In school, the many benefits of reading were often preached, and the one that always stuck out to me the most was the argument that reading fiction increases empathy. It makes complete sense: reading fiction exposes you to the narrative, thoughts, feelings and experiences of someone else, real or not.
One story puts you in a battlefield, another puts you in the royal family, another puts you in a dystopian reality, or the Victorian slums, or in a hospital with five days to live, and so on. Reading lets you learn from the experiences of being a different gender, race, sexuality, age, nationality, class, everything.
You explore the never-ending ways in which humans are capable of thinking and navigating the world, and fundamentally, you learn that your beliefs and feelings are not the only existing ones within it. To step outside of your reality and into another’s through fiction deepens a tendency that can be used in real life….Story continues…
Source: The role of literature in unlocking empathy
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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). Studies in animal behavior and neuroscience indicate that empathy is not restricted to humans (however the interpretation of such research depends in part on how expansive a definition of empathy researchers adopt).
Empathy-like behaviors have been observed in primates, both in captivity and in the wild, and in particular in bonobos, perhaps the most empathic primate. One study demonstrated prosocial behavior elicited by empathy in rodents. Rodents demonstrate empathy for cagemates (but not strangers) in pain.
An influential study on the evolution of empathy by Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal discusses a neural perception-action mechanism and postulates a bottom-up model of empathy that ties together all levels,[clarification needed] from state matching to perspective-taking.
University of Chicago neurobiologist Jean Decety agrees that empathy is not exclusive to humans, but that empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings, and that even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care.
Neural circuits involved in empathy and caring include the brainstem, the amygdala, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex. By the age of two, children normally begin to exhibit fundamental behaviors of empathy by having an emotional response that corresponds with another person’s emotional state.
Even earlier, at one year of age, infants have some rudiments of empathy; they understand that, as with their own actions, other people’s actions have goals.Toddlers sometimes comfort others or show concern for them. During their second year, they play games of falsehood or pretend in an effort to fool others.
Such actions require that the child knows what others believe in order that the child can manipulate those beliefs. According to researchers at the University of Chicago who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), children between the ages of seven and twelve, when seeing others being injured, experience brain activity similar that which would occur if the child themself had been injured.
Their findings are consistent with previous fMRI studies of pain empathy with adults, and previous findings that vicarious experiencing, particularly of others’ distress, is hardwired and present early in life. The research found additional areas of the brain, associated with social and moral cognition, were activated when young people saw another person intentionally hurt by somebody, including regions involved in moral reasoning.
Although children are capable of showing some signs of empathy, including attempting to comfort a crying baby, from as early as 18 months to two years, most do not demonstrate a full theory of mind until around the age of four. Theory of mind involves the ability to understand that other people may have beliefs that are different from one’s own, and is thought to involve the cognitive component of empathy.
Children usually can pass false-belief tasks (a test for a theory of mind) around the age of four. It is theorised that people with autism find using a theory of mind to be very difficult (e.g. the Sally–Anne test). Empathic maturity is a cognitive-structural theory developed at the Yale University School of Nursing. It addresses how adults conceive or understand the personhood of patients.
The theory, first applied to nurses and since applied to other professions, postulates three levels of cognitive structures. The third and highest level is a meta-ethical theory of the moral structure of care. Adults who operate with level-III understanding synthesize systems of justice and care-based ethics.
Some research theorizes that environmental factors, such as parenting style and relationships, affect the development of empathy in children. Empathy promotes pro-social relationships and helps mediate aggression. Caroline Tisot studied how environmental factors like parenting style, parent empathy, and prior social experiences affect the development of empathy in young children.
The children studied were asked to complete an effective empathy measure, while the children’s parents completed a questionnaire to assess parenting style and the Balanced Emotional Empathy scale.The study found that certain parenting practices, as opposed to parenting style as a whole, contributed to the development of empathy in children. These practices include encouraging the child to imagine the perspectives of others and teaching the child to reflect on his or her own feelings.
The development of empathy varied based on the gender of the child and parent. Paternal warmth was significantly positively related to empathy in children, especially boys. Maternal warmth was negatively related to empathy in children, especially girls. Empathy may be disrupted due to brain trauma such as stroke. In most cases, empathy is impaired if a lesion or stroke occurs on the right side of the brain.
Damage to the frontal lobe, which is primarily responsible for emotional regulation, can profoundly impact a person’s capacity to experience empathy. People with an acquired brain injury also show lower levels of empathy. More than half of those people with a traumatic brain injury self-report a deficit in their empathic capacity.
empathy”. Online Etymology Dictionary.^ ἐμπάθεια. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project. ^ Jump up to:a b c
Introspection and empath” (PDF). Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences. 7: 25–30. Archived from
Regulating the costs of empathy: the price of being human” (PDF). The Journal of Socio-Economics. 30 (5): 437–52. doi:10.1016/S1053-5357(01)00112-3.
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