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).
Simon Baron-Cohen argues that men's and women's brains are made differently: the female brain is hard-wired for empathy, and the male to understand and build systems.
Take brother and sister Alex and Hannah. Alex's mother remembers that, as a toddler, he loved toy tractors and fire engines and would happily sit for hours prodding and pressing objects just to see what would happen. By the age of five he was obsessed with compiling football stickers...
Hannah's big passion was people. Even in her early years she loved making them laugh and smile. Hannah learned to talk earlier than her brother and plastered her walls with pictures of kittens and foals.
The condition of man is a condition of war, wrote 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. A quick glance through history books and today's news headlines certainly seems to support the longstanding idea that humans by nature are aggressive, selfish and antagonistic.
But this view simply doesn't fit with scientific facts, write researchers featured in the new book "Origins of Altruism and Cooperation"... The book's authors argue that humans are naturally cooperative, altruistic and social, only reverting to violence when stressed, abused, neglected or mentally ill.
This article shows you how to develop empathy and deals with helpful ways that allow you to perceive the world from another person's perspective.
The following article has a lot to share about compassion, empathy and in general the ability to think yourself into another person’s shoes, if you so want. It will also show you what you can do to develop and cultivate empathy. The origin of the famous proverb “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes” was quite difficult to find, as there are many who simply rephrased and added their own “spin” to this commonly known quote.
Empathy is a critical aspect of human emotion that influences the behavior of individuals as well as the functioning of society. Although empathy is fundamentally a subjective experience, no studies have yet examined the neural correlates of the self-reported experience of empathy.
Furthermore, although behavioral research has linked empathy to prosocial behavior, no work has yet connected empathy-related neural activity to everyday, real-world helping behavior
Politics is making Americans dumb and mean. It's turning a generous, forward-thinking people into glib, defensive, narrow-minded bores.
Kristen Cambell of the National Council on Citizenship, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering civic engagement, was also in that last group. "Successful civic eRodriguez: A cultural civics lessonngagement," she told me, "is all about capturing and harnessing empathy. Ultimately, we're talking about wanting people to care for their neighbors, communities, their country."
At first glance, the word "empathy" evokes vaguely religious associations, something well beyond the reach of civic organizations. But strip away memories of Sunday school and you'll find a concept that's eminently useful in secular, public life. By Gregory Rodriguez
Men are not as 'tuned' in to people's feelings as women. A nasal spray can make men more in tune with other people's feelings, say a team of German and UK researchers.
They found that inhaling the "cuddle hormone" oxytocin made men just as empathetic as women.
This study is the latest of several that suggest that intranasal oxytocin seems to 'sensitise' people to become more aware of social cues from other individuals. by Emma Wilkinson
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
Beginning September 9th, Washington National Cathedral will host A Call to Compassion.
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, our nation came together to pray, reflect, and mourn. Washington National Cathedral was honored to serve as the spiritual home for our nation during those tragic, uncertain times. Now, a decade later, we come together again to remember the victims and heroes of 9/11 as well as the nearly 6,000 service members whose lives have since been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During the days leading up to “A Call to Compassion,” the Washington National Cathedral’s homepage will feature information about this monumental event
Let’s face it, relationships are tough, but people who figure them out do better in life. Men in long-term marriages live longer, have better health overall, report higher levels of happiness, and tend to be wealthier. Divorce, to say the least, is expensive.
While there are a host of tools that marriage counselors teach couples who are struggling, ranging from boundary setting to negotiating conflict to expressing needs in a nonthreatening manner, the tool that underpins it all is empathy.
Full-blown empathy is when you can feel another person's walk, their energy, their breath, their anxiety, their wisdom, their suffering, their confusion, their brilliance, their hopes and fears...
When we see and feel life from somebody else's point of view, I think we can realize that for the most part other people are just trying to be happy in their own life in their own way. Sometimes their pursuit aligns with our own happiness, sometimes it is kind of neutral to us and sometimes it appears to be diametrically opposed to our own experience of well-being.
Want an empathy workout for your brain? Read a book! At right the blue shows activation patterns associated with emotional comprehension (blue) and perspective taking (yellow) when reading a story.
It turns out, when we read an emotional work, we activate a complex mentalizing network in order to think about the mental state of another person. Imagining a person in a different place takes more brain power (reading slows) and also activates the spatial network necessary to set up a scene in the brain.
Baron-Cohen has developed a new model for characterizing gender differences that he calls the systemizing/empathizing theory. Systemizing “is the drive to build or analyze a system, which is simply anything that follows rules or patterns.” Like Legos. And empathizing is the drive to “identify (and respond to) someone else’s thoughts and feelings...
He has found that higher levels of testosterone lead to a child who is more likely to be interested in systems and less interested in empathy and people. He concludes by saying that more research is needed. by Amy Windsor
Empathy is defined as identifying with another person's feelings, or emotionally placing one's self in the place of another. The trait is a theme in Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird...."
The overall character of Atticus Finch is an example of how empathy is used in the novel. He displays empathy in his strong beliefs of racial equality, which was uncommon in the 1930s in Alabama. by Scott Cornell, img http://bit.ly/qCuGfy
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