This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this--You are not extraordinary. It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't and then ask "Why?".
Meet AGNES -- the MIT AgeLab's Age Gain Now Empathy System. This suit was designed to provide insight into the physical effects of aging. The various components simulate the changes that occur naturally as we age. Put on this suit and you feel increased fatigue, reduced flexibility in joints and muscles, spinal compression, and difficulty with vision and balance. Altogether, AGNES is more than just a suit.
New research suggests empathy and curiosity increase job satisfaction...
Eve Ekman is among a vanguard of researchers taking decades of studies on job burnout in a new direction. Instead of looking only at external factors causing burnout, such as heavy workloads, inadequate resources and difficult work relationships, they're focusing how workers can develop empathy to spark and sustain enthusiasm for their work. In doing so, they increase their effectiveness, even in daunting work conditions.
Cultivating empathy -- the ability to understand the experience of another -- is key to heading off burnout, and that takes simple cognitive shifts, Ekman explained. A critical step is developing curiosity toward a patient, inmate or client, she said. Realizing what a person has endured often stokes empathetic feelings, she said.
"Empathy is the most powerful emotion you can feel, is the most powerful state humanity can be in. A humanity united in a state of empathy could change the world..." A video talk by Max Igan - American Voice Radio - about the importance of empathy.
New research suggests that compassion might be able to slow the aging process. Gerontologists (scientists who research aging) probing into why we age have found that a major part of the effects of aging may actually be collateral damage in the body due to inflammation.
The anti-inflammatory properties of compassion have now begun to be studied. In a 2009 study, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine, trained 33 people in a Tibetan Buddhist compassion meditation, which involved the structured generation of feelings of compassion, and compared them with a group of 28 people who didn't do the meditation. After six weeks those who did the most compassion meditation had much lower levels of inflammation than those who did the least or none at all. And if the theory that inflammation is related to aging is correct, then this research certainly tells us that compassion could slow the aging process.
Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter.
He considers empathy — the ability to truly put oneself in the shoes of another — to be a vital but neglected human capacity. “I absolutely believe that empathy can be taught,” he says, citing the success of a programme for Canadian schoolchildren called ‘Roots of Empathy’. He would like to see something similar in British schools. He writes a blog about empathy called ‘Outrospection' and plans a book on the subject, and even a museum.
We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might.
How important is our brain’s empathy circuit and what happens to society when it doesn’t work properly? We explored the subject in July with University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. His recent book is “The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty”.
Scrooge lives on, and it’s not just a popular cliché.
While people differ based on individual factors, their socioeconomic status matters too. People who grow up in affluence have weaker empathy skills and show less compassion, so much that researchers can measure the difference in controlled experiments.
That’s the gist of several studies by Michael Kraus and his colleagues.
The psychologist has conducted social experiments like the Dictator game, in which participants are left in a room to decide how much real prize money they will share with another player.
My name is Simon van Rysewyk. I am a PhD student in the School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, in Australia. I am investigating empathy for pain.
Empathy during medical education Does empathy need a face? Dialogue: pain, facial expression and empathy
Here's a video I just reposted from a guy that was going around the Occupy Berkeley encampment the night of the eviction taping Livestream video. He did an interview with me and I told him about what we had been doing in the tent. The video is not very good quality since it was dark and was shot on a cell phone camera, however, it will give you a sense of what we were doing there. http://CultureOfEmpathy.com
THE AUTISM ENIGMA Autism spectrum disorder has attracted intense interest from the public and scientists over recent years. Nature sorts fact from fiction in this hot, but sometimes contentious, field: from the debate about soaring diagnoses, to the idea that scientists and engineers are at high risk of having a child with autism. The special includes news and comment from Nature, and articles from Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience and Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
It’s called the AGNES, which stands for “Age Gain Now Empathy System”. It probably helps “Agnes” is a suitably old-sounding name too, at least to my ears. But how exactly does this piece of attire put you in the shoes (or clothes) of a 75-year old and, better still, why would you ever want to wear it?
It’s kind of an odd thing to go to the trouble of designing and building, but AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin sees it being a useful tool to help younger generations better understand the needs of those less mobile and easily fatigued. AgeLab, a part of MIT’s School of Engineering, is responsible for creating the suit.
Meet AGNES, the suit that makes you feel 75 years old...
You've heard of the fat suit and the pregnancy suit; now meet AGNES — the old person suit. AGNES stands for "Age Gain Now Empathy System" and was designed by researchers at MIT's AgeLab to emulate what it feels like — physically — to be 75 years old with arthritis and diabetes
A recent paper (‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’ by Jesse Prinz – available in full-text pdf online) examines the link between feeling empathy (the ability to feel what others are feeling), and actually taking action to help others. What previous studies found was that when almost no effort was required, empathy was (weakly) correlated with taking action on behalf of others.
However, as soon as some effort was required (even something as minor as crossing the street to help someone) the ability of empathy to motivate pretty much disappeared. Interestingly, ‘attention’ and ‘concern’ (i.e. ‘paying attention’ and ‘giving a hoot’) were more strongly correlated with taking action for others than empathy.
While watching a brilliant teacher in action, you too may have wondered: "What is it that makes them excellent?"...
Empathy and emotional intelligence are the keys to what our blogger calls "the T Factor"...
Emotional intelligence and empathy are two huge features of a T factor teacher's practice. Knowing how, when, and what to say in order to bring about conditions in which educational attachment flourishes, is an incredibly subtle yet powerful tool. I believe that these skills can be somewhat coached and taught; although it is clear that some individuals have a natural propensity towards innately interacting in an emotionally intelligent manner, without coaching or training...
The T Factor approach to education via empathetic and emotionally intelligent interactions helps us recognise and appeal to the humanity in people; educating them from the inside out, and not the outside in.
New research from the University of Toronto-Scarborough shows that white people’s mirror-neuron-system fires much less, if at all, when they watch people of colour performing motor tasks, and I’m not at all surprised. For years, I just assumed that this was true, and that someone just had to do a study to prove it.
I am beginning the year 2012 with a few weeks of heavy thought on the subject of the development of the early European-hominid brain during the highly competitive historical era of the glacial ice ages, while the new sub-species "Homo Sapiens" competed, interbred, and ultimately prospered over the already entrenched sub-species, "Neanderthal" in the same limited geographic resource area.
The arrival and development of a new sub-species while in contact and competition with another sub-species with an already-existing population in a harsh resource area may have posed a developmental advantage in the development of a very non-emphatic neuron system. The amount of in-fighting amidst lineages of both sub-species could have made the success of resource competition a matter of "sides" in competition. Given that the competition between the two sub-species may have continued for many hundreds of thousands of years ( I am not an anthropologist, nor an historian ) there may have been a segment of the new Homo Sapiens population possibly located in particularly hard-resource competition areas that may have prospered in the acquisition of a non-empathic neuron system to better the odds at resourcing in a population of two competing sub species along with the groups that were assimilating with both sub-species.
The newly developed non-emphatic neuron Homo sapiens may have prospered beyond that particularly competitive age with the warlike societies that championed violence as social progress. The benefit in seizing resources with the violent social behavior, warfare, was a naturally successful biological development for that historical era of low technological development. The predominantly non-beneficial color of white for a hunting species may be explained in this same manner of sub-species intensive competition in that a white skin color is extremely visible to the eye, as is known by any hunter - one never shows a face directly to a prey as it is an immediate alert to flee. A white skin may have played a part in actually performing such a reaction to the Neanderthal that had less of a capacity to tool for warfare and depended more on social cohesion among a herd or small set of cohorts. A presence of a readily identifiable threat such as a quite horrible white face in anger may have been enough to drive the Neanderthal to abandon an area to the invader without a fight.
The world of this Millennium is vastly more responsive to cooperation among groups, individuals and alien presence due to technology's ability to rapidly smooth-out basic areas of ignorance such as language, economics, and social habits. And, again, it is the violent anger of the corporate ruling class that hurls the threats of legal manifest and destruction of democracy while self-admitting has kept barriers to genders and people of color throughout the history of modern capitalism and trade.
It is likely to be witnessed by recent historians that the Capitalist economic structure was overwhelmed by the organizational strategies and "competition war-chests" of non-emphatic minds that have benefitted economically by the promotion of violence as a valid social option, and warfare as a socially acceptable means to profit, all as part of the lineage of specific competition that has no modern correlation to value.
The new Millennium has been touted as an age of Peace, and peaceful it will be, as soon as those who possess empathic ability reach out to the great-unknown and grasp the tool that will make Peace the rule of society, and that tool is participation in the group of manifest peacemakers who are rising quite rapidly in urban areas around the planet.
This is indeed the age of change, if we want it - and if we may successfully campaign against the socially-acceptable insanity that is the global corporate war-profiteering machine.
War, global social injustice, intolerance, hate as a business, death from the ignorance of non-empathic populations, capitalist orthodoxy's killing-for-profitability, all are over - gone - done - if we want it.
Teach your children well.
That is not just a song title, but a message of the millennium.
Our children must be able to be taught - by any means necessary excluding violence, that violence is never an answer and that it is as vile as the socially "acceptable" insanity that promotes the pogrom on the classes imposed by classes that depend on an ancient and non-viable species-development of non-empathy.
Joining the evolving groups of humanity that make demands to fund education and social commons of equitability above warfare budgets is one first step among many on this road to peace, freedom and a recovery of a healthy planet of life and nourishment.
That which may have developed in the eons of historical resource competition is not a viable aspect of society and must be educated to a new technological advantage in Peace and cooperation.
That the war-minded sub-species have been in the control of this entry into the Millennium of Peace is only a matter of brutal capitalistic dominance as a hold-over from the competition for animal meat and range.
Thank goodness technology allows early-education interaction to shift the minds to a more emphatic neuro-plasticity, as the study from the University of Toronto-Scarborough may have indicated quite strongly.
It may well be that the rich are not too rich to feel empathy, but that a lack of empathy has enabled a section of the human population to prosper in the climate of orthodox capitalism, all as a direct result of early hominid development in a crucially competitive inter-species period of specific human development on the European continent and surrounding areas.
January 2, 2012 00:29 hrs., California
I’ve worked with and tutored physically disabled and learning disabled people for most of my life, but I had almost no experience with people who had autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. I knew a little bit (Rainman, sigh), but not enough to be able to truly help. So I got every book on autism and Asperger’s Syndrome at the public library and every book at the community college library, and I started from the ground up...
In short, my friends on the Spectrum were overwhelmingly, intensely, unremittingly, outrageously empathic — not merely in relation to emotions and social cues, but to every possible aspect of their environment....
On a Saturday in December, six women gather in an old house downtown to learn how to listen, really listen.
Outside the streets resound with cheery strains of Christmas carols, shoppers’ chatter, traffic bustle. In here these women are developing the ability to hear and respond to people in the depths of despair over a phone line.
“The vast majority of our callers are repeat callers,” Kurtiss Trowbridge, 28, volunteer coordinator for Toronto’s Distress Centres, tells the trainees. “They lack social supports and coping skills. They are at greater risk of suicide. We can’t solve their problems. We can’t change their situations. But we can listen.
2011 was a big year for empathy. Rats became the first non-primate to demonstrate pro-social behavior, forgoing treats in order to help their brethren in distress. Scientists uncovered what some are calling the empathy gene, a receptor for the brain chemical oxytocin, and which strangers can detect based solely on observing behavior. It was held up as a critical component of training doctors and MBAs, and touted as the defining force in everything from growing the economy, to surviving middle school, to combating the gridlock plaguing today’s public discourse.
But best of all were stories of students from across the country and around the world who are putting empathy into action, refusing to wait for adults to fix the problems that so often leave us paralyzed, and calling on all of us to make way for a new kind of teaching and learning. If — as Roots of Empathy Founder Mary Gordon says — empathy is something that’s caught not taught, we believe these tales of empathy in action are the sign of much more to come.
So doesn't it just seem to you like the 1% just don't give a damn about anyone else? That they lack basic empathy and compassion? This week - Bank of America got hit with a $335 million settlement for preying on minority homebuyers. Their subsidiary - Countrywide - systematically screwed over blacks and latinos - people who just walked in - looking to buy a home - and walked out with a subprime exploding mortgages - even though they qualified for the non-exploding normal mortgages that white people were getting Banksters looked at these prospective homebuyers not as customers - not as fellow Americans - not as neighbors or friends - but instead as suckers - people they could con into a crooked mortgage and walk away with extra fees.
Phoebe and I talk about our final thoughts about the results and effectiveness of the empathy tent and ideas for moving forward. This was the evening of the eviction (Dec 21) of the Occupy encampment in the Berkeley, Martin Luther King Civic Center Park.
We have set up the Empathy Tent at Occupy Berkeley in Martin Luther King Civic Center Park on MLK Way and Center. We're also organizing to set up 'Empathy Tents' at the Occupy events around the country to support building a culture of empathy and compassion. The Empathy Tent is an open and eclectic space for people that value empathy, compassion, caring, community, peace, nonviolence, justice, ...
Emotional differences between the rich and poor, as depicted in such Charles Dickens classics as “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” may have a scientific basis. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that people in the lower socio-economic classes are more physiologically attuned to suffering, and quicker to express compassion than their more affluent counterparts.
By comparison, the UC Berkeley study found that individuals in the upper middle and upper classes were less able to detect and respond to the distress signals of others. Overall, the results indicate that socio-economic status correlates with the level of empathy and compassion that people show in the face of emotionally charged situations.
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