Teaching Happiness and Well-Being in Schools, Second edition by Ian Morris

Author:Ian Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472917324
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Empathy

In a short animated video created by the RSA (the Royal Society of Arts), Brené Brown explains some of the main features of empathy. She defines empathy as ‘feeling with people’ and distinguishes it from sympathy, which always maintains a degree of separation between the person in pain and the person sympathising with them; as she says, ‘empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection.’6 Brown suggests that empathy consists of four elements: 1) perspective taking – the ability to see a situation from the perspective of another person; 2) staying out of judgement and accepting the other person’s situation for what it is; 3) recognising the emotional state of the other person and 4) communicating what you have recognised back to the other person. Empathy firstly depends upon the imaginative ability to connect with something inside ourselves to understand what another person is going through and feel it alongside them and, secondly, on the ability to accept and allow the experience of another without trying to change it. Sympathy, on the other hand, tends to involve what Brown calls ‘silver-lining-it’, in other words, trying to impose some kind of positive spin on a painful experience, usually so that the person sympathising can minimise the discomfort of witnessing the emotional turmoil of another person.

Empathy emerges in the first five years of childhood when children have increased opportunity to play with other children. One’s ability to empathize is usually settled by middle childhood.7 The brain is pre-wired to connect us to others through empathy, and this takes place in the right hemisphere, as Iain McGilchrist explains:

When we put ourselves in others’ shoes, we are using the right inferior parietal lobe, and the right lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in inhibiting the automatic tendency to espouse one’s own point of view. In circumstances of right hemisphere activation, subjects are more favourably disposed towards others and more readily convinced by arguments in favour of positions that they have not previously supported.8

Ingenious research conducted by Professor Tania Singer at the University of Zurich shows the brain structures of empathy in action. Singer asked a married couple to get inside an fMRI scanner, which can detect patterns of brain activity. Inside the scanner there was a pad on which both the husband and wife placed one of their palms. The pad generated mildly painful electric shocks. In front of the pad was a screen with an arrow indicating to the couple which of them was to receive the electric shock; if the wife was about to experience pain, her husband would know about it and vice versa. Singer was able to observe the part of the brain that is active not only when we experience pain ourselves, but also when we see the pain of others we care about. As McGilchrist points out, ‘If I imagine myself in pain I use both hemispheres, but your pain is in my right hemisphere.’9

However, there does appear to be a bit of a difference between the sexes when it comes to feeling empathy for people who have wronged us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.