Empathy Movement Magazine

David Hazen is a peace activist living in in Eugene, Oregon. He is author of, Love Always Wins: Hope for Healing the Epidemic of Violence.

He is an Imagineer, Eugene City of Peace. Advisor, International Cities of Peace. Peacemaker of the Year 2011, Nobel Peace Laureate Project

How to build a culture of empathy?

We live in a culture of violence. There is no quick and easy way out. And yet there is a path for walking away from it, one step at a time. As far as I know, there is no other way - there is no shortcut to learning how to love than surrendering to the process, letting go of old self-serving fears, defenses and rigid beliefs, letting go

Patricia (Tish) Jennings is Co-Leader of the "Program on Empathy Awareness and Compassion in Education (PEACE)" at Penn State University. "The PEACE area seeks to promote health and wellbeing in children, youth and families through the scientific understanding and promotion of awareness, compassion and empathy. The program includes faculty, research associates and students whose work focuses on developing a strong multidisciplinary science in this emerging area.

Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate and is a commentator on various national media programs such as NPR, Rachael Maddow Show, Democracy Now, etc. She has written and commented on the role of empathy in relationship to the Supreme Court, same-sex marriage and woman's issues.
There was a great deal of contention and confusion about the nature of empathy during the last Supreme Court nomination hearings. We talked about preparing now, for the next Senate discussions and debates about the role of empathy in the justice system and Supreme Court.

Muna Awad is Programs Director at the Charter for Compassion-Jordan. She has 15 years of experience working in education as teacher, trainer and private tutor. She worked as head of department for training youth. Muna developed creative positive parenting tools: “Mother’s ToolBox” to help parents creatively overcome the challenges they face raising their children and be able to inspire them to become better people. She feels education is the best way to build a culture of empathy and compassion.

Dan Batson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas. His main research interests are in prosocial emotion, motivation, and behavior. He has conducted a number of experiments on empathy, on perspective taking, and on various forms of prosocial motivation. Author of 'Altruism in Humans'.

He formulated the: 'empathy-altruism hypothesis' - "If we feel empathy towards a person, we are likely to help them (in proportion to the empathy felt) without any selfish thoughts. Otherwise, we will help them only if the rewards of helping them outweigh the costs."

Anthony Cody spent 24 years working in Oakland schools, 18 of them as a science teacher at a high needs middle school. He is National Board certified, and now leads workshops with teachers focused on Project Based Learning. With education at a crossroads, he invites you to join him in a dialogue on education reform and teaching for change and deep learning. He organized the SaveOurSchoolsMarch.com to Washington DC.

Susan Partnow is an organizational development and training consultant and teaches Compassionate Listening and many other empathy and compassion building processes Contributor to the book: Practicing the Art of Compassionate Listening

How to Build a Culture of Empathy & Compassion?
1. Set the Intention (value it; talk about it; name and invite it).
2. Slow down to the speed of wisdom to make space for it.
3. From the Inside Out: Cultivate self awareness and regulation - know your triggers; do the practice with compassion & BE Compassion.
4. Build community from these principles - to embrace conflict, differences, challenges as opportunities to deepen intimacy, understanding, connection - and find creative solutions like Restorative Circles.

Erika Rosenberg offers scientifically- and practically-based training and consultation in a wide range of areas associated with the study and/or understanding of human emotion, facial expressions of emotion, and the improvement of emotional functioning through meditation.

Erika has been practicing meditation for over 20 years. She is a senior teacher for Project Compassion at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University where she teaches the 9-week Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT). The training combines science, mindfulness and Compassionate Communications traditions.

Keiko Krahnke is Associate Professor of Management; Business Communications at University of Northern Colorado in the Montfort College of Business. Areas of research interests include spirituality and business, systems thinking, Appreciative Inquiry, and corporate citizenship. Currently interested in learning about human consciousness and teaching empathy and compassion. She says, Empathy is wholeness and knowing that we are all part of one field and are interconnected. The opposite of Empathy is being trapped in narcissism.

Art Markman, PhD is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas. He writes blog entries for Psychology Today, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, and YouBeauty.com.

Author, Smart Thinking: Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done
"Why Empathy Makes You More Helpful. There is a lot of research suggesting that empathy increases people’s desire to help others. Empathy is the ability to share other people’s emotion. The better able you are to feel what someone else is feeling, the more likely you are to want to help them when they are in a difficult situation. This ability also extends to animals. We are able to project feelings onto animals like dogs, and that increases our need to help them. But, what is it about empathy that promotes the need to help?"

Michael Kimball is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Northern Colorado. In his video Recovering Empathy, he explored the relationship of empathy and the antithesis of antipathy and apathy. Antipathy is wanting to shut down a threat and fear which are often caused by unfamiliarity, differences, ignorance, inexperience and irrelevance. Apathy is shutting down when we feel powerless.
Metaphorically speaking, empathy empowers construction of a stone arch bridge of interpersonal communication; apathy is the gap between the sides; antipathy is tensional stress, i.e., underlying forces trying to pull the connection apart. The Stone arch bridge, like human survival strategies, has an ancient heritage. The metaphorical bridge is made of individual stones – moments of shared experience; outreach efforts; courage to allow oneself to be vulnerable, etc.

Sam writes and speaks about psychopathy & narcissism. He's the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited. He describes himself as a person devoid of empathy. "I do not possess empathy: I am a thrice-diagnosed psychopathic narcissist." Narcissists and psychopaths lack empathy. This deficiency renders them emotionally and cognitively crippled. They exploit, manipulate, and abuse other people because they are unable to relate to them otherwise.

He says there are two type of empathy, one is 'cold empathy', it's metaphorically like a library of books with no emotion. Psychopaths & Narcissists have this quality of empathy but do not see (or care) how their actions affect others.