For the 48 students who had spent 30 hours over the weekend voluntarily going without food as part of the 30 Hour Famine, the time wasn’t spent idly..
"I'm just really hungry," she said before her chair nap. She said she had learned a lot from the experience and gained empathy toward those who may be going hungry.
Jennifer Peterson, the program coordinator at First United Methodist Church, had an explanation for the sudden deflation around her. "It's the perfect storm," she said. "We hit our crash point."
She said that the students - depending on the individual - were learning valuable lessons about empathy and priorities.
Last night I was lucky enough to be at a talk by Simon Baron-Cohen at the Royal Institution. And it was a fabulous way to spend 90 minutes on a warm Spring night in London.
Professor Baron-Cohen is probably best known as an expert in autism, but he's also interested and works in the field of psychopathic behaviour. And in his talk last night, he proposed a fascinating idea: that we should think less about 'evil' and more about 'empathy erosion.'
The Professor's latest book Zero Degrees of Empathy is just out and his talk was one hell of an appetiser for it.
A new study from The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry finds that mothers who feed their babies breast milk exclusively, as opposed to formula, are more likely to bond emotionally with their child during the first few months after delivery.
The breastfeeding mothers surveyed for the study showed greater responses to their infant's cry in brain regions related to caregiving behavior and empathy than mothers who relied upon formula as the baby's main food source.
Something is amiss in our discussion of empathy. I came to this conclusion after a brief search through recent news articles yielded the following headlines: College students have less empathy than past generations, too much testosterone will lower empathy, empathy is considered to be a cause of yawning, and my favorite newsflash, chickens are capable of empathy too!
While this might be very bad news for college-going chickens who suffer from low testosterone and fatigue, it doesn't do much for our public discussion of empathy either. The main problem is we've been asking all the wrong questions.
The empathy gap, for both physical and psychological pain, undermines human ability to objectively evaluate harsh methods of interrogation.
Psychological scientist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, working with Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell of Harvard Law School and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon, wanted to explore a well known psychological phenomenon called the "empathy gap" as it relates to torture. Normally, it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to experience someone else's visceral states. (img http://bit.ly/fHbFnb)
First of all, I owe the launch of today's thought process to Ms. Jone Johnson Lewis of the Northern Virginia Ethical Society, and her thought-provoking blog post, "Empathy in the White House."
The concept of empathy as a worthy and even central consideration in our world is one I've seen highlighted by President Obama, as noted in past posts of mine, such as this one.
But I laud an effort Jone highlighted by an individual to collect a documentary's worth of examples of Obama discussing empathy, titled "Barack Obama and a New Spirit of Empathy".
All politics is moral. Political leaders put forth proposals on the assumption that their proposals are the right things to do, not the wrong things to do. But progressives and radical conservatives have very different ideas of right and wrong..
The basic idea is this: Democracy is based on empathy, that is, on citizens caring about each other and acting on that care, taking responsibility not just for themselves but for their families, communities, and their nation. The role of government is to carry out this principle in two ways: protection and empowerment.
President Obama has begun road-testing his 2012 campaign message this week in a series of speeches that can be boiled down to a single word: compassion.
“The America I know is generous and compassionate,” Obama said in his speech on the debt Wednesday .
At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday night in Chicago, Obama reiterated his “belief in an America that is competitive and compassionate,” contrasting that with a Republican Party that “is entirely sincere that says we no longer can afford to do big things in this country ... (that) we can’t afford to be compassionate.”
A new study suggests individuals who call themselves liberals are more likely to have brains that have a larger anterior cingulate cortex while conservatives have larger amygdalas.
According to what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with some reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat.
Another study from the University of Nebraska found that liberals and conservatives had different reactions to "gaze cues" — whether they tended to look in the same direction as a face on their computer screen. Liberals were more likely than conservatives to follow another person's gaze, suggesting that people who lean right value autonomy more; alternative explanations suggest that liberals might be more empathetic, or that conservatives are less trusting of others.
When you have senior parents who need increasing support, empathy is critical. You try hard, and not always with success, to understand what they are experiencing. That’s called empathy.
The concept of empathy has received a bit of a bad rap the past year or two with politicians actually taking the time to deliver statements against looking at the world through an empathic lens (I could write an entire post just on these tactless quotes). During some U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for judges questions on empathy played a central, and I think somewhat silly, role.
Importantly, the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy.
The present findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes.
Watch as investigators give insight into techniques used to establish empathy with suspects and how they work to get the confession needed to close the case in this video from Investigation Discovery's "Real Interrogations.
This is the first study to show a distinction between breast and formula feeding mothers in brain activity in response to their babies' cries.
Medical News Today reports: The breastfeeding mothers surveyed for the study showed greater responses to their infant's cry in brain regions related to caregiving behavior and empathy than mothers who relied upon formula as the baby's main food source. This is the first paper to examine the underlying neurobiological mechanisms as a function of breastfeeding, and to connect brain activity with maternal behaviors among human mothers.
Currently empathy seems to be a sought-after goal. Why? I am not sure because seeking it in the name of good, peace, and collaboration is as silly as seeking focus or communication skills or charisma for the same purposes. Empathy, focus, skilled communication, and charisma are a few of many traits and states that are neutral. When they are used in the furtherance or service of helping or harming another, they assume goodness or badness.
Because empathy is a neutral skill until one uses it, I grow impatient when I hear people blithely stating that we must raise the amount of empathy in our culture or foster it in our children. As a result of my impatience, I've blogged in the past here and here about this mischaracterization of empathy.
This fascinating and disturbing book is an examination of why some people are viciously, violently cruel to others. “They’re evil” is the standard answer to that question, but as Simon Baron-Cohen points out, invoking evil isn’t really an explanation. It simply raises the question: but why are some people evil? ..
Zero Degrees of Empathy is a strange amalgam of scientific sophistication and philosophical naivety. The detailed findings on which Baron-Cohen bases his conclusions about which parts of the brain do what, and his identification of the particular neurological pathways on which the capacity for empathy depends, are as dazzling as they are surprising.
Peter Kropotkin was one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, who managed to multi-task as a Russian prince, renowned geographer and revolutionary anarchist. In this interview with Phonic FM, a wonderful community radio station based in Exeter, I discuss how Kropotkin’s ideas about ‘mutual aid’ relate to my own work on empathy, and why Kropotkin is a prophet for the art of living in the twenty-first century. The interview lasts around 50 minutes.
Some argue that empathy is undesirable in politics. Ayn Rand, for example, would argue that empathy is a false god, one that leads inexorably to emotionalism and statism and tyranny. Rand’s novels, like her politics, are austere. They are grandly idealistic; her characters posture and pose, but often fail to breathe.
But empathy, properly understood, doesn’t involve acquiescence to the every need of constituents, or the elevation of feeling over logic or necessity. Empathy is broader than that. Empathy speaks to human motivations, like greed or guilt, to human failings, like hubris or arrogance. Understanding people can bring clarity to policy, and some subtlety.
Our budget offers a compassionate and optimistic contrast to a future of health-care rationing and unbearably high taxes. We lift the crushing burden of debt, repair the safety net, make America's tax system fair and competitive, and ensure that our health and retirement programs have a strong and lasting future.
From birth, when babies’ fingers instinctively cling to those of adults, their bodies and brains seek an intimate connection—a bond made possible by empathy, the remarkable ability to love and to share the feelings of others.
In this unforgettable book, award-winning science journalist Maia Szalavitz and renowned child-psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry explain how empathy develops, why it is essential both to human happiness and for a functional society, and how it is threatened in the modern world.
The anterior cingulate cortex is believed to play a role in helping people cope with and sort through uncertainty and conflicting information, as well as affecting their levels of emotional awareness and empathy.
The "conservative" participants, on the other hand, had a higher volume of gray matter in the right amygdala region -- which is thought to play a big role in identifying and responding to threats. ..And, in turn, does that make them more likely to see the world in terms of threats and more absolute answers, with less tolerance for conflicting explanations or information, and less ability to feel empathy?
In The Age of Empathy, Frans de Waal answers some questions about male vs. female empathy that I had been wondering about. People everywhere perceive a considerable difference between male and female empathy:
"Cross-cultural studies confirm that women everywhere are considered more empathetic than men, so much so that the claim has been made the the female (but not male) brain is hardwired for empathy."
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