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Having spent over 12 years in technology and program management, I’ve witnessed how introducing tools allows business tasks and consumer touch points to become more efficient.
Despite all the progress in this space, human empathy is an important element that no algorithm or app can emulate. During the Covid-19 pandemic, telehealth emerged as a crucial technology bridging the physical gap between patients and healthcare providers….Continue reading….
By: Parul Batra
Source: Empathy In The Age Of Automation: Why Human Touch Still Matters
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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.
Athough 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).
In addition, Fritz Breithaupt emphasizes the importance of empathy suppression mechanisms in healthy empathy. Efforts to measure empathy go back to at least the mid-twentieth century. Researchers approach the measurement of empathy from a number of perspectives. Behavioral measures normally involve raters assessing the presence or absence of certain behaviors in the subjects they are monitoring.
Both verbal and non-verbal behaviors have been captured on video by experimenters. Other experimenters required subjects to comment upon their own feelings and behaviors, or those of other people involved in the experiment, as indirect ways of signaling their level of empathic functioning to the raters. Physiological responses tend to be captured by elaborate electronic equipment that has been physically connected to the subject’s body.
Researchers then draw inferences about that person’s empathic reactions from the electronic readings produced. Bodily or “somatic” measures can be seen as behavioral measures at a micro level. They measure empathy through facial and other non-verbally expressed reactions. Such changes are presumably underpinned by physiological changes brought about by some form of “emotional contagion” or mirroring.
These reactions, while they appear to reflect the internal emotional state of the empathizer, could also, if the stimulus incident lasted more than the briefest period, reflect the results of emotional reactions based on cognitions associated with role-taking (“if I were him I would feel…”). Picture or puppet-story indices for empathy have been adopted to enable even very young, pre-school subjects to respond without needing to read questions and write answers.
Dependent variables (variables that are monitored for any change by the experimenter) for younger subjects have included self reporting on a seven-point smiley face scale and filmed facial reactions. In some experiments, subjects are required to watch video scenarios (either staged or authentic) and to make written responses which are then assessed for their levels of empathy; scenarios are sometimes also depicted in printed form.
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