Age Of Empathy Research Articles

Xunzi on Empathy: A Confucian and Biological Naturalist Viewpoint

It is said that a science of empathy is emerging from several disciplinary studies in the West. As a biological naturalist from ancient Confucian school, Xunzi (circa 313BCE-218BCE) shares much of his modern Western counterparts on biological understanding of empathy with three but minor differentiations, that is terminology, approach and the goal of the empathy respectively. The aim of this paper is to provide an elaboration and justification to Xunzi’s Confucian philosophy that he would like to join and expand the empathic progress with the contemporary ‘age of empathy’ or ‘empathic civilization’ proposed by his Western counterparts today.

Mirror Neurons, Psychoanalysis, and the Age of Empathy

AbstractA number of psychoanalysts have become excited about mirror neurons, as they are called by neuroscientists. Mirror neurons have the remarkable property of responding identically to an action I intend as well as an action you intend. The argument of some psychoanalysts is that mirror neurons open a new pathway to understanding the intentions of other. They make possible a new type of empathy, more direct and less mediated by the typical defenses. One result of such a perspective on psychoanalysis is the virtual death of the countertransference. If one has direct empathic contact with another mind, then countertransferential experience is only a barrier, not a guide. The essay not only looks at the evidence for mirror neurons, which is ambiguous, but also at what need they might be filling in our contemporary culture. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Our Better Angels: Empathy, Sympathetic Reason, and Pragmatic Moral Progress

Empathy is the ability to infer and share the feelings, intentions, and goals of other persons.1 It provides the basis for our extraordinary capacity to help others, including strangers we may never meet, without interest in personal benefit. Its extent has been controversial, but recent studies in neuroscience, empirical psychology, and primatology support a highly empathic understanding of human nature. This view overturns the so-called “Darwinian” paradigm prevalent both in popular imagination and academic disciplines.2 The “Darwinian” account—in quotes because distant from Darwin’s own express views3—holds that “man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus); that individuals are self-maximizing and manipulative, even when seemingly kind to others (a common joke among psychologists: “scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed”); and that “Mother Nature” rewards the strong and discards the weak (“the devil take the hindmost”).4 As Richard A. Posner writes, “Darwin’s picture of nature is bleak; it is dog eat dog in virtually a literal sense; the adaptionist process that produced us is genocidal.”5 But recent studies support a different picture, a kinder one, in which persons are naturally attuned to one another, cannot help feeling what others feel, and spontaneously reach out to others in need. In The Age of Empathy, Frans de Waal calls for “a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature.”6 The empathic paradigm is a “radical new view,” writes Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization, “with radical implications for the way we understand and organize our economic, social and environmental relations in the centuries to come.”7 Both Rifkin (an economic and social theorist) and de Waal (a primatologist) look to empathy as an important source of moral progress. Rifkin argues that human empathy emerged over time, in conjunction with

ONE, TWO, THREE, PHI

1 5 1 R O N E , T W O , T H R E E , P H I E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I I’ve got an idea – and I’m just spitballing here – but what if I wrote a wandering dream of a book, lavishly illustrated on glossy pages, in which I am me, myself, a working scientist, cast in the mold of Dante Alighieri, except that I don’t write in terza rima. But I’ve got thousands of Virgils as guides. The Virgils are important scientists and of course artists, and I’ll borrow from all of them copiously, with appropriate scholarly citation. Anyway, these Virgils guide me through the matrix of a nervous-system network – which is to say, the human brain, which I study in real life – and then, miraculously . . . Interrupting response to the above proposal: the book could be hell; it probably is hell. Phi (that would be phi, ⌽, not pi, ⌸) is now out for laypersons and scientists to see and judge for themselves. They might find, to author Giulio Tononi’s credit, that his book is not a reader’s purgatory – not entirely. True enough, there’s torture in it (example to follow). Prolix and uneven, it is nevertheless an astonishing foray into what might be called neuroaesthetics. In theory, neuroaestheP h i : A V o y a g e f r o m t h e B r a i n t o t h e S o u l , by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 364 pp., $30) 1 5 2 M I Y A W A K I Y tics should be congratulated whenever and wherever attempted: getting scientists to write well about beautiful things, including the brain, is noble. Indeed, Nobel winners in science have been getting into the act recently, and we might expect more trade books in step with the latest science-prize announcements from Stockholm. Recently, for example, we have Eric Kandel’s The Age of Empathy (2012). Kandel’s winning science had to do with how the brain remembers, but his Age is about fin-de-siècle Vienna, about Kandel’s nostalgia for the era, and about how art and science mingled then, like hydrogen and oxygen, to create truly beautiful vapor. Even the co√ee klatches in that Vienna (as Kandel describes ) were ethereal. A certain Berta Zuckerkandel, wife of a local anatomist, threw the best soirées by far. ‘‘On my divan, Austria comes alive,’’ she once announced, probably with a demure smile. In aesthetic critical terms, Kandel’s Age confines itself to discussing Viennese portrait artists of the time. By comparison, Giulio Tononi is boundary-less and gratuitously encyclopedic. If memory serves, the only thing that Tononi doesn’t discuss is Viennese portraiture of the fin de siècle. Who is Tononi? I flip through my nonelectronic files to pull a manila folder marked, with Sharpie pen, ‘‘Tononi, G.’’ I find in it, to my embarrassment, only one Xeroxed article, from the 4 December 1998 issue of Science, titled ‘‘Consciousness and Complexity .’’ Tononi’s co-author is Gerald Edelman, a Nobel laureate like Kandel (though Edelman got his prize twenty-eight years before Kandel, for work on the immune system, not the brain). There’s one sentence in my lone Science article – a single phrase, in fact – to suggest that Tononi has spent a sizable chunk of his life working on just one thing. Here’s the sentence, and I’d ask the reader to consider what single phrase or clause in it might make for a career: ‘‘It can be shown that high values of complexity reflect the coexistence of a high degree of functional specialization and functional integration within a system, as appears to be the case for systems such as the brain.’’ The answer is not ‘‘It can be shown,’’ but you’re warm. ‘‘High values of complexity’’ makes me scratch my head vigorously , to the point of disregarding all that comes thereafter. Can one put a ‘‘value’’ on complexity? What are the units – cups or quarts? If you did make a measurement, who would care? The O N...

Social behavior in the "Age of Empathy"?-A social scientist's perspective on current trends in the behavioral sciences.

Recently, several behavioral sciences became increasingly interested in investigating biological and evolutionary foundations of (human) social behavior. In this light, prosocial behavior is seen as a core element of human nature. A central role within this perspective plays the “social brain” that is not only able to communicate with the environment but rather to interact directly with other brains via neuronal mind reading capacities such as empathy. From the perspective of a sociologist, this paper investigates what “social” means in contemporary behavioral and particularly brain sciences. It will be discussed what “social” means in the light of social neuroscience and a glance into the history of social psychology and the brain sciences will show that two thought traditions come together in social neuroscience, combining an individualistic and an evolutionary notion of the “social.” The paper concludes by situating current research on prosocial behavior in broader social discourses about sociality and society, suggesting that to naturalize prosocial aspects in human life is a current trend in today's behavioral sciences and beyond.

The Right to Be Punished: Autonomy and Its Demise in Modern Penal Thought

The Enlightenment was the age of empathy and abstract identity. The common man no longer was to be pitied for his unfortunate plight. Instead, enlightened gentlemen and reformers strove to empathize with the ordinary person—identify with him—precisely because he was identical to them in some fundamental sense. That sense differed from Enlightenment theory to theory, but the identity remained central. So Bentham insisted that every member of the utility community was like any other because every member's pain and joy equally affected the utilitarian calculus and thus the common good. Contractarians like Beccaria or Fichte portrayed all citizens as identical insofar as they were all signatories to the social contract, a contract grounded in the shared rationality of its signatories who surrendered some of their external freedom to pursue their life plans protected from the chaos of the law of nature. And Kant and Hegel stressed the common capacity for rational deliberation shared by all humans as rational beings.