The Art of Social Excellence by Henrik Fexeus

Author:Henrik Fexeus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Nonverbal, Nonemotional Empathy

Nonverbal empathy is when your empathic response is based on nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions and other subconscious displays of emotions. It can help you avoid relying on stereotypes (cultural or otherwise) when your experiences are too different from those of the person you’re speaking to.

If someone is passionate about jazz music and likes to hang out in art galleries, and you yourself are more of a Mamma Mia! kind of person, there is a danger of “filtering” that other person’s behavior through whatever stereotype might be conjured up by those preferences. Nonverbal empathy will help you avoid doing this.

As you know, your mirror neurons will make sure to activate your own muscles for the same gesture or facial expression that you’re observing. Sometimes this mirroring is visually evident, and sometimes it isn’t. But it happens either way. This is why babies that are just a few weeks old can already mimic facial expressions. It’s an automatic process and one of the first methods we use to learn. When the expression we observe results from an emotion, our mirror neurons will also help us understand what the other person is feeling, because the muscular mirroring produces the same emotion in us, although it is weaker. It’s even the case that if a researcher blocks out your ability to mimic expressions, by asking you to bite a pencil to force you into a smile, or by injecting Botox into your forehead to keep the muscles in the top of your face from moving, your ability to understand the feelings of others will be weakened.2

Empathic mirroring is a sensitive instrument. All it takes for the personal connection to weaken is a break in eye contact. If my hand is bleeding and I grimace while looking you in the eyes, you’ll grimace, too. But if my hand is bleeding and I grimace but don’t look you in the eyes, your empathy won’t be activated to the same degree. It’s also been shown that our ability to understand the thoughts of another is drastically diminished when we’re thinking of other things, such as the person’s physical appearance. This could be one reason why people who are wearing revealing clothing often feel that others don’t take them seriously. It’s a purely neurological mechanism: when we look at scantily clad human beings (especially the kind that we are sexually interested in), areas in the brain that process objects and tools are triggered, rather than the areas that process understanding of the thoughts of others.

Basically, empathy requires presence of mind. However, this doesn’t mean you should always attempt to perform an in-depth analysis of another person. It’s often a better idea not to bother. In these situations, you can use your nonverbal understanding instead: observe the other person’s nonverbal signals, and if you’re uncertain about your interpretation, ask what the signals mean.

“When you speak in short sentences and don’t look me in the eyes, it makes me think you’re annoyed with me. Are you?”

“When you slump your shoulders like that it makes you look depressed, at least in my eyes.

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.