Although this is still a hypothesis that I look forward to testing with my colleagues at CCARE, I suggest here that practicing compassion could be a major path to reducing or eliminating chronic stress. Self-compassion practiced wisely could help reduce your own chronic stress, while compassion toward others could reduce chronic stress for the compassion-giver as well as the compassion-receiver.
Part of self-compassion could involve making time for yourself to engage in activities that reduce chronic stress. Such activities could include, meditation, yoga, dance, music, reading, drawing, painting, gardening, walking, consistent moderate exercise, hiking, hanging out with friends, etc.
Video: Q. What drives anyone to do something this caculated.
A. The common trait these folks have is a lack of empathy. Things break your empathy, of varied nature. One is if you have been exposed to horrific emotional.... Dr.Keith Ablow
Article: Having worked for a few decades as a forensic psychiatrist, evaluating many murderers, I have found that the roots of their violence always reach back to early chapters in their life histories and involve themes of feeling unloved or unwanted, or being overtly exposed to psychological or physical abuse, including bullying. These factors, along with the psychiatric disorders they spawn (including substance dependence), can crush a person’s empathy—“freeing” him or her to commit horrific acts.
Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.
Over lunch on the Upper East Side, Maia Szalavitz, science blogger for Time.com and co-author, with leading child trauma expert Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential - and Endangered, explained why empathy needs better PR, and how we can make that happen....
Ada Calhoun: Yes, I think empathy needs better PR.
MS: We underemphasize how fun and cool it is to connect with other people, and how actually our greatest joys in life are about connection and empathy. Let’s say you’re the most successful person in the world but you have nobody to share it with—it’s pretty bad, right? That most of our joys are relational and not material, again underlines the importance of this. We feel like empathy is a vegetable and it’s like something that we have to do because it’s good for us or like exercise or something, but actually it’s the root of all fun.
Maia has done some great work on empathy.. here's more about her work with links to some of her many articles about empathy as well as an interview we did with her. http://bit.ly/mDhQpl
Teaching empathy requires you to keep a few particular things in mind when working with children. Teach empathy to children with special needs with help from the author of an award-winning parenting book series in this free video clip.
A recent contest asked for the best ways to teach empathy. It received more than 600 submissions. Is this evidence of an empathy movement in education?
That idea has been building momentum. President Obama consistently advocated empathy during his 2008 presidential campaign and famously said it was one of his criteria for a Supreme Court justice. Over the past few years, several big books have argued for the critical importance of empathy in the world today, perhaps most notably Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, which Ariana Huffington championed on the Huffington Post, writing, “Empathy is the one quality we most need if we’re going to survive and flourish in the 21st century.” At the same time, some researchers have uncovered evidence that empathy is on the decline in the United States, though in recent years, other scientists have identified empathy’s genetic basis and its ability to help us overcome differences.
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.
A physician's attitude and approach affect every aspect of medical care for patients and their families. An empathic bedside manner is no quaint relic of the past. To restore and ensure public trust in the medical profession, new generations of physicians must understand the emotional, physiological, and practical consequences of discarding empathy.
One legacy of medical education is overvaluing scientific measurement and undervaluing subjective experiences. The neurobiology of empathy offers hope for those who value the subjective experience of empathy and for those who find comfort in what can be measured.
Given the combined competitive, economic, and global forces at play in this current business climate, it’s no accident that many thought leaders are writing about empathy. Leaders must convey their understanding of the daily stressors of their global partners, as well as of their employees. And they must remain sufficiently attuned to others to calm a growing level of fear and anxiety as elicited by various geopolitical forces.
In other words, the practice of empathic resonance has become a leadership asset that distinguishes stellar leaders from the rest. It is the attuned leader who will more quickly be able to manage chaos and meet people where they need to be met so that productive commerce can proceed with minimal disruption.
Part two of my interview with Maia Szalavitz, science blogger for Time.com and co-author, with leading child trauma expert Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential -- and Endangered. See part 1, on the economics of empathy and why empathy needs a PR makeover here.
Ada Calhoun: How can we foster empathy in children?
Maia Szalavitz: You can just explicitly encourage perspective-taking, like while reading to them, ask, “What do you think this character thinks? How do you think he feels? When you’re in one state, it can be very hard to imagine another state. If you’re cold it’s really hard to pack your bathing suit. You just can’t imagine that it could be warm somewhere else.
========================== Maia has done some great work on empathy.. here's more about her work with links to some of her many articles about empathy as well as an interview we did with her. http://bit.ly/mDhQpl
Parents can create countless teachable moments to help their kids understand how it might feel to be in someone else’s shoes and to convey empathy through words & actions.
Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. As discussed in my recent blog, “The Power of Empathy vs. the Power of Bullies,” empathy is defined as recognizing, understanding, and caring about how someone feels, or being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes. "Treat others the way you want to be treated” is the modified golden rule that conveys empathy. Parents can offer their children loads of opportunities to increase their sensitivity toward others, to understand how a person is feeling, or how it might feel to be in someone else’s situation.
We generally think of stress as a big, bad, disease-causing, killer. Yet mother nature didn't give us the stress response to kill us. She gave us the stress response to help us stay alive!
It is easy to understand how showing genuine compassion and helping someone who is suffering could reduce the sufferer's chronic stress. However, an additional benefit of being compassionate may also involve reducing your own stress. For example, you could be disappointed, concerned, or angry -- i.e., stressed -- about the poor performance of someone on your team. Directly taking punitive action would increase your team member's stress, and would also likely increase your own stress levels. If, however, you show compassion and intelligently work with your team member to come up with an effective solution for improving performance, then the compassionate approach is likely to reduce chronic stress not only for your team member but also for yourself.
Stress when not managed properly, can be extremely harmful on the body and mind. We experience stress thanks to the stress receptors that activate when a challenge is presented to us, which then our brain responds with a fight-or-flight response.
These stress receptors help all living beings when we are in trouble or confronted by a challenge. Which is why studies have shown that stress is only bad for us when it is chronic. Short-term stress can actually be good for us with beneficial effects, such as; enhancing immunity and enhancing protection during medical procedures (surgery). Which is why reducing chronic stress, with a goal of being in a resting equilibrium until short-term stress (fight-or-flight) is activated, is ideal. Self-compassion and compassion for others is a key factor in reducing chronic stress.
Taking genuine time for yourself, doing an activity that is enjoyable and relaxing where you are not competing or evaluating yourself is important. Being able to understand why your employee is performing poorly by showing compassion can alleviate stress from both yourself and that employee.
Regardless of your career or relationships, practicing and showing compassion to yourself and others benefits the entirety of your life.
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.'
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