Random notes on empathy from around the web
I researched empathy as part of writing this article: Clarifying empathy so we can talk about it. There are as many definitions of empathy out there as there are words in this article. If you’d like to explore empathy further, here are some of my notes.
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My notes
“Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.”
Etymology:
The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐμπάθεια (empatheia, meaning "physical affection or passion").
The term was adapted by Hermann Lotze and Robert Vischer to create the German word Einfühlung ("feeling into").
Einfühlung was officially translated by Edward B. Titchener in 1909 into the English word "empathy"
Basically, no uniform definition, so it encompasses “a broad range of emotional states”:
“Caring for other people and having a desire to help them”
“Experiencing emotions that match another person's emotions”
“Discerning what another person is thinking or feeling”
“Making less distinct differences between the self and the other”
Empathy is generally divided into two major components:
Cognitive empathy.
Emotional empathy.
Past experiences influence decisions today —> what may be illogical to one person may be logical to another —> Understanding the other’s logic (even when it is different) is empathy.
Martin Hoffman (psychologist) says everyone is born with the capability of feeling empathy.
Empathy is not the same as compassion or sympathy:
“Compassion is often defined as an emotion we feel when others are in need, which motivates us to help them.”
“Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need.”
Empathy is not the same as pity or emotional contagion.
“Pity is a feeling that one feels towards others that might be in trouble or in need of help as they cannot fix their problems themselves, often described as "feeling sorry" for someone.”
“Emotional contagion is when a person (especially an infant or a member of a mob) imitatively "catches" the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognizing this is happening.”
What is Empathy (SkillsYouNeed)
Defines empathy as “as ‘feeling with’ someone – being able to put yourself in their place as if you were them, and feeling those feelings.”
Some other Definitions of Empathy
empathy n. the power of entering into another’s personality and imaginatively experiencing his experiences (Chambers English Dictionary, 1989 edition)
"[Empathy is] awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns." (Daniel Goleman, in Working with Emotional Intelligence)
"I call him religious who understands the suffering of others." (Mahatma Gandhi)
"Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on, intellectually." (Tim Minchin)
Psychologists have identified three types of empathy:
Cognitive empathy is understanding someone’s thoughts and emotions, in a very rational, rather than emotional sense.
Emotional empathy is also known as emotional contagion, and is ‘catching’ someone else’s feelings, so that you literally feel them too.
Compassionate empathy is understanding someone’s feelings, and taking appropriate action to help.
These Are the 6 Habits of Empathetic People
Empathy = the ability to understand and share the feelings of others.
Key habits of empathetic people
They're curious.
They listen well.
They open up.
The social neuroscience of empathy (Singer and Lamm 2009)
The ability to empathize becomes evident when we are misunderstood by someone else and our feelings get hurt
Linguistic roots:
Ancient Greek —> Empatheia (passion), which is made up of “en”(in) and “pathos” (feeling).
The English term empathy originated from the German term Einfühlung (“feeling into” something, a term used as a tool for analyzing works of art and nature that later developed into a more general mechanism for “recognizing each other as ‘minded creatures’”.
Started being used for philosophy then started being researched by development and social psychologists.
Wide interest in our ability to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes”
Definition of empathy:
(I understand affect as a concept used in psychology to describe the experiencing of feelings or emotions)
“There are almost as many definitions of empathy as there are researchers in the field”
Empathy = “an affective response to the directly perceived, imagined, or inferred feeling states of another being.”
Empathy happens when we perceive or imagine someone else’s emotions and this triggers a response so that we partially feel what the other is feeling.
We empathize with others when we feel what another is feeling by observing or imagining another person’s feelings and we know that the other person’s feelings is the source of our feelings.
Related terms:
Emotional contagion and mimicry can contribute to empathetic response, but they are distinct and neither necessary nor sufficient processes for the experience of empathy:
Mimicry is defined as the tendency to automatically synchronize affective expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person —> mimicry seems to serve a social function in increasing rapport and fondness between self and other.
Emotional contagion is another process that is related to but distinct from empathy. It denotes the tendency to “catch” other people’s emotions and has alternately been labeled “primitive empathy”.
Baby crying study shows strong overlap between mimicry and emotional contagion —> Note, however, that there are cases in which mimicry occurs without an emotional component and other cases in which emotions are automatically elicited by observing others’ emotional states without the involvement of motor mimicry
In most cases, mimicry and emotional contagion precede empathy.
And empathy precedes sympathy and compassion.
Which precedes prosocial behavior
The crucial distinction between the term empathy and vicariously felt responses like sympathy, empathic concern,and compassion is that empathy denotes that the observer’s emotions reflect affective sharing (“feeling with” the other person) while compassion, sympathy, empathic concern denote that the observer’s emotions are inherently other oriented (“feeling for” the other person).
In all four cases, affective changes are induced in the observer in response to the perceived or imagined affective state of another person.
For example, empathizing with a person feeling sad will result in a feeling of sadness in the self,whereas sympathizing with, being empathically concerned, or feeling compassion for a sad person will result in either pity or compassionate love for the person, but not sadness.
Also, when an observer notices that someone is jealous of him, he will most likely not start feeling jeal-ous himself—though he might show sympathy or compassion for the jealous person.
Empathy does not necessarily carry such prosocial and altruistic, other-oriented motivations (i.e., a motivation with the goal to increase the other person’s well-being or welfare)
Many examples of how empathy can go awry -> manipulation / torturing
In general, however, empathy is a first necessary step in a chain that begins with affect sharing, followed by understanding the other person’s feelings, which then motivates other-related concern and finally engagement in helping behavior.
While substantial empirical evidence suggests that shared neural activations are at the root of sharing feelings, sensations, and actions of others, additional research is required to clarify whether these activations are actually shared on the neural level, to what extent we share both the somatosensory antecedents or only the affective consequences of another’s affective state, what constitutes the functional significance of these shared activations, and how we can distinguish between emotional contagion vs. empathy on the neural level.
There is considerable evidence that empathy is substantially modulated by top-down processes such as attention or the contextual appraisal of a situation.
Philosophers and psychologists have long wondered about “this thing called empathy.”
Only recently social neuroscience has begun to provide some support in this endeavor.
Initial findings are encouraging that we will some day have a better understanding of why, when, and how we experience empathy and whether we can use that knowledge to increase prosocial behavior and an intersubjectivity that is grounded in a better understanding of ourselves and of others
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy - Chapter 14 (Decety and Hodges)
Empathy denotes a sense of similarity between the feelings we experience and those expressed by others, without losing sight of whose feelings belong to whom.
There is broad agreement about two primary components of empathy:
(1) an affective response to another person, which may (but not always) entail sharing that person’s emotional state;
(2) a cognitive capacity to take the other person’s perspective
Definitional variations on these general statements abound.
However, virtually all empathy researchers agree that empathy requires making a link between the self and other, but without confusing the self and other.
At the core of our theoretical framework is the notion of shared representations between the self and other, which has been proposed as a possible neurophysiological basis for social cognition (Decety & Sommerville, 2003).
Shared representations rely on the common neural coding associated with the perception and performance of actions.
Perception of a given behavior in another individual automatically activates one’s own representations of that behavior
However, the activation of that behavior is generally inhibited or occurs at a sub-threshold level.
The shared representations model may also be applied to the processing of emotions, which are a key component of empathy.
For instance, viewing facial expressions triggers expressions on one’s own face, even in the absence of conscious recognition of the stimulus.
Many social and developmental psychologists have documented that the default mode for understanding others is biased toward relying on one’s own self-perspective.
We see others through our own embodied cognition, and use our own knowledge (including beliefs and attitudes) as the primary basis for understanding others.
Stated in other words, people are fundamentally egocentric and have difficulty getting beyond their own perspective when anticipating what others are thinking or feeling.
For instance, we are inclined to impute our own knowledge to others, and overestimate what they know.
In addition, recent research indicates that people’s predictions of how other people will feel in situations that arouse drive states (such as thirst) are based largely on their predictions of how they themselves would feel, which in turn are based on their own current drive states.
This projective tendency, which stems from the shared representations, is very parsimonious and frequently useful in understanding and predicting the behaviors of others.
Yet it is far from perfect, as individual differences in people’s thoughts and emotions abound.
Errors in taking the perspective of others stem from the inability to suppress the self-perspective and many costly social misunderstandings are rooted in people’s failure to recognize the degree to which their perception of a situation may differ from those of others.
Confusion of the self and other is generally not considered a hallmark of empathy
Yet, although the self and other may be similar, we are able to understand that they are separate.
Perspective-taking allows us to adjust for differences in the way other individuals may, literally and figuratively, see the world.
Perspective-taking also plays a critical role in triggering empathy
An essential aspect of empathy is to recognize the other person as like the self, while maintaining a clear separation between self and other.
We argue that empathy requires some form of executive inhibition (i.e., the deliberate suppression of cognitions or responses to achieve an internally represented goal)
(Certain parts of the brains may impact perspective taking / empathy)
Batson’s (1991) empathy–altruism model —> postulates that concern for another person in distress is the more reliable predictor of the distressed person receiving help, rather than experiencing another person’s distress as one’s own.
Self–other awareness is a vital component of human empathy.
It has been argued that self-awareness may have evolved for the specific purpose of allowing us to understand our own and others’ behavior.
This may help explain why humans are able to “feel for” and act on behalf of other people whose experiences differ greatly from their own.
Behavior that constitutes rudimentary “empathy” in other species consists mainly of fixed action patterns that are engaged only for those recognized as kin. Self-reflexive capability may be a crucial difference between humans and other animals.
It is unlikely that self-awareness relies on one specific brain area; rather, probably arises from the interaction of processes distributed in the brain
Social psychologists have identified how multiple social stimuli may trigger empathy (e.g., the target person’s emotion, kinship with the target, attempts to take the target’s perspective).
The Science of Empathy (Riess 2017)
Empathy plays a critical interpersonal and societal role.
Empathy enables sharing of experiences, needs, and desires between individuals.
Empathy provides an emotional bridge that promotes pro-social behavior.
Empathy enables us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in the perspective of others, and to distinguish between our own and others’ emotions.
Cognitive empathy must play a role when a lack of emotional empathy exists because of racial, ethnic, religious, or physical differences.
Self- and other-empathy leads to replenishment and renewal of a vital human capacity.
If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical to strengthening individual, community, national, and international bonds.
In the past, empathy was considered an inborn trait that could not be taught, but research has shown that this vital human competency is mutable and can be taught.
Why is the human brain designed for this complex, intricate task?
If human existence was simply the result of “survival of the fittest,” we would be wired solely to dominate others, not to respond to their suffering.
Our capacity to perceive and resonate with others’ suffering allows us to feel and understand their pain.
The personal distress experienced by observing others’ pain often motivates us to respond with compassion.
The survival of our species depends on mutual aid, and providing it reduces our own distress.
Mutual aid exists in the earliest reports of tribal behavior and remains a powerful force in today’s world, where thousands of organizations and millions of people work to relieve global suffering.
The concept of empathy was first introduced by aestheticians (people who are knowledgeable about the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art) in the mid-19th century.
They used the German word “Einfühlung” to describe the emotional “knowing” of a work of art from within, by feeling an emotional resonance with the work of art.
At the end of the 19th century, the psychologist Theodore Lipps expanded this concept to mean “feeling one’s way into the experience of another” by theorizing that inner imitation of the actions of others played a critical role in eliciting empathy.
The philosopher Martin Buber added deeper texture to the concept of empathy by describing the empathic relationship as “I and Thou,” versus unempathic disrespect, as “I and It” => humane respect and concern for the other is contrasted with objectification and dehumanization of another person
Empathy is a hardwired capacity
Research in the neurobiology of empathy has changed the perception of empathy from a soft skill to a neurobiologically based competency (9).
Differences in these neural processes may account for different individual capacities for empathy.
Attenuation makes it possible to empathize but not become overwhelmed with another’s personal distress. Our own distress would likely render us less helpful.
A cardinal feature of empathy is that it usually helps connect people to others
Affective empathy, or emotional sharing, most easily occurs among members of the same “tribe”.
Individuals tend to have the most empathy for others who look or act like them, for others who have suffered in a similar way, or for those who share a common goal.
We see these biases play out repeatedly in communities, schools, sports teams, and religious communities.
Empathy is not always an equal opportunity benefactor
People are evolutionarily wired to recognize and respond to differences and socially or culturally based perceptions can trigger subconscious fears that threaten emotional homeostasis.
Because of this evolutionary bias, cognitive empathy must play a role when a lack of emotional empathy exists because of racial, ethnic, religious, or physical differences.
Research on empathy and altruism has demonstrated that enhancing perspective taking, the capacity to see a person’s situation from his or her point of view, coupled with enhanced value being placed on the welfare of those who are unfamiliar can override bias.
Perspective taking is a well-known precursor to empathic concern.
… valuing a person in need is an important, and largely overlooked, variable and precursor of feeling empathy for that person
Compassion cannot exist without empathy, as they are part of the same perception and response continuum that moves human beings from observation to action.
Self-empathy is a much neglected area and is necessary to ensure [we] have the necessary resources to remain empathic toward others.
Plato’s ancient question, “Can virtue be taught?”
Is self-empathy is necessary in order to be empathetic toward others?
These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena (Batson 2009)
The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena
Application of the term empathy to so many distinct phenomena is, in part, a result of researchers invoking empathy to provide an answer to two quite different questions:
How can one know what another person is thinking and feeling?
What leads one person to respond with sensitivity and care to the suffering of another?
The first question has been of particular interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, neurophysiologists, primatologists, and developmental psychologists interested in the theory of mind ⇒ use empathy to explain how we humans come to know what others are thinking and feeling
The second question has been of particular interest to philosophers and to developmental and social psychologists seeking to understand and promote prosocial action.
(I understand prosocial action/behavior to mean refer to a social behavior that benefits other people or society as a whole such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering)
The goal of these researchers is to explain an action by one person that effectively addresses the need of another.
Those using empathy to answer this question are apt to say that empathic feelings for the other—feelings of sympathy, compassion, tenderness, and the like—produce motivation to relieve the suffering of the person for whom empathy is felt.
Eight conceptual uses of the term empathy:
Concept 1: Knowing Another Person’s Internal State, Including His or Her Thoughts and Feelings
cognitive empathy?
Concept 2: Adopting the Posture or Matching the Neural Responses of an Observed Other
facial empathy or motor mimicry or imitation?
Concept 3: Coming to Feel as Another Person Feels
Concept 4: Intuiting or Projecting Oneself into Another’s Situation
Concept 5: Imagining How Another Is Thinking and Feeling
Concept 6: Imagining How One Would Think and Feel in the Other’s Place
Concept 7: Feeling Distress at Witnessing Another Person’s Suffering
Personal distress or empathic distress?
Concept 8: Feeling for Another Person Who Is Suffering
Other-oriented emotion felt when another is perceived to be in need has not always been called empathy. It has also been called “pity” or “compassion”
It would simplify matters if empathy referred to a single object and if everyone agreed on what that object was.
Unfortunately, as with many psychological terms, this is not the case.
Both empathy and sympathy (the term with which empathy is most often contrasted) have been used in a variety of ways.
The best one can do is recognize the different phenomena, make clear the labeling scheme one is adopting, and use that scheme consistently.
The processes whereby one person can come to know the internal state of another and can be motivated to respond with sensitive care are of enormous importance for our life together.
Roman Krznaric on How to Start an Empathy Revolutiom (TED 2013)
We live in an age of hyper-individualism
Happiness = pursuit our self-interest
Empathy is antidote
What is empathy?
Empathy is the art of stepping into the shoes of another person, and looking at the world from their perspective.
It’s about understanding the thoughts, the feelings, the ideas and experiences that make up their view of the world.
It’s about understanding where another person is really coming from.
You’ve probably had experiences where you’ve been arguing with your partner, or your husband or your wife and you thought to yourself, ‘I wish they just understood my point of view’. I wish they understood what I was feeling (You’re asking for Empathy)
Empathy can create radical social change.
In the United States, empathy levels have declined by nearly 50% over the last 40 years.
The steepest decline has been in the last 10 years.
At the same time, we have worldwide growing social divides. In two-thirds of western countries, the gap between rich and poor is greater today than it was in 1980.
At the same time, over a billion people in the world are living on less than a dollar a day.
98% of us, say the neuro-scientists, have the ability to empathize and step into somebody else’s shoes.
Our brains are wired for empathy.
But very few of us have really reached our full empathic potential.
As a society, we haven’t yet really learned to harness the power of empathy, to create social and political transformation.
Ideas to start a global empathy revolution.
Train up the next generation.
Empathy can be taught and learned.
It’s best to learn it when you’re young.
The world’s greatest program for teaching empathy is the one you can see on the screen here which is called the Roots of Empathy, which goals are:
To foster the development of empathy
To develop emotional literacy
To reduce levels of bullying, aggression and violence, and promote children’s pro-social behaviours
To increase knowledge of human development, learning, and infant safety
To prepare students for responsible citizenship and responsive parenting
Develop an ambitious imagination.
If you focus on somebody else’s feelings and needs, that is, empathize with them, that increases your moral concern with them and can motivate you to take action on their behalves.
Spark our curiosity.
Most of have lost the curiosity that we once had as children.
We walk past strangers every day, without knowing what’s going on in their minds.
We hardly know our neighbors.
Cultivate curiosity about strangers in order to challenge our prejudices and stereotypes.
E.g. At least once a week you can have a conversation with a stranger.
Talk about the stuff that really matters in life: love and death, politics and religion.
See Human Library Organisation as example
Learn from history.
Empathy can also exist on a mass scale, on a collective level.
Historical examples:
Holocaust
Rwandan Genocide
Harness technology.
Technology’s always been important in empathic movements.
E.g. Printing press led to abolishment of slavery
There’s also a danger: social networking platforms have been designed for the efficient exchange of information, not for the exchange of intimacy and empathy.
Become empathic leaders.
E.g. Nelson Mandela ⇒ mutual understanding between black and white South Africans.
Cultivate Outrospection.
Socrates ⇒ to live a wise and good life, we need to ‘know thyself’.
We need to balance this with “outrospection” ⇒ the idea of discovering who you are, and how to live by stepping outside yourself, and looking through the eyes of other people and discovering other people’s worlds.
Empathy, as a concept, is more popular today than ever.
It’s on the lips of politicians and neuroscientists, business leaders and spiritual gurus.
Since 2004, internet searches for the word empathy have more than doubled in frequency. (They’ve tripled now ⇒ Empathy Google Trends)
The power of empathy by Helen Riess (TED 2013)
What makes us connect with others and what makes us disconnect?
Imagine what implications there were if doctors, nurses, teachers, employers, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends could learn to be more empathic with each other.
I learned everything I could about the neuroscience of empathy and this was a very growing field at the time.
And through what I learned, I developed empathy training and this training was grounded in the neurobiology of emotions and empathy
So this seemed like a very important message to get out, because some of my training is just about opening your eyes to the receptive and perceptive aspects, then into the empathic responses.
Created the acronym EMPATHY to help people remember the key pieces of how we connect to people:
‘E’ stands for eye contact.
Eye contact is usually the first indication that we’ve been noticed by someone even though cultural norms can vary.
In the Zulu tribe, the word for hello is Sawubona, which means I see you.
Every human being has a longing to be seen, understood and appreciated.
‘M’ stands for muscles of facial expression.
The human face is one part of us that we almost never fully cover up.
Faces are a roadmap of human emotion — powerful communicator
E.g. The disgusted look on someone’s face who’s just eating rotten food
‘P’ stands for posture.
Posture is a powerful conveyor of connection.
Our open or closed posture signal approach and avoidance signals to others.
E.g. doctors who were told to sit down on rounds versus who stand up
‘A’ stands for affect.
Affect is the scientific term for expressed emotions.
Try labeling others emotions and it will change how you hear what they’re saying.
‘T’ stands for tone of voice.
When we are emotionally activated, our tone of voice and our facial expressions change without our even trying.
Emotions leak out through tone of voice.
‘H’ stands for hearing the whole person.
Hearing the whole person means understanding the context in which other people live (this requires your curiosity open and avoidance of judgement until you understand where the person is coming from).
‘Y’ stands for your response.
We respond to other people’s feelings all the time.
We might think that we only experience our own emotions but we’re constantly absorbing the feelings of others.
E.g. When you see a mother embracing her son who has just returned from active duty.
Our human brain is actually hard wired for empathy
Our survival depends on it.
We reflect the feelings of others, because that’s what is required for our survival.
We all are here more because of mutual aid and cooperation than because of survival of the fittest.
If we were only wired for survival of the fittest, we’d be wired to dominate others and to only look out for ourselves but that’s not how we are made.
Daniel Goleman on the Three Kinds of Empathy (Oprah 2016)
3 kinds of empathy:
Cognitive empathy. That means I understand how you see things. What your perspective is. You know that old saying walk a mile in the other person's shoes. Technically it means I know what mental models you have. I know what language to use so you'll understand me. And it operates in one part of the brain. (Lack of this leads to poor connection and poor communication).
Emotional empathy. It's sensing in yourself what another person is feeling.
Empathetic concern. It means if I have someone in my life who is in distress, I'm not just gonna feel it, I'm gonna want to help.
Simon Sinek - Understanding Empathy (Keynote 2017)
Trust and cooperation are not yet standard in our organizations
They should be and we know that which is why we're looking for ways to bring those things to our organizations
Great leaders need to have empathy and perspective
Leadership is about taking care of those in our charge
(when everything goes right you have to give away all the credit and when everything goes wrong, you have to take all the responsibility)
One of the great things that is lacking in most of our companies is that they are not teaching us how to lead
Leadership is a skill
Empathy is being concerned about the human being not just their output