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Empathy has always been a critical skill for leaders, but it is taking on a new level of meaning and priority. Far from a soft approach it can drive significant business results.
You always knew demonstrating empathy is positive for people, but new research demonstrates its importance for everything from innovation to retention. Great leadership requires a fine mix of all kinds of skills to create the conditions for engagement, happiness and performance, and empathy tops the list of what leaders must get right.
The Effects of Stress
The reason empathy is so necessary is that people are experiencing multiple kinds of stress, and data suggests it is affected by the pandemic—and the ways our lives and our work have been turned upside down….Continue reading…
By: Tracy Brower
Source: Empathy Is The Most Important Leadership Skill According To Research
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Compassion and sympathy are terms associated with empathy. A person feels compassion when they notice others are in need, and this feeling motivates that person to help. Like empathy, compassion has a wide range of definitions and purported facets (which overlap with some definitions of empathy). Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need.
Some include in sympathy an empathic concern for another person, and the wish to see them better off or happier. Empathy is also related to pity and emotional contagion. One feels pity towards others who might be in trouble or in need of help. This feeling is 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.
Alexithymia describes a deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing one’s own emotions (unlike empathy which is about someone else’s emotions). Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy, is the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another’s mental states. Our ability to empathize emotionally is based on emotional contagion.
Being affected by another’s emotional or arousal state. Affective empathy can be subdivided into the following scales: Empathic concern: sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering. Personal distress: feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another’s suffering. There is no consensus regarding whether personal distress is a form of empathy or instead is something distinct from empathy.
There may be a developmental aspect to this subdivision. Infants respond to the distress of others by getting distressed themselves; only when they are two years old do they start to respond in other-oriented ways: trying to help, comfort, and share. Affective mentalizing: uses clues like body language, facial expressions, knowledge about the other’s beliefs & situation, and context to understand more about what one is empathizing with.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state. The terms empathic accuracy, social cognition, perspective-taking, theory of mind, and mentalizing are often used synonymously, but due to a lack of studies comparing theory of mind with types of empathy, it is unclear whether these are equivalent. Although measures of cognitive empathy include self-report questionnaires and behavioral measures, a 2019 meta-analysis found only a negligible association between self-report and behavioral measures, suggesting that people are generally not able to accurately assess their own cognitive empathy abilities.
Cognitive empathy can be subdivided into the following scales: Perspective-taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt others’ psychological perspectives. Fantasy: the tendency to identify with fictional characters. Tactical (or strategic) empathy: the deliberate use of perspective-taking to achieve certain desired ends. Emotion regulation: a damper on the emotional contagion process that allows you to empathize without being overwhelmed by the emotion you are empathizing with.
The scientific community has not coalesced around a precise definition of these constructs, but there is consensus about this distinction.Affective and cognitive empathy are also independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another’s perspective.
Additional constructs that have been proposed include behavioral empathy (which governs how one chooses to respond to feelings of empathy), social empathy (in which the empathetic person integrates their understanding of broader social dynamics into their empathetic modeling), and ecological empathy (which encompasses empathy directed towards the natural world).
Contemporary neuroscience offers insights into the neural basis of the mind’s ability to understand and process emotion. Studies of mirror neurons attempt to measure the neural basis for human mind-reading and emotion-sharing abilities and thereby to explain the basis of the empathy reaction. People who score high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems.
Empathy is a spontaneous sharing of affect, provoked by witnessing and sympathizing with another’s emotional state. The empathic person mirrors or mimics the emotional response they would expect to feel if they were in the other person’s place. Unlike personal distress, empathy is not characterized by aversion to another’s emotional response.
This distinction is vital because empathy is associated with the moral emotion sympathy, or empathic concern, and consequently also prosocial or altruistic action. A person empathizes by feeling what they believe to be the emotions of another, which makes empathy both affective and cognitive. For social beings, negotiating interpersonal decisions is as important to survival as being able to navigate the physical landscape.
Meta-analysis of fMRI studies of empathy confirms that different brain areas are activated during affective-perceptual empathy than during cognitive-evaluative empathy. Affective empathy is correlated with increased activity in the insula while cognitive empathy is correlated with activity in the mid cingulate cortex and adjacent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
A study with patients who experienced different types of brain damage confirmed the distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy. Specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy.
Borderline personality disorder is characterized by extensive behavioral and interpersonal difficulties that arise from emotional and cognitive dysfunction. Dysfunctional social and interpersonal behavior plays a role in the emotionally intense way people with borderline personality disorder react. While individuals with borderline personality disorder may show their emotions excessively, their ability to feel empathy is a topic of much dispute with contradictory findings.
Some studies assert impairments in cognitive empathy in BPD patients yet no affective empathy impairments, while other studies have found impairments in both affective and cognitive empathy. Fluctuating empathy, fluctuating between normal range of empathy, reduced sense of empathy, and a lack of empathy has been noted to be present in BPD patients in multiple studies.
Although more research is needed to determine its prevalence, although it is believed to be at least not uncommon and may be a very common phenomenon. BPD is a very heterogenous disorder, with symptoms including empathy ranging wildly between patients.
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“Regulating the costs of empathy: the price of being human”
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Response to Smith’s Letter to the Editor “Emotional Empathy in Autism Spectrum Conditions
“The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal
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