listen.... Trust an empathic colleague....
Dr. Christian Keysers gives a lecture entitled, "The Vicarious Brain: The Neural Basis of Empathy, Learning by Observation, and Sociopathy." Dr. Keysers is Professor for the Social Brain at the University of Groningen.
This session is part of the conference, Understanding Virtue: New Directions Bridging Neuroscience and Philosophy, funded by a grant from the Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series (STARS) of the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences. It was sponsored by the Travis Research Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary and the California Institute of Technology.
Christian Keysers is professor and group leader of the Social Brain Lab at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands. The lab explores the biological nature and neuroscience of empathy.
Christian is author of 'The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature'.
Virtual avatars are one thing. But what about real bodies? Would identifying with another person's body make you behave more like that person? ..
These reports have gotten scientists interested in using the Mirrorbox as a tool to study and perhaps enhance empathy. Humans, after all, are prone to exclusion: Me, not you. Our group, not those others.
But humans also have a powerful capacity for empathy. Great men and women throughout the ages and around the world have been able to identify with the suffering of others and work tirelessly to alleviate it.
The vulnerability of our children transformed human relationships, argues Dacher Keltner, and made compassion essential to our survival.
This month, we feature videos of a Science of a Meaningful Life presentation by Dacher Keltner, the author of Born to Be Good and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center. In this adaptation from his talk, Dr. Keltner discusses the evolutionary roots and biological building blocks of human compassion.
Charles Darwin was the beloved and engaged dad of a really rambunctious group of children. When one of his daughters died at age 10, Darwin started to have these deep insights about the place of suffering and compassion in human experience.
Here's a story that made the rounds at a scientific conference this weekend: Researchers interested in the effects of mediation on the brain recruited Buddhist monks for a study. When they started attaching electrodes to the monks' heads, the monks started laughing. Why, the scientists asked, were the monks laughing? The researchers were attaching wires to the wrong part of the body, the monks said. They ought to place the wires over their hearts.
Like other engineers at Facebook, Arturo Bejar, a mathematician by training, is helping to build new products to encourage users to communicate and share.
But his products are a bit different. He works on social tools to help people get along with each other and resolve conflicts ranging from the posting of annoying pictures to serious cases of bullying.
Working with researchers from Yale, Berkeley and Columbia University, Bejar and his team are tasked with improving the tools that enable Facebook users to report and resolve problems.
A powerful technique for empathy in communication from Derrick Jones, and the edge you need in order to really connect with the person across the table!
Imagine walking into a customer meeting and instead of you giving a presentation, the customer has one waiting for you, slide show and all. During the presentation, the customer explains in detail what you must say in order to earn his or her business. The slideshow includes detailed charts, tables and bulleted lists of their core motivations and fears. Your only job is to simply repeat what they said, and the business is yours!
Keynote II. William Mobley, MD, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, recipient of the Zenith Award and the Temple Award from the Alzheimer's Association, and the co-creator, with the Dalai Lama, of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University
How Do We Educate Physicians to be Skilled in Empathy and Compassion?
The rigors of patient care tax the ability of physicians and nurses to understand and provide compassionate care. It is evident that the ability to listen and care is more readily practiced by some of us than others. Our profession values these abilities and points to skillful individuals as role models. But mimicry and mentorship alone appear to be inadequate. In part, it is difficult to scale from one mentor to very many trainees. In addition, what might be mentored and taught is poorly understood and vaguely defined. An alternative approach is to use modern neuroscientific methods to explore the brain bases of empathy and compassion, develop programs that can objectively be shown to enhance the ability to engage in these cognitive states, and scale effective programs of training so as to make them generally available.
A recent study links compassion training with an area of the brain that has also been linked with altruism. Neuroscience and Compassion Training Predict a Better World
In 2000, Dr. Richie Davidson brought over a number of monks, who practiced a form of compassion meditation, to his lab in Madison, Wisconsin for at least 10,000 hours to find out what was happening in their brains. He hooked them up to brain imaging machines and found that when exposed to a sound of human pain, their brains weren’t disturbed, but areas of the brain involved with empathy and compassion lit up.
DO YOU KNOW HOW TO EMPATHIZE? Nachamu Workshop We all know what pain and loneliness feel like. We also know when we feel abandoned, when others are not being...
Long before the discovery of "mirror neurons" that show the connection we have with each other, Judaism taught us the power of empathy -- as so aptly captured in this week's Shabbat Nachamu, which begins the period of the "seven weeks of comfort" and empathy. How empathy reflects the profound and intrinsic bond that connects us all together, and that it is as important for the giver as it is for the recipient. But then why is empathy and compassion is such short supply? Why is it far easier to appreciate the need to receive empathy than it is to offer it? And above all, what can we do about it?
Empathy is a fashionable concept at the moment and I celebrate this. Learning to listen with empathy is, I believe, the most important step towards a more peaceful and sustainable world.
Applying the NVC approach to empathy means listening to what someone is expressing beyond the words they use. Most people have been educated to express mainly their judgements and analysis. So being able to hear their unexpressed feelings and needs is a great gift to them – it’s reaching out to what is really alive in them and not only staying in the relatively narrow realm of the mind. If their judgements are directed towards me then empathy is also an essential act of self-protection!
A convening of five schools last week yielded these tips on cultivating empathy in your school.
At the end of last week, the StartEmpathy team gathered together educators from Mission Hill School, Lake Forest Park School, the Center for Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, Georgetown Day School, and Prospect Sierra School--five elementary schools committed to a vision of a different kind of education.
The agenda? To talk about what empathy education looks like in theses educators’ classrooms and hallways, to share what’s working and what’s not working, and to articulate a shared vsion of a "Changemaker School." Here are six takeaways from the event:
Christian Keysers is professor and group leader of the Social Brain Lab at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands. The lab explores the biological nature and neuroscience of empathy. Christian is author of 'The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature'.
This week’s video comes from Megan Daalder, an instructor at UCLA’s Art/Science Nanolab. Nanolab is a two-week program for high school students at the intersection of art and science.
Daalder’s video tells the story about how one of her art projects morphed into an investigation into the psychology and neuroscience of empathy.
We are inaugurating The Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindness – in Seattle on Friday September 21st with the United Way Day of Caring, and ending on Sunday October 21st, the last day of The Next Fifty at Seattle Center. Compassionate Seattle wants to help turn the Golden Rule into the Golden Reality by extending the Day of Caring to 30 inspired days of Compassionate Civic Action!
The Compassion Games are community projects that can move us to try new things, build relationships and trust, and help turn apathy into action. There are four main components: Compassionate Seattle Scavenger Hunt, organized Compassionate Action Projects, Storytelling and support for Random Acts of Compassion that anyone can do.
We need help in all phases, from brainstorming and co-creating to co-producing and organizing. Some of the roles include:
Volunteer coordinator Outreach – for volunteers as well as action projects needed by communities or organizations Community resource exchange – outreach and coordination Event coordination (including Day of Care After Party) Social media networking Sponsorship recruitment
What happens in the brain when we feel for others? Neuroeconomist Brian Knutson of Stanford University studies meditating monks to explore what compassion looks like in the brain.
“Reliably they like the art more if the faces they showed compassion to came before it,” Knutson said. “Which leads to a hypothesis that there is some sort of compassion carryover happening.”
Though still a mystery, most people yawn reflexively when someone else does. One scientist studying chimps says catching a yawn is related to empathy. It's a human sentiment Columbia University's Kevin Ochsner says we're hard-wired to feel.
Empathy can be expressed on a spectrum, and how a child responds to a given situation may depend on a range of different complex psychological and child development issues.
What picture, or metaphor comes to mind, when you think of Empathy? A waiting outstretched hand, a mother stooping down to kiss a child's scraped knee, a silent long embrace at the end of a funeral service? It's different for different people because empathy by its very nature is uniquely personal. Indeed it requires a courageous leap of compassion to enter into another's personal world and imaginatively experience what that person is going through. Little wonder many of us are reluctant to go further than the sympathetic smile; true empathy involves vulnerability.
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