Empathy is crucial to human understanding. It allows us to see another's perspective and reminds us of our common, shared experiences. Unfortunately, a recent study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review shows that since the early 1980s empathy scores have dropped a significant amount. The causes for this are varied, and educators are already thinking about how to address this critical issue in the classroom.
While the low empathy scores published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review are troubling, they are not yet a reason for real concern. Empathy is not a fixed trait, rather, it is similar to a muscle that can grow or if not given enough care, can easily atrophy and wither away. By Bobby Mann
Sponsored by Stony Brook University's Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics
Several independent lines of scientific inquiry that suggest humans are compassionate by nature, and that those who are compassionate have better heath and live longer compared to those who do not help others. Some efforts to understand the health effects of compassion have turned to neurobiology for answers, as way to study and understand how compassionate behavior involves bodily processes that influence morbidity and mortality.
Our presenters consist of faculty and students who began their efforts to study the neuroscience of compassion at the University of Michigan, and who will discuss some of the key methodological and substantive issues surrounding this emerging new field, with an eye toward understanding the relevance to health and medical education.
Empathy is the key cornerstone in genuine human relationships. Empathy is conscious. It means one with empathy feels compassion, while those without do not take into account other people’s emotions.
All well and good.
But what if you are saddled with it, let’s say you are burdened with chronic empathy as opposed to acute, or the seasonal variety? How do you get this grasping monkey off your back? At times, his grip is so tight it becomes hard to breathe. Your mind races, you need to do something. But what? by Chris Gelken
Ever felt dismay and a sense of hopelessness when you hear yet another story of animal abuse, domestic violence or teenage bullying? Why are people so cruel? Many researchers studying aggression and violence find the answers to their questions consistently fall back to a failure of empathy...
Aggression and violence relate inversely to empathy. Those who abuse their children, for example, score low on measures of empathy...
So if empathy is the key, how do we teach empathy? Is education about issues pertaining to animals, the environment or social justice enough? Will telling children about puppy mills lead to their sharing the emotional state of a puppy mill dog?... Nicole Forsyth
Last week a parent asked, ”Can schools teach empathy?” Here’s my answer.
Empathy isn’t taught. The human brain is wired for empathy (mirror neurons). Adults shape an environment; that environment shapes the child’s empathy. So schools can’t helpeducating a child’s empathy. If they don’t do it well, they do it poorly.
Since we want young people to graduate from school with their social-emotional intelligence trained for success in their personal and professional lives, designing culture for the graceful expression of empathy is one of the chief responsibilities of all educators: school principals, teachers, and, yes, parents in their homes. by Rick Ackerly
Administrative support - I chose this resource because I feel that empathy is an extremely important quality to have in education. I hope to share this with other administrators to hopefully encourage them to be more supportive of their staff and understand that they are human and may struggle emotionally once in a while.
How to Deal With Empathy. People who are empathetic naturally take on the feelings of those around them as their own. While empathy usually is considered a positive trait, it can be exhausting for the person who possesses it.
The more empathetic someone is, the more difficult it is for them to cope with the deluge of feelings to which they are exposed. Empathy fatigue, also known as compassion fatigue, is a condition in which a person's mental and physical health is adversely affected by empathy-related stress.
Wired.co.uk tracked down a leading expert in what makes boys different from girls, Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University and Director fo the Autism Research Centre. His study into autism has led him to develop the "systemising/empathising" theory to help explain the differences between the sexes...
So you are looking for consistent repeating patterns, and boys on average seem to show a stronger interest in systems, whereas girls develop social skills more quickly. I talk about this in terms of empathy, which is the drive to identify (and respond to) someone else's thoughts and feelings. The systemising/empathising theory is a new model for characterising typical sex differences. By Belinda Parmar
Todd Wilms: Everyone is using social media today. We are all desperately trying to figure out how to use this new channel of communication – for personal reasons, for business reasons, to network, to learn.
In large part, the reason we struggle with this new channel is that we don’t understand the basic foundation of social media. Ready? Here it is: You need to ask what people want before you start talking. Empathy is the key to social media success.
If you want to have success with social media marketing, you need give people exactly what they want. Empathy with your audience is key.
The Empathy Symbol stands for: reaching out to the “other” and then opening up to truly understand each other. Use the empathy symbol to indicate your support for a world in which we all can get along.
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Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has sh...
What's empathy got to do with healing domestic abuse injury? Everything. Domestic abuse healing is much like healing other social trauma and psychological injury.
Hearing You
It all starts with attention. When you are seen and heard by another, you open onto yourself and through that attention, healing begins.
When another person steps into that pain with them, something shifts by the mere fact that it draws their attention to what they, too, have repressed. And with this, the shield covering the wound lifts...the false faces fade...and transformation begins.
Newborns cry in response to another newborn cry and researchers agree that these are the very early signs of empathy development. Yet, little is known about the development of these affect sharing reactions in infancy, beyond the very first few days after birth.
The aim of this study is to investigate the presence of contagious cry phenomenon in infancy. Infants aged 1-, 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old were presented with the sound of another infant cry vocalizations.
byElena Geangu, Oana Benga, Daniel Stahl, Tricia Striano
The Dalai Lama has been telling us for years that it would make us happy, but he never said it would make us healthy, too.
Compassion can’t cure cancer or banish suffering. But the steady re-orientation of the mind toward compassion can be the beginning of a virtuous cycle, with decreased stress boosting the immune system and the boosted immune system improving attitude, which can further enhance health.
And we can all take comfort in knowing that we are part of a larger movement, says Charles Raison, clinical director of the Emory University Mind-Body Program: “We ignored the emotions for 50 years, and like everything that gets ignored or undervalued, like real estate, there’s a goldmine there”—a goldmine whose wealth we all can share.
At the outset of the empathy movement, this distinction between normative and descriptive work is crucial. As founders of the movement, we must define empathy not as we find it, but as a crafted ideal in social practice among humans. Our definition of empathy should include a moral dimension. Empathy is not merely an extant human capacity, it is also an idealized practice in human relationships.
We see glimmers of the ideal in reality, just as we see beauty in certain works of art. Idealized empathy appears in the relationship between a loving mother and infant. This is the brilliance behind Roots of Empathy, which helps children learn through experience of the ideal. by David Castro
You could think of empathy as stepping into someone else’s shoes and seeing through their perspective,” he says, “but an equally valid definition of empathy might be stepping in their shoes and thinking from your own perspective.”
Learn more about Bruneau’s empathy research and experiments in the video below, which was produced by students in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. by Liv
Do people with autism truly lack empathy? By Lynne Soraya...
In a 2001 research paper, Simon Baron-Cohen describes Theory of Mind as "...being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action. In brief, having a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one's own and other's minds."
For many of those with autism or Asperger's, mindblindness, or lack of Theory of Mind creates major barriers to communication and closeness. These barriers often lead to those nearest to the individual feel, whether real or perceived, a lack of empathy from the individual.
When I think of Theory of Mind, I think of an amusing, but of course very inaccurate, belief I harbored as a young child. While playing games like hide and seek, I used to think, "If I can't see them, they can't see me."
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” - Dalai Lama
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks. The key to developing compassion in your life is to make it a daily practice.
Have you ever been annoyed by flip-flops in the scientific literature? Many people, for example, feel this way when it comes to nutrition science: diet advice, it sometimes seems, changes almost as fast as hardware from Apple.
It can make one wonder about-- even doubt-- the usefuleness of science.
And so it was last week, when my colleague Jason Marsh at Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center referred me to a recently published article that contradicts the findings I talk about in this blog post about the relationship between empathy and prejudice. My post summarized findings by researchers at the University of Manitoba showing that empathy and perspective taking can backfire in real-world intergroup interactions, because seeing the world through another person's eyes activates negative metastereotypes (stereotypes about one's own group) that other people may be judging you by.
Indeed, how are we to fix this problem? Although the authors make references to “empathy workshops,” to me this reeks of the very “market fundamentalism” that the authors decry. Empathy cannot be examined, measured, and taught in a “workshop” setting, which is yet another product of “self-help”, an industry rooted in the neo-liberal market mentality.
Empathy can be learned in various ways, but I think the most important thing is to subject students to failure and discomfort. Narcissism grows from never experiencing challenges or difficulties. When you are in an environment in which you cannot fail, you begin to think you are infallible, and as such, the center of the universe. By Lenore Holditch
Out of the ashes of 9-11, Fred has experienced an expansive sense of relationship and empathy for all humanity. It is on this foundation, he says, that Jesus invites us to live in the Kingdom of God, participating in what God is doing in the world.
The whole story of the Bible, culminating in the Incarnation, is the story of God's empathic relationship with humanity. Insofar as we live, we live in relationship to this fundamental reality -- loving God, loving neighbor and loving self.
From the ruins of all our disasters rises the spirit of empathetic compassion in relationship -- resurrection in action. If we as individuals, and as a nation, are to share in the divine work of reconciliation and resurrection, we will have do embrace our fundamental calling to be in empathetic relationship with all humanity.
OK, I admit. Adam Smith never talked about mirror neurons. So why am I bringing this topic up? Because Smith actually did, in a way, tackle the debate about mirror neurons and empathy. What is this debate?
In recent years, empathy, understood as the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient being, has received more and more interest.
American neuroeconomist Paul Zak claims that the brain chemical oxytocin is responsible for trust and empathy.
Lack of trust is at the root of many of the world's problems, says American neuroeconomist Paul Zak, who claims to have found the brain chemical responsible for empathy. But could oxytocin really help to solve social issues?
Oxytocin is best known for its use in inducing labour. However, according to Zak, the director of the Centre for Neuroeconomics at Claremont Graduate University, California, it is also the "social glue" that binds families, communities, and societies, and fosters trust between strangers. by Mark Honigsbaum
Sara Konrath’s research has shown that today’s college-aged kids are finding it tougher to care for others – but why?
Since her studies have come out, Konrath has attracted a lot of press, not all of it accurate. One headline announced “The End of Empathy” and warned that if not arrested the decline in empathy would “erode everything we truly care about: family, friendship, our very future.” Konrath insists the news, while troubling, isn’t quite so dire. “Empathy may be sick,” she says, “but not ‘you have six months to live’ sick.” Empathy is scored on a five-point scale, Konrath notes, and the most recent college-student averages are just above 3. ..
Yawning when others yawn is a sign of empathy and a form of social bonding.
Watch someone yawn, and try not to yawn yourself. It can be impossible to resist. Even reading about yawning can make you do it. Now, a new study offers insight into why contagious yawning is such a powerful force.
Yawning when others yawn, the study suggests, is a sign of empathy and a form of social bonding. Kids don't develop this deeply rooted behavior until around age four, the study found. Kids with autism are half as likely to catch yawns.
"It's a primal social bonding process," he added. "We're looking at the roots of empathy." By Emily Sohn
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