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While most school children are educated in academic subjects such as math and English, there are other important life lessons that don’t always make it into the curriculum. Having empathy is a learned skill that comes with listening and understanding others.
That’s why Danish schools decided to introduce mandatory empathy classes in 1993, as a way to teach children aged 6-16 how to be kind. For one hour each week, during “Klassens tid,” students are invited to talk about problems they have been experiencing.
During this time, the entire class works together to find a solution. This teaches children to respect the feelings of others without judgement. The empathy classes are believed to help them strengthen their relationships, sympathize with others’ problems, and even prevent bullying…Continue reading….
By Emma Taggart
Source: In Danish Schools, Empathy Is Taught to Students Aged 6 to 16
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Investigators into the social response to natural disasters researched the characteristics associated with individuals who help victims. Researchers found that cognitive empathy, rather than emotional empathy, predicted helping behavior towards victims.
Taking on the perspectives of others (cognitive empathy) may allow these helpers to better empathize with victims without as much discomfort, whereas sharing the emotions of the victims (emotional empathy) can cause emotional distress, helplessness, and victim-blaming, and may lead to avoidance rather than helping.
Individuals who expressed concern for the vulnerable (i.e. affective empathy) were more willing to accept the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures that create distress. People who understand how empathic feelings evoke altruistic motivation may adopt strategies for suppressing or avoiding such feelings.
Such numbing, or loss of the capacity to feel empathy for clients, is a possible factor in the experience of burnout among case workers in helping professions. People can better cognitively control their actions the more they understand how altruistic behavior emerges, whether it is from minimizing sadness or the arousal of mirror neurons.
Empathy-induced altruism may not always produce pro-social effects. For example, it could lead one to exert oneself on behalf of those for whom empathy is felt at the expense of other potential pro-social goals, thus inducing a type of bias. Researchers suggest that individuals are willing to act against the greater collective good or to violate their own moral principles of fairness and justice if doing so will benefit a person for whom empathy is felt.
Empathy-based socialization differs from inhibition of egoistic impulses through shaping, modeling, and internalized guilt. Therapeutic programs to foster altruistic impulses by encouraging perspective-taking and empathic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, especially in the long-term.
Empathy-induced altruism can improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups, racial attitudes, and actions toward people with AIDS, the homeless, and convicts. Such resulting altruism also increases cooperation in competitive situations.
Empathy is good at prompting prosocial behaviors that are informal, unplanned, and directed at someone who is immediately present, but is not as good at prompting more abstractly-considered, long-term prosocial behavior.
Empathy can not only be a precursor to one’s own helpful acts, but can also be a way of inviting help from others. If you mimic the posture, facial expressions, and vocal style of someone you are with, you can thereby encourage them to help you and to form a favorable opinion of you.
People who score more highly on empathy questionnaires also report having more positive relationships with other people. They report “greater life satisfaction, more positive affect, less negative affect, and less depressive symptoms than people who had lower empathy scores”.Children who exhibit more empathy also have more resilience.
Empathy can be an aesthetic pleasure, “by widening the scope of that which we experience… by providing us with more than one perspective of a situation, thereby multiplying our experience… and… by intensifying that experience.” People can use empathy to borrow joy from the joy of children discovering things or playing make-believe, or to satisfy our curiosity about other people’s lives.
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fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains”.
Case Western Reserve University “Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa: Brain physiology limits simultaneous use of bothnetworks”.
What’s so special about mirror neurons? “Do mirror neurons give us empathy?”. Greater Good Magazine.
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