As you watch your six-year-old daughter having a tantrum because she lost her favourite hair slide, it's easy to wonder: where does that rage come from? And where might it lead? Equally, when you watch her blithely crush snails underfoot or deliberately pinch her little brother, you find yourself thinking: how come she is so apparently unfeeling? Is it something we, as parents, have done?
Rare is the parent with a child so saintly that she has never asked herself these questions. But there is little need to worry. Young children get angry. They jump on snails and squash flies
The Dark Side of Empathy by Barbara Oakley, the author of Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping that Hurts.
Empathy, altruism, and caring for others has become the mantra of modern American culture, but as the Greg Mortenson scandal over his three cups of deceit has revealed—empathy has a dark side that has remained unexplored...
Empathy’s dark side has been too long neglected. To truly help others, it’s time to shine a light into the darkness. Barbara Oakley
Nonetheless there is troubling evidence. Scientific American recently reported on research by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan. She looked at surveys in which students were asked to rate their own empathy. She found that self-reported empathy has declined sharply over the past decade. Almost 75 percent of the students today rate themselves as less empathetic than the average student 30 years ago.
The crucial question in evaluating a potential Supreme Court justice, therefore, is not whether she relies on empathy or emotion, but how she does so. First, can she process multiple streams of emotion? Reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. Sonia Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.
Second, does she have a love for the institutions of the law themselves? For some lawyers, the law is not only a bunch of statutes but a code of chivalry. The good judges seem to derive a profound emotional satisfaction from the faithful execution of time-tested precedents and traditions.
It’s not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it’s how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice. David Brooks
Bishop Sheen on False and True Compassion. [I try to show all different views of compassion and empathy here. Fulton does a good job of articulating this point of view which is more of the conservative view.]
A study published last month in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that someone with a permanent poker face caused by Botox can't mirror a joyful smile or a furrowed brow -and this mimicry, research suggests, is essential to our capacity to empathize with others.
A frozen face begets frozen feelings. This got us thinking about empathy. We can't afford to forfeit it for taut skin. It takes about 40 muscles to frown -and we'd like to preserve every one of them.
Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen writes that empathy is already in short supply in this warring world.
Andrew Marr explores how far empathy, or the lack of it, can explain cruelty. Simon Baron-Cohen proposes turning the focus away from evil and says we should understand human behaviour by studying the 'empathy circuit' in the brain.
Gwen Adshead, a forensic psychotherapist at Broadmoor Hospital and the crime writer Val McDermid question whether this would help in their line of work, and the philosopher Julian Baggini tries to pin down what we mean when we talk about the self.
Simon Baron-Cohen: Empathy Expert Page: http://bit.ly/jlHrf7 with transcripts of this show.
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.
What happens when we decide empathy is a bad thing? Chris Hedges says that empathy is key and we have forgotten its importance--and that's why we're a dying nation.
President Barack Obama continued his push for immigration reform Thursday, calling the need for change an economic, security and moral imperative both for "millions of people who live in the shadows" and for the country as a whole.
This is a subject that can "expose our raw feelings," Obama told an audience at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast. But we need to "show empathy to our brothers and sisters and try to recognize ourselves in one another."
Like most conventional scientists, Hawking believes that human beings are not conscious beings. Thus, we are incapable of empathy; incapable of love,pain, suffering or making our own decisions based on free will.
This utter lack of recognition of the value of consciousness in living beings is the core principle of evil upon which most of modern science is built. It is the lack of empathy itself that gives rise to great evil.
Interestingly, this is precisely the conclusion of a member of the scientific community– Cambridge University psychology professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who has written a new book in which he concludes that evil originates with a failure of empathy. He explains that psychopaths have “zero degrees of empathy,” meaning they do not recognize nor value the thoughts and feelings of others.
Botox patients don't just have trouble expressing emotions with their faces: They have trouble recognizing how others are feeling.
Physical mirroring heightens empathy and understanding: Without always realizing it, we widen our eyes when our conversational partners express surprise and crease our brows when they’re worried.
How do we recognize the emotions other people are feeling? One source of information may be facial feedback signals generated when we automatically mimic the expressions displayed on others’ faces.
Supporting this “embodied emotion perception,” dampening and amplifying facial feedback signals, respectively, impaired and improved people’s ability to read others’ facial emotions...
Accordingly, when the skin was made resistant to underlying muscle contractions via a restricting gel, emotion perception improved, and did so only for emotion judgments that theoretically could benefit from facial feedback.
I ask this question not because I think that libertarians are lacking a basic human emotion (I don’t believe you are), but because politically, I think it needs explanation if libertarian thought is going to be able to reach a larger audience.
Let me explain….when reading a recent interview that Brian Dougherty from Reason did with Ron Paul, Paul said: The biggest challenge for conservatives and libertarians is to convince people who think being libertarian means you have no compassion, and in politics you better have compassion.
Developments in the study of evolution suggest that the survival of the fittest depends as much on cooperation as it does on a competition between self-interests.
These are books about sympathy, empathy, cooperation and collaboration, written by scientists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists and others. It seems there’s been a shift among those who study this ground, yielding a more nuanced, and often gentler picture of our nature.
The use of reconciliation threatens to destroy the humanizing function of the Senate.
Human beings, the philosophers tell us, are social animals. We emerge into the world ready to connect with mom and dad. We go through life jibbering and jabbering with each other, grouping and regrouping. When you get a crowd of people in a room, the problem is not getting them to talk to each other; the problem is getting them to shut up.
To help us in this social world, God, nature and culture have equipped us with a spirit of sympathy. We instinctively feel a tinge of pain when we observe another in pain DAVID BROOKS
Acclaimed New York Times columnist David Brooks explores new insights into human nature and the forces that shape our choices and actions
1. 98% of experience is unconsciousness 2. emotions is the foundation of reason. it assigns value to experience. 3. not individual creatures but tightly interpenetrated with others We are primarily social creatures an not rational creatures
This changes our view of politics
Important traits; 1. Mindsite - see into other peoples minds and download what they have to offer. We learn by mimicry. 2. Equipoise - able to see into ones self and correct for bias's 3. Metas - look at environment and see patterns sympathy - scan a social environment
Bishop Sheen on False and True Compassion. [I try to show all different views of compassion and empathy here. Fulton does a good job of articulating this point of view.]
Everywhere I turn these days I see paeans to empathy. Books are being written about its civilizing powers — The Empathic Civilization, Empathy and Democracy, Empathy in a Global World — and conferences and websites are being devoted to the concept as well.
In his bid for the presidency, Barack Obama literally ran his campaign on the value of being emotionally open, telling Americans they had, in fact, an "empathy deficit," which he urged they rectify, first by electing him.
Empathy, of course, is the ability to experience the feelings of another person. Humans do it, so do other mammals, according to many primatologists, including Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape and The Age of Empathy.
A look at new neurological work by Simon Baron-Cohen and Patricia Churchland.
It's presumably neither ethical nor practical, but supposing that somebody could sequence Osama bin Laden's genome, which genes would you want to examine to try to understand his violent desires?
I put this question to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of a new book called "The Science of Evil" (and a cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen). He replied that there is no evidence that bin Laden's crimes came from his nature, rather than from his experiences, so you might find nothing.
My quest for building a culture of empathy continues with this interview of Paul Ekman. 'He has been considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century.'
After asking Paul, 'How can we build a culture of empathy?', he told me,
'The survival of the planet as we know it depends on global compassion...
If I was president, thank god I'm not, I would start a Manhattan Project on global empathy. It has the urgency of the Manhattan Project. It needs the bringing together of the best minds in the world to focus on this issue, because there is an urgency too it. I think Al Gore was right, that time is running out. We can't wait 20 or 40 years to figure out what to do with this problem."
So, yes, immigration reform is a moral imperative, and so it’s worth seeking greater understanding from our faith. As it is written in the Book of Deuteronomy, “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” To me, that verse is a call to show empathy to our brothers and our sisters; to try and recognize ourselves in one another...
That sense of connection, that sense of empathy, that moral compass, that conviction of what is right is what led the National Association of Evangelicals to shoot short films to help people grasp the challenges facing immigrants. It’s what led the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to launch a Justice for Immigrants campaign, and the Interfaith Immigration Coalition to advocate across religious lines. It’s what led all the Latino pastors at the Hispanic Prayer Breakfast to come together around reform...
I’m asking you to help us recognize ourselves in one another.
For me, one of those people was my fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Mabel Hefty. When I walked into Ms. Hefty’s classroom for the first time, I was a new kid who had been living overseas for a few years, had a funny name nobody could pronounce. But she didn’t let me withdraw into myself. She helped me believe that I had something special to say. She made me feel special.
She reinforced the sense of empathy and thoughtfulness that my mother and my grandparents had tried hard to instill in me -- and that’s a lesson that I still carry with me as President.
Ms. Hefty is no longer with us, but I often think about her and how much of a difference she made in my life. And everybody has got a story like that, about that teacher who made the extra effort to shape our lives in important ways.
Presidents must show empathy during difficult economic times. It's in the office handbook. There's only so much any one president can do though about the immediate condition of the economy, and he must be careful not to exaggerate his impact.
So he emphasizes that he understands the plight of regular Americans. The problem with empathy, however, is not just that there's never enough of it to go around. It's that by offering it, presidents raise unrealistic expectations of a different sort.
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