each side has legitimate aspirations -- and that’s part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other’s shoes; each side can see the world through the other’s eyes. That’s what we should be encouraging. That’s what we should be promoting. ... And we will only succeed in that effort if we can encourage the parties to sit down, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and each other’s fears.
Conflict and repression will endure so long as some people refuse to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Yet that is precisely why we have built institutions like this -- to bind our fates together, to help us recognize ourselves in each other -- because those who came before us believed that peace is preferable to war, and freedom is preferable to suppression, and prosperity is preferable to poverty. That’s the message that comes not from capitals, but from citizens, from our people.
A new report from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) asserts that by making "empathy a core driver of their grantmaking," grantmakers can combat prevailing notions that they are "disconnected from their communities and from the organizations they support, as well as the people whom those organizations serve."
The report stresses the importance of every staff person - not just program officers - having "an immediate sense of the true needs, concerns and priorities of grantees and communities" and outlines five steps to "high-empathy grantmaking:"
-Make it about others, not about you: remain "behind the scenes" while grantees and community members are "out front"
- Get out of the office: get face-to-face with grantees, through site visits, volunteering and board service
The newest publication from GEO and Jump Associates argues that having an organizational commitment to widespread empathy allows grantmakers to base their decisions on an authentic, firsthand understanding of the perspectives of grantees, community members and other stakeholders.
The guide also shares the stories of grantmakers that are moving from compassion to connection as they bring more empathy to their day-to-day work.
The economic downturn has caused many people in the nonprofit world to re-examine the way they work, but too little effort has focused on one of the keys to success: empathy.
We know what you are thinking: Nonprofit groups are all about empathy. Soup kitchens, after-school programs, affordable-housing groups—the people who provide those services as well as the foundations that support them are always focused on helping others.
But empathy—real empathy—is more than good intentions. Empathy is the ability to reach outside of yourself and walk in someone else’s shoes. Over time, empathy grows into an informed intuition for how other people see the world. We rely on this intuition to help us make better decisions that affect the folks around us.
Robots may one day learn to care for and nurture one another, according to research by an University of Oklahoma professor.
Computer science professor Dean Hougen studies robotics in the OU Robotic Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab, founded by him in 2001.
Hougen’s most recent project investigates whether robots can learn to care for one another and, eventually, humans.
“I am hoping one of the things we will evolve is the capacity for empathy, to look at another individual and say, ‘I see what this person needs. I am going to respond to it,’” Hougen said. “There are people who try to write code to make a robot empathetic, but it’s hard to sit down and say, ‘OK, this is what it means.’”
Researchers from the University of Buffalo have found that reading fiction can improve people's ability to empathize with others. For the purposes of their study, those "others" are wizards and vampires - the researchers used excerpts from JK Rowling's Harry Potter books and the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer to test the responses of 140 undergraduate students...
Philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty have both argued that legal figures, especially judges, should read fiction in order to empathize more effectively with the accused. Literature, they believe, offers a way of engaging with the stories and internal lives of people different from ourselves, which may lead to fairer and more nuanced judgments .
April 13-15, 2012 in Syracuse, New York State, USA
at the Embassy Suites Syracuse Hotel
Dr. Peter Breggin's new Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living is sponsoring our second annual Empathic Therapy Conference for International Counselors, Social Workers, Psychiatrists, Psychologists and Educators, April 13-15, 2012 in Syracuse, NY.
The theme of the Power of Empathic Relationship relates both to individual growth and life improvement as well as specifically addressing ways that counselors, social workers, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, teachers, and others can be their very best professionally with their clients, patients and students
Empathetic, or active listening, enables the listener to not only understand what the speaker is saying, but it also allows her to identify with the speaker’s emotions. As a result, the empathetic listener becomes more compassionate, tolerant and accepting of differences.
However, becoming an empathetic listener takes practice. A beginning empathetic listener should practice in low-stress situations until the process becomes automatic. Then she will be able to use her empathetic listener skills in difficult, highly emotional situations.
Numerous benefits result from using empathy as a communication technique....
A trait that underscores many of the attributes ideal for the “engineer of 2020” is empathy. Being able to understand the experience of others – a widely accepted definition of empathy, is vital to understanding problems, designing solutions, effective communication, multicultural competency, and relationship-building. Therefore, we seek to understand how the promotion of empathy and care into engineering will promote target attributes.
Stemming from this framework, the guiding questions of this research project are
(1) What is the relationship between empathy and care
(2) How are empathy/care conceptualized, integrated into standards, and taught in disciplines with a long-standing tradition of being considered empathetic and caring?
(3) How does conceptualization and integration in other disciplines compare to engineering disciplines? and
(4) Are there differences in how the terms are used in engineering as compared to non-engineering disciplines?
Study survey shows that compassion is vital to a patient's full recovery...
‘For most clinicians, compassionate care matters because it is fundamental to the practice of medicine, ethically sound and humane,’ according to Beth Lown M.D., the lead author.
‘However, there is also strong evidence that compassionate care improves health outcomes and quality of life, increases patient satisfaction, and lowers health care costs. Particularly as our health care system faces such intense pressure to reduce costs, we must make sure that this critically important element of health care is not lost,’ Lown added.
To ensure that all patients receive compassionate care, the Schwartz Center recommends that:...
Today is my final post on Szalavitz and Perry’s book Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential- and Endangered...
What interests me more inBorn for Love is the final question posed on the book’s dust jacket: “What can we do to increase this vital capacity to love and care in society.” The final two chapters of the book take a long look at society-wide trends, and several important factors can be tackled to improve empathy throughout society.
The opening of the final chapter provides us with the best possible conclusion for this pithy book:
'Empathy – fully expressed in a community of nurturing interdependent people – promotes health, creativity, intelligence, and productivity. In contrast, apathy and lack of empathy contribute to individual and societyal dysfunction, inhumane ideologies, and often brutal actions.'
Several months ago I reviewed Simon Baron-Cohen's latest book and interviewed him for Countering and Science 2.0. In the months since his new book came out, autistics and family members have responded to the argument that autistic individuals lack empathy with wide-ranging posts on empathy, theory of mind, autism as a civil rights issue, and more.
Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg created a new blog devoted to the issue, Autism and Empathy, which I have contributed to. In the interest of dialogue, I asked Dr. Baron-Cohen if he would be interested in responding to the reactions his work has received. What follows is his response (screen captures of a pdf file).
Empathy is an important element within all relationships. It is to emotionally put your self in the place of another. When we demonstrate it we identify with another's feelings. The ability to empathize is directly dependent on your ability to feel your own feelings and identify them.
While a lack of empathy means not understanding the feelings and emotions of a person with whom we are in a relationship. Such behaviour is responsible for relationship break ups.
To master empathy you need to have self -awareness, non judgement, listening skills and self-confidence.
The newest publication from GEO and Jump Associates argues that having an organizational commitment to widespread empathy allows grantmakers to base their decisions on an authentic, firsthand understanding of the perspectives of grantees, community members and other stakeholders.
The guide also shares the stories of grantmakers that are moving from compassion to connection as they bring more empathy to their day-to-day work.
Jump Associates collaborated with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) to publish a new whitepaper titled Widespread Empathy: 5 Steps to Achieving Greater Impact in Philanthropy.
The newest publication from GEO and Jump Associates argues that having an organizational commitment to widespread empathy allows grantmakers to base their decisions on an authentic, firsthand understanding of the perspectives of grantees, community members and other stakeholders.
The paper outlines how foundations can be more effective when they embrace empathy within the whole organization.
Dev Patnaik, author of Wired to Care, created a buzz at GEO’s 2010 National Conference when he introduced the concept of empathy, the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people, and told the story of how organizations of all kinds are tapping the power of empathy to develop a shared sense of how best to meet stakeholders needs and increase effectiveness. Watch the video of Dev Patnaik's plenary address:
Die Fähigkeit zur Empathie gehört zu den grundlegendsten menschlichen Eigenschaften. Doch was passiert dabei eigentlich in unserem Gehirn und kann man diese Fähigkeit trainieren? Fragen, denen die Neuropsychologin Tania Singer auf der Spur ist.
Lou Agosta: The commitment of the Chicago Empathy Project (CEP) is to expand the application of empathy in human relatedness. In particular, the commitment is to provide an opening for the exchange of ideas in a context of empathic human relations by delivering motivational presentations, inspirational conversations, training, workshops, and psychotherapy services to the professionals in the mental health, education, and business communities.
This post is a call for participation and an invitation to provide leadership in designing and implementing the Chicago Empathy Project (CEP).
Why Does Our Motive for Volunteering Affect the Benefit It Gives Us?
We study empathy and altruism in our research lab and have noticed that volunteer organizations often try to get volunteers to help by telling them about all the personal benefits that they can receive.
We sometimes see this with students who need volunteer experience in order to get a job or to get into medical school. We wondered if it really matters why you volunteer. Does it have to be a sincere effort to help someone else? Or does the act of helping someone itself affect your health?...
So why should motives matter so much? In our study, we did not specifically examine why motives affected mortality risk; however, some other research being conducted in the Interdisciplinary Program for Empathy and Altruism Research (iPEAR) at the University of Michigan can perhaps shed light on this. http://sarakonrath.com/research.html
Psychologist Larry Rosen presented on the positive and negative side effects of social networking on teens at a recent psychology convention.
one of the more interesting points from Rosen’s research was the development of “virtual empathy.”
Generally, we think of empathy as an in-person activity, where hugs, facial expressions and kind words help improve a loved one’s mood. Rosen says that teens are developing the ability to show virtual empathy for distressed Facebook friends and that the empathy is actually well-received by friends, positively influencing their mood.
This virtual empathy, he says, can even spill over into the real world, teaching teens how to empathize with others in everyday life.
In this Edge Video, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen looks at one test he's developed to see if there are differences between males and females in the mind.
"It turns out that when you test newborn
babies—this experiment was done at the age of 24 hours old, where we had 100 babies who were tested looking at two kinds of objects—a human face and a mechanical mobile. And they were filmed for how long they looked at each of these two objects.
What you can see here is that on the first day of life, we had more boys than girls looking for longer at the mechanical mobile and more girls than boys looking at the face.
[plus take the empathy in the eyes test to test your own empathy]
A groundbreaking study suggests people with autism-spectrum disorders such as Asperger's do not lack empathy – rather, they feel others' emotions too intensely to cope.
People with Asperger's syndrome, a high functioning form of autism, are often stereotyped as distant loners or robotic geeks. But what if what looks like coldness to the outside world is a response to being overwhelmed by emotion – an excess of empathy, not a lack of it?...
As posited by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the theory suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum disorders is not a social deficiency but, rather, a hypersensitivity to experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response.
The 2nd volunteer video / non-profit profile of my Roadtrip with Reason. Check out The Empathy Factory - a new & amazing organization in Nova Scotia who are helping youth find their voice in philanthropy. Enjoy!!
Empathy. For most people, the word is synonymous with humanity. The American Psychological Association calls empathy “the trait that makes us human.” According to author D.H. Pink, empathy is “a universal language that connects us beyond country or culture. Empathy makes us human. Empathy brings joy…. Empathy is an essential part of living a life of meaning.”
In the popular mind, in scientific journals, and in autism-related books and websites, the canard that autistic people innately lack empathy (or have deeply impaired empathy) continues to hold sway. Of the innumerable reiterations of this trope, a few representative instances will have to suffice:...
I could adduce an abundance of further examples, but these assaults on our humanity are almost too much to bear.
Simon Baron-Cohen Replies to Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
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