A few facts about empathy
Empathy can be emotional , when you internally live, feel what another is feeling, and cognitive , when you remember yourself in a similar situation, your emotions and feelings, and can assume what this person is feeling now.
Empathy does not make you kind, understanding and accepting. Rather, it makes you an adult, takes off your rose-colored glasses. You understand the feelings of other people and how you feel about these feelings, how you yourself feel about this topic.
And finally, empathy boosts emotional intelligence. Reading books on emotional intelligence is great, but practicing it is even better.
There are 3 positions regarding empathy.
1. “Empathy is an important mechanism, I use it/try to use it.”
This position is close to me.
2. “What kind of empathy, what am I doing to them, mom? Am I going to ask how they are doing? I give them a task, and they must carry it out. What happens there doesn’t concern me at all.”
With this position, it is natural for us to set a task and leave. People are perceived as resources. The position is closer to me when you see people as people and know how to interact with them and highlight what is important to them, what motivates them. Where you need to soften the “ardor” a little, and where, on the contrary, you need to “ignite”. Then the work can be done more efficiently and effectively.
3. “Actually, there are people without empathy. Maybe I am like that. Maybe I don't have empathy."
Of course, there are people with very low empathy. But these are people with a certain type of disorder that is rarely encountered in everyday life. Therefore, if you take the position that you do not have empathy, perhaps it is poorly developed in you, insufficiently.
Or, perhaps, you don’t want to turn it on, you’re experiencing difficulties. You don't want to handle it, because then you will feel what the other person feels, think about him. And you will have to ask him about something, interact... And this is so “boring, difficult... it’s better to set a task and leave.”
Blocked person
They may not notice or understand that the person next to them is experiencing depression, for example. Most often, these are down-to-earth people with a superficial, stereotyped perception of the world. They don't know how to actively listen. The main thing for them is to speak out themselves. Thus, they fill the space with various noises in order to avoid frank conversations, because they are afraid of them or do not understand anything about them. That is, a person is blocked from showing empathy - the ability to understand what is happening to his loved one and to empathize.
Most often, such a person was brought up in a family where the parents were also deaf to him.
For example, one of my friends’ father was a despotic man who only drilled his children, hoping to raise them to be stoics in his own image, while any emotional conversations were not encouraged and were considered a sign of weakness. This friend's mother also did not know how to listen. When her son approached her to tell her something, she always interrupted him and began to jabber without listening to the end.
Active listening as a tool for improving empathy
Active, or empathic, listening helps you build a dialogue and be with the person in the context of what is happening to them. To do this, it is very important to ask your interlocutor questions.
One of the problems with feedback : we often give feedback, but do not allow the person to tell us something in response. We do not ask what is happening to him, how it is happening, why this task was done this way, why such mistakes were made. The feedback error prevents active listening from happening. With active listening, you ask questions, participate in a dialogue with the person, and try to understand what motivated them in a given situation.
A very important element of active listening is being open to the person . It is worth removing everything unnecessary and being present with the person in the dialogue that is currently taking place.
The usual story is to come to a one to one with an employee with a laptop, a phone, a mug of coffee or an energy drink, arrange everything around you on the table and at the same time type something else without looking at it. “Well, what did you mess up there? What was the problem?" And in this, of course, there is no active listening, because we are absolutely distancing ourselves. We fenced ourselves off with everything we could, and don’t even turn to the person who is sitting somewhere there.
When I say this, I constantly hear in response: “So what’s wrong? Well, I got distracted, but they wrote to me! I’m a team leader, I need to be in the process.” No, guys. At one to one, when you take feedback from an employee on what and how the project is going, and at the same time you are absent because you are answering the email of the technical director, you fall out of this relationship and can really miss something important.
The next point is to listen in order to hear what the person is saying, and not to distort it with your conjectures and your previous experience of interacting with him. Don't remember everything from the Nativity of Christ. He made a mistake today, and when he first arrived, he made a mistake, and at his last job, I know, he made the same mistake. And now I interact with him and I know that he will make this mistake again, because he is lazy, a parasite, etc.
No! When we are in active listening, we are present, as psychologists say, here and now. We perceive what the person is telling us, we try to hear his current motivation, his current story.
Here they may object to me, say: “Well, what if he’s really lazy? I know he’s lazy, he made the same mistake last time, and it’s because he’s like this.” OK! He may be lazy. And you can look at this deeper and ask him questions: why is he lazy to do this task? What's going on with him here? Perhaps the task is not interesting to him. Or he doesn't know how to solve it. Perhaps, in order to resolve it, he needs interaction with a team member with whom he has a hidden or open conflict. Perhaps he has burnout that you did not notice; When a person is at the stage of burnout, he can actually put off tasks, withdraw himself from them, because he is tired and can no longer do it. To find out, he needs to ask questions, discarding your past negative experiences, and be with him here and now. In a word, you need to learn to listen and perceive what a person says .
I don't understand how you feel because I've been through it myself. No, there is no mistake in this phrase. It shows that we lack empathy for people facing problems we know. An old, cruel Indian tradition tells a young wife to leave her parents' house and move into her husband's house. She is cruel because often the mother-in-law treats this woman like a servant. One may wonder where such hostility comes from, because once upon a time the husband’s mother herself found herself in the same situation, having found herself in a new home, and was herself persecuted by her mother-in-law, who in her youth... and so on, and so on. Shouldn't it be exactly the opposite? A mother-in-law who survived hell could surround a young girl with care and love. But this happens extremely rarely. You are returning to work from maternity leave. Sleepless nights, new responsibilities, doubts, longing for the child. Do you remember that five years ago the boss went through the same thing. You go to her, hoping that she will understand you. Don't be surprised if she ignores you. Although intuition suggests that we can best be understood by a person who was once in a similar situation. A group of 112 people were asked which teacher would be more understanding of a teenager who was being bullied by classmates: one who had experienced it in the past, or one who was fine. 99 people answered that it was the first. So it seems to us. The question was asked by a team of researchers from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. However, scientists knew in advance that intuition in this case would fail us.
Focus.pl 09/12/2015 The Atlantic 09/27/2020 In fact, the opposite is true. “If you've been through some kind of adversity, you may not be able to show understanding to someone who is currently facing the same problem,” says Rachel Rattan of the Kellogg School of Management. Indifference will be stronger the worse the other person copes with the problem. So it’s more appropriate to talk about maternal problems to a childless colleague. Scientists have tested this in many experiments. The first was held during a competition in jumping into the icy water of the American Lake Michigan. Participants in the experiment were asked to fill out a questionnaire: one group before jumping into the water, and the second a few days later. The questionnaire told the story of Pat, who was also going to jump, but at the last moment he refused because he was too cold. Participants had to indicate how much they understood this decision and how much they condemned it. Those who responded before their own jump were much more likely to be sympathetic to Pat’s decision than those who had already been in the water. The latter were much more cruel in their assessments and condemned the young man’s action. Maybe the lack of empathy was due to the fact that in the end, jumping into icy water turned out to be great entertainment, and in more serious life situations we are still able to show empathy? To test this, the same group of researchers conducted another experiment. This time, 200 people read the story of an unemployed man who could not find a job and began selling drugs to earn a living. The subjects had to answer the question how much they understood this man. The answers again diverged from intuitive assumptions. Those who were once unemployed condemned the hero of the story, and those who had never encountered such a situation or were unemployed at the time of the experiment showed sympathy. The most serious problem teenagers face is peer harassment. Will we better understand the feelings of a victim if we ourselves have lived through a similar experience? Scientists at the Kellogg School of Management and the Wharton School of Business asked this question in an online survey to a group of 300 people. They were given a story about a bullied teenager: in one version, he successfully got rid of the bullying, in another, he did not. Victims of harassment, as opposed to those who had never experienced such a situation, had a better understanding of a teenager who had overcome problems. Interestingly, these same people were least sympathetic to the victim who did not know how to cope with the situation. What is the reason for such heartlessness? According to one of the study's authors, Loran Nordgren, people forget what feelings and emotions they experienced when they struggled with a problem in the past. They know that it was hard and unpleasant, but they are not able to remember their feelings. If they managed to overcome the vicissitudes of fate, they feel that the situation was some kind of life challenge that needed to be overcome. Therefore, they show much less empathy for someone who is currently struggling with a similar problem. In psychology, this phenomenon is called the “empathy gap”. The first to describe this phenomenon was George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon University. We not only cannot assess how another person feels in a particular situation, but we even have difficulty assessing our own future emotions. Levenshtein asked the experiment participants how much money they wanted to receive for participating in an experiment during which they would have to put their hand in ice water. Those who have done this recently have demanded the most. Fewer are those who were in such a situation some time ago. The smallest amount was given by people who had never done anything like this. However, we still understand our own emotions better than the feelings of others. In another experiment, participants were asked how willing they were to perform a dance in front of an audience, on a scale of 1 to 11. Then they were asked how willing other people were to do this. People rated their own courage much lower. When we imagine ourselves dancing on stage, we feel shame and fear of failure. We can no longer understand what other people who do the same experience experience.
We only show empathy when we ourselves are currently experiencing similar problems. Levenshtein gathered the experiment participants in the gym and divided them into two groups. The first did intense exercise for 20 minutes, and the second rested. Then everyone was asked to read a short story about people who were lost in the forest without water or food. The scientist asked what would torment these people more: hunger or thirst? Participants who exercised and were themselves thirsty said they would miss drinking water. The second group talked more often about food. Most of us would agree that we do behave this way. And this, unfortunately, turns into negative consequences. Many studies show that cancer patients and hospitalized children often receive insufficient pain medications. Nurses and doctors underestimate how much pain they feel. Even as parents who want only the best for our children, we become victims of our own psyche. Kristin Lagattuta of the University of California, Davis, has shown that parents fail to understand their children's emotional needs. Most often, they underestimate their fears and anxieties. Parents think that if everything is fine with them, then their children have no problems either. They don’t remember how they themselves were afraid of the dark or the answer at the blackboard. Unfortunately, Laurent Nordgren notes, therapy and psychological training programs are usually based on the idea that the best support can come from a person who has gone through similar experiences. People who broke up with her talk about how to overcome addiction, the young employee’s mentor becomes her boss, who managed to break through the glass ceiling during her career. Is it possible to develop empathy despite all this? Nordgren advises us to distract ourselves from our own experience, stop remembering how we ourselves felt while in a particular situation, and try to imagine what another person is experiencing. Taking a broader view of the problem can help, for example by thinking about how most new parents returning to work cope. It's worth looking into statistics and research. Our own experience is a single case against the backdrop of thousands of others, so it cannot be generalized and transferred to others. Each person feels differently.
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
Types of empathy
Specialists studying this topic use a classification in their work that determines the form and degree of empathic abilities. The classification includes five types of empathy.
♦ Emotional empathy is the case when a person connects to the feelings of another person and begins to perceive them as his own.
♦ Cognitive empathy – based on intellectual processes (comparison, generalization, analogies, etc.). In this case, a person tries to understand another by analyzing his actions and behavior.
♦ Predictive empathy – a person’s ability to predict the affective reactions of an interlocutor in a specific situation.
Special forms of empathy include empathy and sympathy.
Empathy, sympathy and compassion
If you notice another person's feelings, it helps you understand him better. To empathize and sympathize means to listen with your heart to the state of another person, to his mood. In communication, it is very important to understand both your feelings and the feelings of other people. It is very important to be able to feel with another person - to sympathize. To sympathize is to touch the feelings of another person, to his inner world. Empathy
Empathy is understanding and sharing the emotions, affects and feelings of another person. empathy is a hidden communication process without public expression. Empathy is comprehension of the emotional state, penetration and feeling into the experiences of another person. There are:
- 1. Emotional empathy - based on the mechanisms of projection and imitation of the motor and affective reactions of another
- 2. Cognitive empathy – based on intellectual processes – comparison, analogy, etc.;
- 3. Predicative empathy - manifested as the ability to predict the affective reactions of another in specific situations.
How special forms of empathy are distinguished:
- 1. Empathy - experiencing the same emotional states that another experiences through identification with him;
- 2. Sympathy – experiencing one’s own emotional states in connection with the feelings of another.
Empathic ability usually increases with the depth of life experience; Empathy is more easily realized when subjects have similar behavioral and emotional reactions. William Blake wrote about this in his poem “On the Sorrow of Your Neighbor.” Don’t you feel sorry for your neighbors, If sadness oppresses you? Knowing his neighbor's torment, who does not seek relief? Is it possible, seeing streams of tears, not to add your own to them? If your son groans heavily? And what mother can not suffer together with the baby? As we age, our ability to empathize decreases. Egocentrism interferes with the formation of empathy. Adler believed that empathy is an innate sense of community. A living being has an involuntary reaction to the painful emotional states of another and to the life situation in which the other finds itself. According to some data, women are more prone to empathy than men. Forms of empathic behavior - empathy and sympathy - manifest themselves differently in children of different ages and genders. Empathy is more typical for younger schoolchildren, and compassion - for teenagers. Empathy for adults and animals is more often observed in boys, and sympathy - in girls **
Empathy and sympathy
An important personality trait that predisposes to selfless behavior is empathy and compassion.
Empathy
- this is the subject’s experience of the same feelings that another experiences.
Empathy can develop into compassion and a desire to help.
Help
is sacrificial in nature, it is when a person “tears himself away.”
S. Schwartz (1977) developed a model of selfless help.
1. Stage of actualization - perception of need and responsibility:
- awareness that a person is in a state of need;
- understanding that there are actions that can alleviate his situation;
2. Stage of obligation – construction of norms and the emergence of the experience of moral obligation:
— activation of previously existing or situation-defined personal norms.
3. Protection stage – consideration of potential reactions, their assessment and reassessment:
— determination of costs and assessment of possible outcomes;
- redefinition of the situation and its reassessment through negation: the state of need (its reality and seriousness), responsibility for one’s action, the relevance of previously updated norms;
— repetition of the previous stages, taking into account the revaluations made.
4. Reaction stage:
- action or inaction.
With age, the ability to empathize and sympathize decreases. A personality trait such as egocentrism, as well as the psychological discomfort experienced (anxiety, aggressiveness, depression, neuroticism) interferes with the formation and manifestation of empathy and sympathy.
Highly empathetic individuals are characterized by gentleness, goodwill, and sociability, while low empathetic individuals are characterized by isolation and hostility.
Sympathy is a responsive, sympathetic attitude towards the experiences and misfortunes of another (expression of regret, condolences, etc.).
Sympathy.
1. Literally - in accordance with the Greek roots (sim and pato), feeling together with another. Hence, a set of circumstances in which a person shares the feelings of another. Generally, due to its original Greek usage, the term was used only in reference to painful and unpleasant emotions.
2. A feeling of compassion or understanding that allows a person to interpret or justify the actions and/or feelings of another.
“Empathy – 1. the appearance of the same emotions in different people under the same circumstances. More often in this meaning the term is used in relation to negative emotions.
2. compassion caused by the ability to imagine oneself in the position of an unhappy person” (V.A. Zhmurov).
Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s negative emotions that arise in the face of life’s difficulties.
There are two sides to empathy. On the one hand, with your sympathy you tell the person that you care about him, thereby providing him with support; on the other hand, you reinforce his disorder, his negative emotions, in fact, you accustom him to problematic behavior.
Unfortunately, refusal of sympathy is often regarded as a conflict generator, and an upset person, having not received sympathy, feels the moral right to make counter-accusations of indifference.
Types of sympathy
Sympathy comes in different forms:
- I can, together with a person, in unison with him, whine about how bad everything is and that’s the end of it (more precisely, this is called compassion).
- I can provide support, give warmth, care and help with this too.
Sympathy is right and sympathy is inappropriate
Sympathy is sometimes needed when a person is at a loss, is very upset, or has something hurting somewhere.
But not all sympathy is useful. Like any other action, sympathy can have two directions: because the person felt bad or to make him feel good. If I want to raise a strong person next to me, someday I can sympathize with him, share his experiences between us in order to give him the strength to cope with his difficulties. If this happens rarely, it’s normal: it’s hard and painful for everyone. If a person abuses sympathy and, instead of adding strength, moves even more into the position of a victim, spreading his paws and expecting that I will definitely do everything for him, because I sympathize - such sympathy is inappropriate and at the wrong time.
Sympathy must be with the mind: sympathy without the mind often leads to irresponsible help: see illustrations of irresponsible help.
Sympathy at the wrong time is not help, but a provocation to the position of the Victim. A confident lack of sympathy for erroneous behavior is one of the ways a person switches to new, more appropriate behavior. Perhaps they will be angry with you for your hard-heartedness, but you can really help a person.
Empathy and compassion
Victims (and Victims) have compassion.
They resonate with someone else’s “I feel bad” and suffer together. But empathy is different. Sympathy sometimes also manifests itself in leaving a person alone with his experiences. *** Author: N.I. Kozlov Compassion Compassion is the ability to feel someone else’s pain as if it were your own, and without hesitation to help your neighbor.
Compassion is ours, Russian, but it’s always difficult to understand our own. The Russian mentality is amazing: caring for health is not a value in Russian culture, sports are strange, getting sick is normal, but it is categorically not allowed to abandon (leave from) those who did not care about their health and, as a result, became essentially helpless disabled people. Why? Because he is suffering now. And we have compassion...
Anyone who has worked with codependency knows what a sore subject this is: “How can he live without me?” - and the woman lives for years with an alcoholic, supporting him in alcoholism and depriving herself of a normal life. Because he will feel very bad without her, because he will suffer, and she feels it, she is not insensitive, she has a feeling of compassion. Compassion is the ringing note of our culture, which has given us a lot of beautiful and kind things, and at the same time brought us a lot of pain and suffering.
Compassion is a way of support characteristic of female culture. In a male culture, compassion is not accepted or demanded.
By raising compassion in children, we get two different results. On the one hand, we want to prevent indifference and cruelty in children: we believe that, feeling the pain of another, a child is unlikely to hurt him. There is little confidence in success here: sentimental people are no less cruel than non-sentimental people. On the other hand, we actually reinforce the other person’s disorder, his negative emotions, and essentially teach him to engage in problematic behavior.
Men are also disinclined to be compassionate for another reason: in male culture, it is customary to think rather than feel, and doing something “without thinking” is considered a bad habit. In a situation where help is needed, the Ministry of Emergency Situations employees organize and provide assistance, but they do it thoughtfully, having a plan and calculating the effectiveness of certain measures.
If compassionate women get involved in helping, doing real help, this is useful and necessary. If compassionate women make sad faces, cry and distract from helping, they are only serving themselves and their feelings, but are hindering the cause.
Compassion is not given by love for people, but by a surrogate of love. Indifference is overcome not by compassion, but by general personal development, when a person goes beyond just his own interests, learns to think not only about himself and knows how to care for people in a responsible way.
A tendency to experience compassion more often characterizes people with a low level of personal development. These people are usually from lower social groups and are more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of danger.
When is compassion appropriate and justified? When a person has great grief, he often loses contact with others, and restoring his mental strength is difficult. If you express compassion to him at this time, this will be an appropriate addition, it will provide an opportunity to establish contact with him, and then gradually it will be possible to help him.
Painkillers are not a way to live a normal life, but in medicine they are appropriate. Also, compassion - when a person is very bad, as a temporary measure - compassion is appropriate. Making compassion the norm of life, living with compassion, is not entirely adequate.
