A recent study at the University of Cambridge found that children that partake in music activity in a group setting are more prone to developing one of humankind’s noblest traits: empathy.
The research, though preliminary, may have an impact on how school systems, policymakers, and music educators view music as being integral to the development of children.
The year-long study, conducted in the U.K. by Tal-Chen Rabinowitch and Ian Cross, who are both on the music faculty at Cambridge, found that children between 8 and 11 years old involved in different types of group musical activities were more likely to develop empathy than those in control groups where music was not included.
Science suggests that compassion may well be the most important thing in your life.
1. It makes us happy (as happy as getting money)! A brain-imaging study headed by neuroscientist Jordan Grafman from the National Institute of Health showed that the "pleasures centers" in the brain, i.e. the parts of our brains that are active when we experience pleasure (like dessert, money, sex) are equally active when we observe someone giving money to charity as when we receive money ourselves!
When you are in a conversation, do you listen with your own autobiographical filter? Or do you listen to actually understand the speaker?
When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It's an entirely different paradigm. Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.
Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it's that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.
Empathic listening involves much more than registering, reflecting, or even understanding the words that are said.
Empathetic GPs may reduce depression and suicidal thoughts...
Published in the Annals of Family Medicine, the study found that a physician's empathy and willingness to discuss the emotional concerns of patients might play an important role in reducing self-harm thoughts and depression.
The study's chief investigator, Winthrop Professor Osvaldo Almeida at UWA's Centre for Health and Ageing, said more than 370 GPs and almost 22,000 patients took part in the two-year study. Some of the GPs (the control group) received no structured education while others had their practice reviewed and received relevant educational material and six-monthly newsletters over the two years of the study.
The book Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, Edited by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason is published by Intellect Ltd.
A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being.
ncouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.
About the editors Dee Reynolds is Professor of French at the University of Manchester. She has written two books, Rhythmic Subjects (Dance Books, 2007) and Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art (CUP, 1995). She is Principal Investigator of ‘Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy’ (www.watchingdance.org), a collaborative, interdisciplinary project funded by the AHRC 2008-2011.
Matthew Reason is a senior lecturer in Theatre and Head of MA Studies in Creative Practice at York St. John University. He has written two books, Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave 2006) and The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children's Experiences of Theatre (Trentham 2010) and is currently working on a collaborative AHRC funded project on kinesthetic empathy.
When I was finishing my graduate studies in psychology, one piece of raising children stuck out to me – that of teaching empathy.
Science now shows that children are born with empathy. It’s the reason they begin to cry when another baby or child cries. This is truly their (our) natural state. However, we get culturally conditioned out of being empathetic.
Q: What can you do to ensure your child’s natural empathetic style stays with them through adulthood?
A: Be empathetic yourself – as a parent, as a partner, as a human being..
Everyone knows that employees who are bullied at work are more likely to quit. But a new study from the University of British Columbia shows that it's not only the victim who is likely to bail -- the person's coworkers are also likely to leave their jobs:
'Witnessing or learning about these impacts of workplace bullying is likely to promote empathetic responses. Employees witnessing coworkers being bullied, or merely talking to them about their experiences, are pushed toward taking the targets' perspective. Such perspective-taking leads one to experience cognitive or emotional empathy, which includes imagining how another feels...or actually sharing in another's feelings. These empathetic responses can contribute to the understanding that a significant moral violation has occurred and the recognition that the victim does not deserve his or her mistreatment.'
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says listening can help end the suffering of an individual, put an end to war and change the world for the better. Watch as he explains how to practice compassionate listening.
One of the many challenges that parents face is teaching their children the concept of compassion and how important helping others simply for the sake of doing good is. It can be a bit difficult for little ones to grasp the concept of acting selflessly, even when they may feel sympathy and compassion, and it’s important to teach them to act on these feelings; here are ten ways to help children of all ages understand and practice compassion for fellow creatures.
Alex Gabbay, Filmmaker and Director, discusses his new film, Love Hate and Everything in Between.
Man’s capacity for kindness and compassion is overshadowed only by his ability to be as cruel and destructive.
Can empathy resolve issues of aggression and subjugation, where wars, politics and economic sanctions have failed?
Love Hate and Everything in Between looks into the world of neuroscience, psychology, education and technology to explore the extraordinary relevance of empathy in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
Man’s capacity for kindness and compassion is overshadowed only by his ability to be as cruel and destructive.
Can empathy resolve issues of aggression and subjugation, where wars, politics and economic sanctions have failed?
Love Hate and Everything in Between looks into the world of neuroscience, psychology, education and technology to explore the extraordinary relevance of empathy in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
Writing in the Mind Matters column at Big Think, David Berreby offers a brief overview of the findings in a new study suggesting altruism is linked to the same brain circuitry (the right temporoparietal junction) as moral decision making and empathy.
[For more on the link to empathy, see Jean Decety's work in this area, including this 2007 article (Neuroscientist; 13; 580) that outlines the role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interactions - he examines how lower-level computational functions are essential to the meta-cognitive processes of self/other distinction, agency, and empathy.]
Study: The More Altruistic You Are, The Bigger Will Be This Part of Your Brain
In pursuit of the biological basis of morality, researchers are interested in an area of the brain at the boundary of the right temporal lobe and the right parietal lobe (very roughly, it's located maybe 2 inches above the midpoint of a line between your right eyebrow and your right ear, not that I recommend digging around for it).
Imagine a molecule that underlies the virtues that glue societies together. Imagine that it brought out the better angels of our nature with just a sniff and could “rebond our troubled world.” Imagine that it was the “source of love and prosperity” and explained “what makes us good and evil.”
Well, carry on imagining. This is a story about oxytocin, and oxytocin is not that molecule.
But a surprising torrent of research is beginning to suggest that compassion — along with altruism, social connection and service — has deep roots in our stories, in our religions and in the wiring of our brains. For the first time, a large-scale international conference will address these questions, and more. “The Science of Compassion: Origins, Measures and Interventions,” will take place Thursday through Sunday in Telluride.
The conference will be a gathering of leading experts discussing the latest scientific research into age-old questions.
“There is an ever-enlarging body of scientific evidence that being compassionate has immense positive impact on the individual, both in regard to their mental and physical health,” says Dr. James Doty, Neurosurgery Professor at Stanford.
“Compassion is complex,” says Emiliana Simon Thomas, the former associate director of CCARE, the Center for Compassion And Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University.
Brian Knutson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University, adds: “It’s not quite an emotion, is it? It’s more sophisticated.”
Emerging science is exploring how our minds feel for others.
“Can we see it?” asks Knutson. “Does it help people to extend compassion? That would be very exciting.”
Dr Yosuke Morishima explains the link he and his colleagues have found between behavioural altruism and individual differences in brain structure...
Research published in the journal Neuron last week may help to explain why some individuals are more altruistic than others. Experts at the University of Zurich in Switzerland carried out an experiment based on the hypothesis that the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) – a region of the brain previously associated with the ability to understand another’s feelings, motives or beliefs – might be associated with the level of altruism expressed by an individual.
While the term empathy refers to affective experience of another person's affective state (and may affect altruistic behaviour towards the other person due to empathetic concern), showing high levels of empathy does not always increase altruism.
'Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy' uses audience research and neuroscience to explore how dance spectators respond to and identify with dance. It is a multidisciplinary project, involving collaboration across four institutions (University of Manchester, University of Glasgow, York St John University and Imperial College London).
Psychopaths do not lack empathy and can turn it on when they want to, according to new research that challenges the current understanding of the psychological disorder.
Psychopaths involved in the study showed very little empathy for others, but this was reversed once they were told the experiment would measure their levels of empathy.
“It was one of the really exciting and surprising results,” said Christian Keysers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, who announced these results at the Euroscience Open Forum in Dublin, Ireland.
Think about compassion like a radio dial. We can tune our compassion up or down, but where the dial lands will depend on our concerns about being overwhelmed and on how well we can control our emotions.
Some have argued that we just can't feel compassion for mass suffering. Our studies suggest a different story: People can control whether they experience compassion for multiple victims. These findings have a promising upshot. If the collapse of compassion is a choice, then individuals have the capacity to change it in themselves. Think about compassion like a radio dial. We can tune our compassion up or down, but where the dial lands will depend on our concerns about being overwhelmed and on how well we can control our emotions.
Seventeen years ago today, in the Boston Globe Magazine, a dying man issued a plea for greater compassion in medicine. He worried that medical professionals faced increasing work demands that prioritized efficiency over empathy.
Kenneth Schwartz died of lung cancer two months later, but not before founding an organization that would bring increased attention to the importance of human interactions in medicine. The Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare’s flagship program, which started at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1997, . ..
Empathy is a multidimensional construct composed of several components such as emotion recognition, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Even though patients with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits in all core components of this basic social ability, the neural underpinnings of these dysfunctions are less clear. Using fMRI, we analyzed data from 15 patients meeting the DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia and 15 matched healthy volunteers performing three separate paradigms tapping the core components of empathy, i.e. emotion recognition, perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Behavioral data analysis indicated a significant empathic deficit in patients, reflected in worse performance in all three domains.
Empirically speaking, does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people?
ALL the major religions place great importance on compassion. Whether it’s the parable of the good Samaritan in Christianity, Judaism’s “13 attributes of compassion” or the Buddha’s statement that “loving kindness and compassion is all of our practice,” empathy with the suffering of others is seen as a special virtue that has the power to change the world. This idea is often articulated by the Dalai Lama, who argues that individual experiences of compassion radiate outward and increase harmony for all.
As a social psychologist interested in the emotions, I long wondered whether this spiritual understanding of compassion was also scientifically accurate.
Man’s capacity for kindness and compassion is overshadowed only by his ability to be as cruel and destructive.
Can empathy resolve issues of aggression and subjugation, where wars, politics and economic sanctions have failed? Love Hate and Everything in Between looks into the world of neuroscience, psychology, education and technology to explore the extraordinary relevance of empathy in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
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