Why cultivate empathy? Empathy Library. Six Habits of Highly Empathic People. If you think you’re hearing the word “empathy” everywhere, you’re right.
It’s now on the lips of scientists and business leaders, education experts and political activists. How to Listen Between the Lines: Anna Deavere Smith on the Art of Listening in a Culture of Speaking. By Maria Popova “Some people use language as a mask.
And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.” In his exquisite taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence, Paul Goodman included “the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear.” And yet so often we think of listening as merely an idle pause amid the monologue of making ourselves clear. Hardly anyone has done more to advance the art of listening in a culture of speaking more than artist, actor, playwright, educator, and enchantress of words Anna Deavere Smith, founder and director of Harvard’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.
Smith writes: The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. Our ability to create reality, by creating fictions with language, should not be abused. Daniel Goleman on the different kinds of empathy. Six Habits of Highly Empathic People. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Andy Dean Photography This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center.
If you think you’re hearing the word “empathy” everywhere, you’re right. It’s now on the lips of scientists and business leaders, education experts and political activists. But there is a vital question that few people ask: How can I expand my own empathic potential? Empathy is not just a way to extend the boundaries of your moral universe. But what is empathy? The big buzz about empathy stems from a revolutionary shift in the science of how we understand human nature.
Over the last decade, neuroscientists have identified a 10-section “empathy circuit” in our brains which, if damaged, can curtail our ability to understand what other people are feeling. The empathy deficit. Young Americans today live in a world of endless connections and up-to-the-minute information on one another, constantly updating friends, loved ones, and total strangers — “Quiz tomorrow...gotta study!”
— about the minutiae of their young, wired lives. And there are signs that Generation Wi-Fi is also interested in connecting with people, like, face-to-face, in person. The percentage of high school seniors who volunteer has been rising for two decades. But new research suggests that behind all this communication and connectedness, something is missing. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with the steepest decline coming in the last 10 years.
According to the findings, today’s students are generally less likely to describe themselves as “soft-hearted” or to have “tender, concerned feelings” for others. Such studies have obvious flaws. Are You Suffering From Empathy Deficit Disorder? It's possible that you're among the large number of people who suffer from EDD.
No, that isn't a typo -- I don't mean ADD or ED. It's EDD, which stands for " Empathy Deficit Disorder. " I made it up, so you won't find it listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Empathic people are natural targets for sociopaths - protect yourself. © Fotolia Olly The empathy trap: therapists and counselors almost by definition are empathic, to facilitate clients' recovery - but this quality can mean those carers are targets for sociopaths, aided by what Dr Jane & Tim McGregor call "apaths".
The first UK article on this cruel sport shows how to identify and thus avoid it. People targeted by a sociopath often respond with self-deprecating comments like "I was stupid", "what was I thinking" of "I should've listened to my gut instinct". But being involved with a sociopath is like being brainwashed.
The sociopath's superficial charm is usually the means by which s/he conditions people. On initial contact, a sociopath will often test other people's empathy, so questions geared towards discovering if you are highly empathic or not should ring alarm bells. Sociopaths make up 25% of the prison population, committing over twice as many aggressive acts as other criminals. New Study Links Social Anxiety To Being An Empath. Written by Amateo Ra| Have you ever felt anxious being around other people?
For some, the feelings of social anxiety can be so intense that someone can feel totally paralyzed just to be out in public. Could social anxiety’s hidden link to empathy give us a greater understanding into the lives of those affected? Social anxiety can often be an extremely confusing, challenging and even interesting experience for many. Fear is the primary feeling generally attributed to social anxiety, and those who experience it often can’t seem to discover the origin of the social anxiety within themselves.