empathy

Empathy

Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own. You can imagine yourself in their place in order to understand what they are feeling or experiencing.

                   It also is the ability to feel and share another person's emotions. Some believe that empathy involves the ability to match another's emotions, while others believe that empathy involves being tenderhearted toward another person.Having empathy can include having the understanding that there are many factors that go into decision making and cognitive thought processes. Past experiences have an influence on the decision making of today. Understanding this allows a person to have empathy for individuals who sometimes make illogical decisions to a problem that most individuals would respond with an obvious response. Broken homes, childhood trauma, lack of parenting and many others factors can influence the connections in the brain which a person uses to make decisions in the future.Empathy is distinct also from pity and emotional contagion. Pity is feeling that another is in trouble and in need of help as they cannot fix their problems themselves, often described as "feeling sorry" for someone. Emotional contagion is when a person imitatively "catches" the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognizing this is happening.

                  

             Since empathy involves understanding the emotional states of other people, the way it is characterized is derived from the way emotions themselves are characterized. If, for example, emotions are taken to be centrally characterized by bodily feelings, then grasping the bodily feelings of another will be central to empathy. On the other hand, if emotions are more centrally characterized by a combination of beliefs and desires, then grasping these beliefs and desires will be more essential to empathy. The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated imaginative process. However, the basic capacity to recognize emotions is probably innate and may be achieved unconsciously. Yet it can be trained and achieved with various degrees of intensity or accuracy.

                  

             Empathy necessarily has a "more or less" quality. The paradigm case of an emphatic interaction, however, involves a person communicating an accurate recognition of the significance of another person's ongoing intentional actions, associated emotional states, and personal characteristics in a manner that the recognized person can tolerate. Recognition that are both accurate and tolerable are central features of empathy.

Can You Be Too Empathetic?

Unlike sympathy, which simply means feeling sadness or pity for someone who is undergoing some type of hardship, empathy promotes selfless compassion and action on behalf of another person or group of people. While this sounds like a positive, highly ethical and well-principled practice, some people believe having too much empathy can be detrimental to one's own well-being and even to the world at large. Too much empathy interferes with rational decision making, causing us to lead with our hearts rather than by our heads, losing the broader picture or long-term consequences of overly empathetic behavior.

I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit - the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us - the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this, when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers; it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.