Empathetic Identification Research Articles

IDENTITY AND INFINITY: ALTERNATE MODES OF SCRIBING THE SELF: A COMPARISON OF MARIO VARGAS LLOSA’S AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER AND YANN MARTEL’S LIFE OF PI

An active engagement with the notion of the ‘self’ in modes of confrontation, contestation and conjuration has been an important tropological concern of fictional narratives, especially of an autobiographical intent and tone. Any coherent and significant concept of the ‘self’ entails a conglomeration of conscious and subconscious indices of subjectivities, intellectual sensibility, emotional drives and epistemological orientations, all of which are ideally conducive to artistic or material creativity. And, in life as well as in literature, it inevitably determines the ways and the extent to which the individual is capable of transcending the ‘personal’ to connect with the ‘other’ in varying degrees of empathetic identification. Literature is a terrain where one can encounter, on the one hand, protagonists who cross the confines of their self and feel one with the whole cosmos, and on the other, those who fail miserably in transcending the anxieties and fears of the personal, and recede into self-imposed reticence and insularity. The former is usually seen undertaking a self-chosen or imposed journey in which their inner psychic resources are unearthed and are ultimately traced to the vast eternity of cosmic energies. The latter is representative of the tragic consequences of the ruthless encroachment of normative social forces upon the personal space and the resultant subjugation of the individual self. There is also an in-between category of individuals who can strike a fine balance between their self and the social mores, through an ironic process of competitive negotiation. They consolidate their selves through the calibrated transgressions they perform upon the rules and rigours of social institutions and ethics, only to be re-inducted after a brief interregnum of ostracized animation.

“They really looked, looked and looked:” Contemporary dance, disability and the circulation of emotions

Over the past decade, several inclusive dance projects, in which professional dancers with and without disabilities collaborate, have been started in Sweden. The article explores disabled and able-bodied dancers’ and leaders’ experiences of and strategies for managing gazes and emotions – in encounters with the audience and other surrounding people – from a phenomenological perspective. Eleven qualitative interviews were conducted. The interviewees meet gazes filled with benevolence, surprise, pity and fascination. The emotions stick to the disabled dancers’ bodies, distance them from their own bodies and arouse uneasiness that needs to be handled. However, disabled dancers and disabled persons in the audience may also meet in the gaze of recognition. The companies’ internal gazes are important, too. When disabled dancers are only physically integrated or when differences are hidden, the potential for change gets lost. If choreographers and audiences succeed in looking beyond the body itself, an empathetic identification may take place. Another strategy is to completely break with voyeurism by blocking all gazes. The companies show new ways of interacting, thus expanding the possibilities for both able and disabled bodies.

Teaching Palestine

Abstract This article explores theories and methodologies for an activist teaching and reading of Palestinian literature, including Susan Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin and Remi Kanazi's poetry. Based on student responses — empathy with individual Palestinian characters but not resistance to Israeli settler colonialism — the author suggests that empathetic identification, often perceived as a means of comprehending the other, instead blocks political and historical understandings. Building on Saidiya Hartman's and Lorenzo Veracini's arguments, the author posits the need for seeing the other through a Levinasian radical alterity (which he denied Palestinians), not through similarity. Moments when texts disturbed readerly identification were moments of activist potential.

Students’ Perspectives about Science Technology Engineering Art and Math in Application to Physics Measurement Equipment Projects

This research aims to describe student perspectives about STEAM in application to Measurement Physics Measuring Instrument Projects. Research focuses on 23 students enrolled in the Physics Education Study Program at the Palangka Raya State Islamic Institute. The research used descriptive qualitative-quantitative and utilize a Likert scale to conduct a survey. Five projects implemented in this research are DC voltmeter project, galvanometer project, project to determine spring constants, vernier caliper project made from bamboo, sensory equipment project to detect water levels. The integration of STEAM with each project is a holistic methodology that commences with empathetic identification of a problem, followed by ideation through testing, and culminating in the acquisition of knowledge from prototypes and literature to inspire further innovation. According to the results, the five projects described for the science component ( ), technology component ( ), engineering component ( ), art component ( ), and mathematics component ( ). In conclusion, five projects strongly approved as constructive project with STEAM application.

Leveraging Online Teaching and Learning to Foster Critical Global Citizenship Education: Higher Education Faculty’s Perceptions and Practices from Japan

This study investigates how eight higher education (HE) faculties located in Japan perceive and implement Global Citizenship Education (GCE) as a critically oriented pedagogy in the online course ‘Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education’. The main instruments of the study were questionnaires and interviews. The data collected were scrutinised with the use of the grounded theory and constant comparative method. Four notions of GCE surfaced from the data. According to the HE faculty, a critically oriented GCE should: (a) develop students’ empathetic identification, (b) cultivate students’ critical agency, (c) foster students’ self-confidence and inclusive mindset and (d) encourage students’ community participation. Building on the findings, this article concludes by advancing a proposal for a critical pedagogical framework for GCE online teaching and learning in Japanese HE.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin

Reviewed by: The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin Katharina von Kellenbach Erin McGlothlin. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. 346 pp. We will never be able to fully understand the mind of another person. This is especially true of people involved in atrocity, who are both eminently “ordinary” (Browning) and “monstrous” (Mohammed). “Perpetrator studies” has emerged as a new field of inquiry with its own scholarly networks, journals, and book series. The scholarly and popular fascination with the minds of perpetrators is partly driven by their inscrutability. Perpetrators are notoriously obtuse, in part because of their vested interest in keeping their crimes hidden from critical view, but also because their hearts and minds have become impenetrable—even to themselves. Acts of violence involve a “hardening of the heart,” to use a biblical term, as perpetrators avert their eyes and block their ears from seeing, feeling, and responding to the suffering of others. The ability to shield against empathy is integral to codes of conduct that allow agents of mass violence to dehumanize and degrade [End Page 217] victims. And generally, they show little awareness of culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities create force fields that suck entire communities into moral indifference, complicity, and denial. Erin McGlothlin, professor of German and Jewish studies at Washington University in St. Louis, analyzes fictional and nonfictional approaches to the mind of the perpetrator, distinguishing “mind-reading” from “imagination.” “Mind-reading” refers to practices of nonfiction writers attempting to penetrate and intuit the thinking and feeling of individual perpetrators in direct interaction. Fiction authors, on the other hand, use “imagination” to invent and envision the interior world of Holocaust perpetrators. Choosing her samples was, I am sure, the hardest part of writing the book. McGlothlin settles on four writers to make her case about “mind-reading.” Three observed Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt, the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, and the American Pentecostal minister William Hull; the fourth author, Gita Sereny, interviewed Franz Stangl in the early 1970s. The second part of the book examines Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1971), Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009), and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and The Zone of Interest. Out of the profusion of possible titles, this choice of authors serves McGlothlin to develop a theoretical framework that bridges fictional and nonfictional literature. This linkage of fiction and nonfiction is startling and somewhat disturbing at a point in history when the boundary between fact and fiction is hotly contested, and the objective truth is systematically challenged by peddlers of conspiracy myths and purveyors of alternative facts. But McGlothlin is right to point out that fact-driven historical descriptions of perpetrators also follow narrative conventions. While Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is different from Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, both authors enter into the imagined interior world of a perpetrator. McGlothlin proposes the “theory of mind” to ground the human capacity to decode the thoughts and feelings of others in order to anticipate their plans and actions. Human beings learn early on to interpret facial expressions, behavioral cues, and body language to predict behavior, especially in situations of vulnerability and moments of danger. This, argue cognitive psychologists, is a critical survival skill. Literature, argues McGlothlin, builds on this human ability to experience the world through the eyes of others. Authors of perpetrator literature must enter into a depraved mental world of cruelty and dehumanization. This requires “empathetic identification” and “intersubjective intermediation” that filters mendacity and maintains ethical adjudication. It is probably no accident that most of McGlothlin’s authors are Jewish (except for Amis and Hull). There is little appetite among German non-Jewish fiction writers to enter into the minds of Holocaust perpetrators, which involves impossible balancing acts between intimate familiarity and disassociation, fears of contamination and apology. For Jewish authors, entering into the Nazi universe is tempered by embodied identification with the victims. Gita Sereny, for instance, can extend sympathy to Franz Stangl, because she is also mediating his thinking against her own experience and ethical position. Her strategy of eliciting a confession from Stangl...

Mary Spongberg. Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories.

In Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he describes the queen of France awoken from sleep and fleeing, almost naked, from her bedchamber to escape the band of ruffians who had broken in and were cutting down the sentinel outside her door before they pierced the bed she had just vacated with bayonets and poniards. In Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860, this scene is presented as a startlingly Gothic vignette in which the trauma of the revolution is embodied in the figure of Marie Antoinette, evoking from the reader what Mary Spongberg calls an “empathetic identification” (11) with the unfortunate queen. This event is central to Spongberg’s deftly argued reorientation of a formative period of English historiography because it emblematizes the dual influence of Burke’s text. On the one hand, Burke’s Reflections emerges as the founding text of Whig history as a conservative and masculinist national discipline that normalized the erasure of women. On the other hand, Burke’s romanticized account of the queen’s plight allowed women to identify with her. This empathetic identification, Spongberg argues, functioned as “a form of embodied historical cognition” (11) that transformed the historical representation of women in the Romantic period and crucially enabled the development of women’s historical writing.

Rousseau's Toe

Abstract This article suggests that we might find a new way to address two stubborn questions regarding Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions through a single shift in perspective. These two questions are: What can we make of the antipathy that readers often feel toward this text, in response to the narrator's demand for total empathetic identification? And, how can we draw out the text's queer potential? Versions of these two questions have been asked many times by critics, but always in the register of unveiling, unmasking, exposing. What if, rather than deconstructing or diagnosing, we take an explicitly reparative position toward the paranoia that the text models, and toward the queer encounters it records? This approach involves seeking empathy away from where the text directs us, giving Rousseau a version of what he wants while challenging his tyrannical program that sets out how we should read and relate. Far from attempting to restore to the narrator the coherence or wholeness that myriad suspicious reads have undermined, this reparative reading counsels approaching the text as fragmentary archive. In the process, early modern queer identities, surface versus depth, and the Confessions as foundational text for modern autobiography—and the modern self—are all reconsidered.

‘Forced empathy’: Manipulation, trauma and affect in virtual reality film

Exploring two recent examples of virtual reality (VR) short films designed to produce visceral experiences (on solitary confinement and on seeking asylum), we call into question claims that assign normative value and even transformative power to the VR medium – imagined as so-called ‘empathy machines’. Drawing on a growing body of literature that seeks to contest such claims, we point to and problematise both the manipulative intent of such projects and the liberal-humanitarian logic, which underpins them. Based on such a logic, advocacy through immersive technologies supposes that if only individuals can be made to ‘feel’ something they will be changed by it and so will their behaviour. Whatever progressive motivations of the content producers, the emphasis on empathetic identification threatens to by-pass critical engagement and raises wider questions about the potentially de-politicising effects of seeking technological solutions to effect social change.

The Strange and the Familiar in theThousand and One Nights

AbstractThis analysis of the structure and meaning of The Tale of the Hunchback, the most novelistic of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, shows how the Nights stages the relationship of reader to fiction (the fictitious lives of others) as a power relationship and in terms of distance and familiarity. Through its juxtaposition of stories, the tale anatomizes fortunate and unfortunate human lives; it dramatizes the latter through the practical joke. The tale and its storyteller, Shahrazad, try to teach brotherhood and compassion for human weakness to a reader figured as an all-powerful Caliph-King who demands to be amused by the strange and who laughs at stories of the unfortunate. This reader’s power vis-à-vis the stories presented to him is above all to dismiss them as fictions that do not apply to him, as freakish as the deformed hunchback entertainer for whom the stories substitute within the tale. The tale and the larger Nights show how the estrangement that is the means of literary fiction can lie at cross-purposes with the ethical end of self-recognition and empathetic identification with others.

Racial Resentment, Empathy, and Support for Release during COVID-19: Results from a Survey Experiment

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented the American criminal justice system with unprecedented challenges, including protecting the safety of incarcerated men and women. Given the ill-suited structure of correctional facilities to facilitate health and safety guidelines, one solution is decarceration. Yet decarceration has faced political and public backlash. As no evidence currently exists on how the public views this emergency solution, the authors examined the correlates of support for decarceration by conducting a survey experiment in which respondents were randomly presented with information on the dangers of COVID-19 in prisons and jails. Respondents’ attitudes toward releasing various subgroups of the incarcerated population were then measured. The findings indicate that learning about the health risks of COVID-19 in correctional facilities had no discernable effect on support for decarceration for any subgroup. Racial resentment consistently predicted opposition to release for all groups, although its effect largely operated through empathetic identification with those who commit crimes.

‘We Are That In-Between Nation’: Discourses of Deservingness of Hungarian Migrants Working in Institutions of Refugee Accommodation in Germany

The article elaborates on the role of deservingness discourses in regulating membership of non-citizen groups in Germany. Specifically, it focuses on Hungarians working or volunteering in institutions of refugee accommodation in Germany. It asks how personal migration experience and migrant statuses and identities of Hungarian workers are mobilised when recreating discourses of refugee-deservingness. Performance expectations on refugees related to education and employment evoked references to similarities of migration experience, strengthening an empathetic perspective towards refugee clients and students. Deservingness frameworks related to culture were more ambiguous. A ‘mission civilisatrice’, that is educating Muslim Others to European, non-Muslim ways of behaving and thinking, often tied to gender relations, was paralleled by a continuous attempt to challenge and dismantle such discourses of difference and disciplining. These ambivalences of empathetic identification and disciplinary racialisation draw the contours of a characteristic place of (Hungarian) migrant workers in the governance of refugee accommodation in Germany.

Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR

This article rethinks the notion of virtual reality (VR) as an ‘empathy machine’ by examining how VR directs emotional identification not toward the subjects of particular VR titles, but toward VR developers themselves. Tracing how both positive and negative empathy circulates around characters in one of the most influential VR fictions of the 2010s, the light novel series-turned-anime series Sword Art Online (2009–), as well as the real-life figure of Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset that launched the most recent VR revival, the author shows how empathetic identification ultimately tends to target the VR game master, the head architect of the VR world. These figures often already inhabit a socially privileged position. A better understanding of how VR channels empathy towards VR creators points to the need to ensure a broader range of people have opportunities to take up the role of VR game master for themselves.

Imaging Axis Terror: War Propaganda and the 1943 “The Nature of the Enemy” Exhibition at Rockefeller Center

In the summer of 1943, the Office of War Information (OWI) staged an exhibition titled “The Nature of the Enemy” at Rockefeller Center in New York City. It included huge photo-murals showing the destruction and displacement caused by the global conflict of World War II and six scenic installations depicting the cruel practices of the Axis powers. In this essay, I analyze the exhibition, which was designed by OWI Deputy Director Leo Rosten, as an instance of propaganda, relating it to a series of posters on the same topic produced at the OWI by the American artist Ben Shahn, but never shown to the public. Rosten’s exhibition depicted the enemy’s actions and alleged nature in a prestigious urban location and provocative style, combining elements of instruction with thrilling entertainment. I argue that it signified an important yet ambiguous and contradictory attempt to represent the horrors of war from a “comfortable distance.” While Shahn’s poster series aimed for empathetic identification with the victims of terror, Rosten’s exhibition promised the vicarious experience of cruelty through the juxtaposition of enemy statements and installations depicting scenes of violence.

In Auditory Absentia: Music(ology), Modern Art, and Aesthetic Experience

Inspired by recent interdisciplinary studies of music and the visual arts, this article is broadly based on the permeable boundaries between the two that are characteristic at thefin de siècle. I concentrate on scenes of music-making depicted on two painted canvases : Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’sLe Chant du berger(1891) and Henri Matisse’sLa Musique(1910). The principal aim is to suggest how these illustrations of music and musical performance, as well as critical responses to them, resonate with perspectives from some of the most prominent aesthetic and intellectual concerns of the day. An additional aim is to extend our understanding of live musical engagement, considering what it might mean to obstruct empathetic identification, deny the sensuous properties of sound, and negate aesthetic experience.

Knock, Knock: The Taxman\u2019s at Your Door! Practice Sense, Empathy Games, and Dilemmas in Tax Enforcement

Tax administrators are empowered by the state to secure compliance with tax obligations. Enforcing compliance on the ground is complex, and street-level administrators often engage in the “art of the possible,” leading to dilemmas in the field. This paper examines tax administrators’ practices with regard to Jamaican property tax defaulters with outstanding tax liabilities in excess of 3 years. Drawing on interviews with tax administrators and other key agents, we find that tax administrators reposition themselves from objective enforcers to empathizing officials engaging in schemes of action, doing what they can do rather than what they should do. This is a practical-sense approach to securing compliance. We identify two forms of empathy, assimilated and cynical, and conclude that administrators’ empathetic identification with defaulters does not necessarily arise solely from concern for social cohesion, or inter-subjective compassion, but also sometimes from self-interest.

Prayer as Divine Experience and Empathetic Identification in 2 Baruch: 2 Baruch 48:1–25 as a Test case

First, in this essay I will summarize research in the field of neuroscience, which describe the cognitive processes that allow a person to empathize with another person’s emotional experience. Second, I will provide evidence that implies the author of the late first-century Jewish Apocalypse, 2 Baruch, wished to portray that the seer, Baruch, was in God’s presence as he prayed. Finally, I will discuss the emotions potentially aroused by the language of one the seer’s prayers (2 Baruch 48:2–24). Reverence for God, hope, confidence, and humility all are expressed by the words of his prayer. I will propose that reading or hearing these emotions could have allowed an ancient reader or listener to share and understand Baruch’s emotional states that are reflected in his prayer. Consequently, this process may have provided the reader or listener with a sense of the tangible presence of God that is consistent with the experience described as occurring to Baruch while offering his prayer in the divine presence.

Contests for Meaning: Ableist Rhetoric in Video Games Backlash Culture

An increasing number of video games focus on empathetic identification across difference. Since the mid-2000s, games that encourage catharsis and immersive engagement with trauma range from the personal as in That Dragon, Cancer (2014), in which players experience what it is like to parent a terminally ill child to geopolitical struggles as in Peacemaker (2007) which encourages player empathy for both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. These games are rapidly gaining in popularity and commercial backing. As more games focus on issues of social justice, the backlash against these concerns among a vocal segment of the gaming community is increasing in frequency and intensity. A branch of the men's rights movement has focused on video games aimed at understanding difference, and has attracted attention suggesting that all those advocating for social justice in games (dubbed Social Justice Warriors) should be understood to have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). We argue that these claims to NPD need to be understood as a form of structural ableism mobilized by the men's rights movement. In doing so, we argue that by situating the mental health labels evoked by current men's rights' activist rhetoric about feminist anti-racist interventions in game culture is a new form of the old practice of attaching mental health labels to people challenging social norms underpinning the dominant culture.

Defoe’s psychological realism: The effect of directness in indirect consciousness representation categories

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies represent the life of an individual through personal memories. Although he has often been associated with circumstantial realism rather than psychological realism, Defoe in fact represents the psychological as well as social and economic realities of his characters. In Defoe’s first-person autobiographical narratives, the person who narrates (i.e. the narrating self) and the one who experiences (i.e. the experiencing self) share the same pronoun, ‘I’, which exhibits a fluctuating internal tension between the two selves. This article aims to investigate Defoe’s psychological realism in terms of this internal tension, focusing on the narrative techniques for representing consciousness in which the points of view of the two selves are mingled. The representation of consciousness by means of what is called free indirect speech and thought (FIST) is under development in the early eighteenth century. In Defoe’s fictions, however, the internal tension between the two selves is abundantly indicated by his use of FIST and his handling of directness (the-experiencing-self-oriented deictic and expressive elements) within indirect representations of consciousness (indirect speech and thought (IST) and narrator’s representation of speech/thought act (NRSA/TA)) and within narration (N). The analysis demonstrates that, like FIST, direct elements used in indirect consciousness representation categories show the narrating self’s empathetic identification with the past self, which simultaneously evokes the reader’s empathetic feelings towards the psychology of the experiencing self. It consequently reveals that the creation of empathetic effects through directness helped Defoe to represent the psyches of individuals in remembering as in real life.