Empathic Resonance Research Articles

(INTER)FACING EMPATHY:

Screen technologies, ranging from the cinema to the smartphone, are taken for granted in the contemporary screen landscape. This landscape has been referred to as the “screen-sphere” (Sobchack 2014) owing to the fundamental ways screens affect how people understand and relate to the world around them. It is particularly their structural and operative functioning as interfaces that influence not so much how we use screens, but, more importantly, how they affect our communication with and feelings towards others. In so doing, the screen as an interface profoundly transforms people’s capacity for empathy. This article exposes the intersection of the screen and the face of the celebrity persona in an artwork by Candice Breitz titled Love Story (2016). Since the installation focuses attention on the faces of its subjects, it utilises the enormous power of the face in generating empathic responses. More specifically, the face of the celebrity persona cultivates both fascination and empathy in this work. Through a close analysis of this installation, I aim to show how empathy can be controlled and manipulated just as much as it can be compromised due to our screen-based day-to-day practices and our interactions with the faces of others. This article also demonstrates the crucial role that an artwork can play in raising awareness about the consequences of screens on our empathic resonance with others.

Road to empathy: Online teaching of cognitive empathy during a pandemic

ABSTRACT The general public’s acceptance of quarantined individuals back into society during a pandemic is key to the psychological adaptation of such individuals after their quarantine. Therefore, we designed an empathy learning programme, implemented on a virtual network platform, that targeted unquarantined individuals and was designed to promote reflection and mutual understanding. Approximately 70 students participated in the programme. The programme consisted of three stages: an observational stage, a reflective stage, and an experiential learning stage. The data from the empathy learning platform on which the course was offered were analysed according to these stages. The study findings revealed that cognitive empathy can be enhanced through four paths: perspective-taking, empathic resonance, feedback cycle, and experience organisation. Leaders need to understand the contextual characteristics of their students’ environment to facilitate learning engagement. Using a wider range of media, various types of interactions, and emotional support from leaders can promote in-depth learning.

Forms and transformations of empathy: Subtleties and complexities of empathic communication

ABSTRACT The role of empathic understanding and responsiveness is central to therapies anchored in self psychology and intersubjectivity theory. The process of achieving and communicating empathic understanding, however, is complex and multiply determined. Understanding on a theoretical level the rationale for employing an empathic mode of observation and response does not necessarily mean that one knows how to do so effectively. To help bridge this gap between theory and practice, the author offers a series of concrete, experience-near suggestions or principles for enhancing empathic understanding and responsiveness. Starting with Kohut, several writers have stated their belief that empathic resonance is a skill that can be developed through training and learning. The author references these previous efforts and adds to them here by defining several choice points and subtleties of how we respond that can make empathic communication more effective. These suggestions emerged from the process of training and supervising mental health professionals in all disciplines and thus are presented as a resource not only for clinicians, but also for teachers and supervisors.

An interesting clinical case. New therapies in Dissociative Identity Disorder.

IntroductionDissociative identity disorder (DID) also referred as multiple personality disorder is a chronic post-traumatic condition. It is characterized according to DSM-5 by “disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states”, with “marked discontinuity in sense of self… accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning.”ObjectivesHere, we present a case of a 33-year-old Caucasian female with no psychiatric history until 2 years ago, privately. The patient is admitted to the Psychiatry Service due to worsening. During admission, consultations are made to the Neurology Service and the Neurophysiology Service, who request an electroencephalogram, an MRI and a brain scan, resulting in normality.After discharge, she returns home with her parents, and the crisis become more frequent and of longer duration. She acknowledges that during these periods she is dominated by her alternate personality, which she is unaware of until her family informs her. This personality is a demon, who verbally assaults and even physically threatens her surroundings, and can hardly be controlled by the prayers of her family.MethodsDespite psychopharmacological treatment, as well as the cognitive-behavioral therapy carried out by the patient for more than two years, there was no improvement. Once she comes to the consultation, it is decided to carry out a therapy guided by the central Rogerian attitudes, originating a process of empathic resonance of the therapist, which influences the experience of the patient. Three main interventions are carried out, the awareness of the disease, the regulation of the intensity of this experience, to maintain the attention and the exploration of what guides the change. After carrying out this intervention, the patient is currently asymptomatic.ResultsCurrently, there are not evidence-based treatment guidelines. The most common approach is individual psychodynamic psychotherapy according to practice-based guidelines initiated by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.To handle the present case, we used a model with two pillars, the patient’s commitment and the investigation of microprocesses within a process of experiential exploration, in which the therapist is a facilitator of reflective attention and experimental awareness.ConclusionsThe torpid evolution suffered by the patient, with little clinical improvement to the interventions carried out, and the absence of evidence on the treatment, led to a therapeutic approach focused on the empathic resonance process of the therapist, with good results.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Listening in Sophocles: The Sounds of Empathic Dialogue

This article explores how listening sounds in Sophoclean tragedy. Engaging with insights from the work of psychotherapists and philosophers of sound and voice, I offer an understanding of listening as an active form of vocalization—a manifestation of empathy. By focusing on metric structures and other poetic effects making up the vocal soundscape of Sophocles, I explore how such listening is sonically performed between characters as they engage in sung dialogue, and how such dialogues may offer a possibility of healing during or after extreme suffering. Musical passages in particular bring together the protagonist and the chorus, a collective body of listener-witnesses, in moments of great distress and heightened emotionality. Three sung dialogues are examined in detail: one from Oedipus Tyrannus and two from Oedipus at Colonus. The exchange between the chorus and Oedipus the King immediately following his act of self-blinding already suggests the possibility of mitigating and making sense of suffering through empathic resonance. The first dialogue at Colonus exemplifies the chorus's refusal to empathically listen to Oedipus, an interaction that magnifies his traumatic experience; the second demonstrates the subsequent development of choral listening and the radical therapeutic potential of a reciprocally empathic vocal exchange.

“Tonghua” Theory and a Holistic View of Chinese Films

Abstract Similar to “Kongqi” (air) theory, “Tonghua” (assimilation) theory describes the holistic thought and aesthetic spirit of Chinese films. From “Zihua” (self-enlightenment), “Huaren” (enlightening people), to “Tonghua” (assimilation), “Tonghua” theory describes an approach to film thinking that transcends the barriers of race and class as well as the binary opposition of evolution and degeneration and enters the free realm of film thought and aesthetic representation through the subject’s introspection and persuasion in body and mind as well as the communication and interaction between on-screen and off-screen. Based on both creative practice and theoretical criticism, “Tonghua” theory concerns all aspects between human and universe, human and nature, human and human, and the whole process from film production to consumption. Through the operational mechanism of mutual attraction, induction, and connection, an atmosphere of enlightenment and harmony is achieved through the unity of nature and human beings, providing endless vitality and empathic resonance in Chinese films.

Towards psychedelic apprenticeship: Developing a gentle touch for the mediation and validation of psychedelic-induced insights and revelations.

A striking feature of psychedelics is their ability to increase attribution of truth and meaningfulness to specific contents and ideas experienced, which may persist long after psychedelic effects have subsided. We propose that processes underlying conferral of meaning and truth in psychedelic experiences may act as a double-edged sword: while these may drive important therapeutic benefits, they also raise important considerations regarding the validation and mediation of knowledge gained during these experiences. Specifically, the ability of psychedelics to induce noetic feelings of revelation may enhance the significance and attribution of reality to specific beliefs, worldviews, and apparent memories which might exacerbate the risk of iatrogenic complications that other psychotherapeutic approaches have historically faced, such as false memory syndrome. These considerations are timely, as the use of psychedelics is becoming increasingly mainstream, in an environment marked by the emergence of strong commercial interest for psychedelic therapy. We elaborate on these ethical challenges via three examples illustrating issues of validation and mediation in therapeutic, neo-shamanic and research contexts involving psychedelic use. Finally, we propose a pragmatic framework to attend to these challenges based on an ethical approach which considers the embeddedness of psychedelic experiences within larger historical and cultural contexts, their intersubjective character and the use of practices which we conceptualise here as forms of psychedelic apprenticeship. This notion of apprenticeship goes beyond current approaches of preparation and integration by stressing the central importance of validation practices based on empathic resonance by an experienced therapist or guide.

Empathic Resonance with Their Mother's Stress Affects Executive Function in Children

Empathic Resonance with Their Mother's Stress Affects Executive Function in Children

Hunting Ideology and Ritual Treatment of Animal Remains in Hunter-Gatherer Societies: An Enactive Anthropological Approach

Ritual treatment of animal remains after hunt and consumption as an act of reciprocity with animal persons is a widespread practice among ethnographically documented northern hunter-gatherer societies. Often these practices and their associated set of beliefs are discussed as part of a broader complex of circumpolar cosmology and religion which is assumed to have arisen from historical continuities within the region and is assigned considerable time depth on that basis. However, the aforementioned practices and beliefs are by no means unique and can also be attested among various tropical hunter-gatherer groups. By way of a critical discussion of the “ontological turn” and enactivist theory, this paper suggests that, rather than through historical connections, the hunting rituals and beliefs may be better explained within the context of developmental histories of structural coupling between hunter and prey affected by bodily and empathic resonance and the complexity of the relation between epistemology and ontology.

Theatrical manipulation and seductive sentimentality: constructions of empathy in Swedish online far-right discourse about EU-migrants

Digital technologies such as online forums afford opportunities for users to circumvent and challenge feeling rules. The online far-right uses such opportunities to challenge feeling rules regarding racialised minority groups, refugees and immigrants, including rules about empathy for such groups. However, while the disruptive features of online far-right practice are widely acknowledged, less has been written about how participants in online far-right forums actually make sense of emotional experiences, including empathy in relation to migrants. This article analyses a Swedish far-right-dominated online discussion thread about non-Swedish EU citizens who ask for money, a group referred to in Sweden as ‘EU-migrants’. From an affective-discursive practice perspective, and focusing on metaphorically constructed interpretative repertoires, the article analyses how participants in the thread make sense of empathy as an actual or possible emotional response to these migrants, as well as how the participants position themselves as subjects in relation to such experiences and various actors involved. The results indicate that the participants are formulating a dual affective-discursive position. First, they present themselves as especially capable of empathic resonance and mirroring, but as righteously angered by EU-migrants’ putative attempts to manipulate this empathic capacity. Second, they disidentify with ‘Swedes’ by presenting themselves as capable of avoiding the seductive and sentimental ‘kindness narcomania’ supposedly deeply rooted in Swedish society, and thereby present themselves as a (counter-)empathic vanguard community in relation to this society. The implications of such affective-discursive practices for far-right online and offline action are discussed.

Emotional play and resonating to the shape of the valued self with fellow-feeling: Therapeutic conversations in Brief Dynamic Therapy

Drawing from the work of Meares and Hobson the author outlines a conceptual framework that places the valued self and the sanctuary within which it is located at the centre of human development and of the therapeutic process. The experience of being valued is seen to be the basis upon which a capacity for intimacy develops. In contrast, failures of empathic resonance to the shape and texture of the valued self by significant others are seen to result in the development of an unconscious trauma system and a diminished sense of self. A consequence of this is the development of an expectational field which shapes the interpersonal patterns and experiences of the individual. A feature of this expectation field is the development of an Alien self which can manifest in the phenomenon of role reversals in the therapeutic relationship. The function of maintaining a sense of fellow-feeling in the therapeutic relationship is highlighted. Comparisons are made between the concept of an Alien self and Woodmansey’s conceptualisation of the punitive or humiliating super-ego and its distinction from the ego-ideal which in contrast contributes positively to the development of intimacy. These themes are illustrated by a case example.

Empathy in pedophilia and sexual offending against children: A multifaceted approach.

Empathy is regarded as dynamic risk factor of child sexual offending. However, empathy research in the context of child sexual abuse suffers from various problems. First, prior studies failed to differentiate between pedophilic and nonpedophilic sexual offenders. Second, there is no distinction made between cognitive and affective empathy. Third, cognitive and affective empathy toward emotional states of specific age groups (children and adults) has not been adequately addressed. The current study tackles these shortcomings investigating offending and nonoffending pedophiles and multiple aspects of empathy using self-reports and objective behavioral measures. Participants included 85 pedophilic men who committed hands-on child sexual offenses (P+CSO), 72 pedophilic men who never committed hands-on child sexual offenses (P-CSO), and 128 nonoffending teleiophilic male controls (TC). Several affective and cognitive aspects of empathy were assessed using the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Whereas in self-reports (IRI) P+CSO scored lower than TC (P-CSO intermediate) in cognitive perspective-taking abilities, a performance-based measure (MET) revealed evidence for a better differentiation of emotional states in P-CSO as compared with P+CSO (TC intermediate). In addition, P+CSO and P-CSO showed significantly higher affective resonance while observing children (MET), which was paralleled by higher self-reported levels of personal distress in social situations (IRI). The results indicate evidence for higher general affective empathic resonance to children in pedophilic men but superior cognitive empathy abilities in nonoffending pedophiles only, which may act as a protective factor in the prevention of sexual offending. Together, these findings underline the importance of accounting for multiple facets of empathy when targeting pedophilia and child sexual offending. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

From autonomic reactivity to empathic resonance in psychotherapy mutual regulation of post-traumatic stress (PTS) – What does that take in the role as psychotherapist?

This paper discusses autonomic reactivity and empathic resonance in the psychotherapy setting. Autonomic reactivity is understood as involuntary nervous system responses we experience when exposed to activations in our autonomic nervous system (ANS). In an autonomic reactive state, we may revert to defensive strategies resulting in ‘stuck’ behavioural patterns, diminishing our capacity to consciously choose our response. While we cannot override autonomic reactivity, we can build psychomotor skills to notice our reactivity and employ affective attunement, self-regulation and mutual regulation skills that move us into a state of empathic resonance – moving from reactivity to conscious response. Therapists can manage challenges associated with autonomic reactivity with acceptance, normalisation, and psychomotor skill development. This article presents a road map to address ANS responses and three case examples highlighting three different states, namely hyper-arousal, hypo-arousal and dissociation of disorganised states, to clarify concepts presented here.

UNLIVING HANDS: LYRIC DISTANCE IN OWEN'S “ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH”

4 4 Y U N L I V I N G H A N D S L Y R I C D I S T A N C E I N O W E N ’ S ‘ ‘ A N T H E M F O R D O O M E D Y O U T H ’ ’ A D A M K E L L E R In the preface to his then unpublished oeuvre, Wilfred Owen characterized his poems as elegies, a move that has sparked much debate among his few devoted critics about the generic boundaries of his work. Owen’s poems are elegies (if only because he says so), yet they often seem to probe, contest, and subvert the genre’s longstanding conventions. Owen’s generic changes have proved too discordant for some. W. B. Yeats was not among those inclined to read Owen’s poems as elegies. In fact, judging from his editorial decisions and correspondence, he preferred not to read them at all. As editor of the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats excluded Owen’s work and that of his contemporary ‘‘trench poets’’ on the grounds that ‘‘passive su√ering is not a theme for poetry,’’ crassly dismissing it as ‘‘all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick.’’ The argument behind Yeats’s dismissal is worth noting. What it seems to imply is that elegies, at least those in the classical and English tradition with which Owen identifies his work, must transcend melancholic lament to achieve consolation. As many critics have noted, however, Owen’s poems seem to o√er little such promise; indeed, his preface explicitly warns us that the poems to follow are ‘‘in no sense consolatory.’’ 4 5 R Even readers who recognize a place for the anti-elegiac within the genre’s boundaries have found another significant problem with Owen’s verse. The contemporary critic Jahan Ramazani offers a nuanced reading of Owen’s work that recognizes his place as a generic innovator of the modern elegy. Yet Ramazani, too, levies a charge against Owen – and all war elegists – that, if more oblique, shares a tangential connection with Yeats’s blunt criticism . For Ramazani, the fundamental problem with war elegies is not one of poetic authenticity so much as of empathic resonance and universality. According to Ramazani, war elegies highlight the central obstacle with which all elegies must contend: namely, that they ‘‘are irreducibly occasional forms of poetry.’’ Ramazani’s objection could, I think, be developed further, since the occasional status of such poetry is only half of the problem. No less significant than the inherent irregularity of the genre is its transient a√ective resonance. Owen’s poems may preclude consolation, but they do arouse pity, which he takes to be his rightful subject. The contrast between these two sentiments is an important one for Owen in that consolation implies a permanence and stability that pity can never attain. And yet, I will argue that pity’s transience in time pales in significance before another limitation: its inability to survive without attenuation beyond the limits of an exclusive community of mourners, one predicated on the firsthand experience of combat . In this community, the wounds of war that these elegies attempt to dress are neither metaphorical nor transient. In very di√erent ways, then, both Yeats and Ramazani have implicitly recognized the war elegy’s problematic claim to exceptionalism – that war (more specifically, the direct and unmediated firsthand experience of combat) represents a qualitatively distinct realm of human experience, the full knowledge of which is accessible only to a few. It is this notion of the unbridged epistemological gulf that exists in the highly fraught relationship between the combatant war elegist and his civilian audience that I wish to investigate. This distance exists to some degree in all elegies and, one might even say, in all works of lyric poetry. Whether we conceive of the lyric poem as the dramatic monologue of a fictive speaker or as a patched-together collection of speech acts frustrating all attempts to perceive a unified speaking persona, all poems exist in a social 4 6 K E L L E...

A Neural Model of Empathic States in Attachment-Based Psychotherapy.

We build on a neuroanatomical model of how empathic states can motivate caregiving behavior, via empathy circuit-driven activation of regions in the hypothalamus and amygdala, which in turn stimulate a mesolimbic–ventral pallidum pathway, by integrating findings related to the perception of pain in self and others. On this basis, we propose a network to capture states of personal distress and (weak and strong forms of) empathic concern, which are particularly relevant for psychotherapists conducting attachment-based interventions. This model is then extended for the case of self-attachment therapy, in which conceptualized components of the self serve as both the source of and target for empathic resonance. In particular, we consider how states of empathic concern involving an other that is perceived as being closely related to the self might enhance the motivation for self-directed bonding (which in turn is proposed to lead the individual toward more compassionate states) in terms of medial prefrontal cortex–mediated activation of these caregiving pathways. We simulate our model computationally and discuss the interplay between the bonding and empathy protocols of the therapy.

Advances in functional brain imaging technology and developmental neuro‐psychology: their applications in the Jungian analytic domain

Analytical psychology shares with many other psychotherapies the important task of repairing the consequences of developmental trauma. The majority of analytic patients come from compromised early developmental backgrounds: they may have experienced neglect, abuse, or failures of empathic resonance from their carers. Functional brain imagery techniques including Quantitative Electroencephalogram (QEEG), and functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI), allow us to track mental processes in ways beyond verbal reportage and introspection. This independent perspective is useful for developing new psychodynamic hypotheses, testing current ones, providing diagnostic markers, and monitoring treatment progress. Jung, with the Word Association Test, grasped these principles 100years ago. Brain imaging techniques have contributed to powerful recent advances in our understanding of neurodevelopmental processes in the first three years of life. If adequate nurturance is compromised, a range of difficulties may emerge. This has important implications for how we understand and treat our psychotherapy clients. The paper provides an overview of functional brain imaging and advances in developmental neuropsychology, and looks at applications of some of these findings (including neurofeedback) in the Jungian psychotherapy domain.

The impact of mood on empathy for pain: Evidence from an EEG study.

The current work investigated whether the neural correlates of empathy for pain are altered by mood valence of observers. Following mood induction, participants watched pictures representing painful or nonpainful situations. We used EEG to record neural activity and assessed event-related desynchronization at central sites during pain observation. Greater mu desynchronization was observed during painful relative to nonpainful situations in positive and neutral mood but not in negative mood. We also found that the pain empathy effect, indexed by mu suppression differences between painful and nonpainful conditions, was smaller in negative than in neutral and positive mood, while this effect was similar between neutral and positive mood. The current study demonstrates that observers' mood states influence the motoric component of empathy for pain, and specifically the negative mood suppresses the motoric empathic resonance for others' pain.

Empathy Examined From Perspectives of Neuroscience and Artistic Imagination

This response to Ian E. Wickramasekera II’s article, Mysteries of Hypnosis and the Self Are Revealed by the Psychology and Neuroscience of Empathy, is addressed from a joint perspective on consciousness comprising two related orientations: neuroscience and artistic imagination. We find that the central importance of empathy to empathic involvement theory (Wickramasekera II, 2015) reflects the pivotal nature of empathy in the brain and in the relational exchange implicit in the psychotherapeutic process, particularly when using art in therapy. We offer a preliminary unpacking of the roles related to key psychological processes, such as imagination, that are implicated in clinical uses of verbal and visual empathic resonance.

Reduction of empathy for pain by placebo analgesia suggests functional equivalence of empathy and first-hand emotion experience.

Previous research in social neuroscience has consistently shown that empathy for pain recruits brain areas that are also activated during the first-hand experience of pain. This has been interpreted as evidence that empathy relies upon neural processes similar to those underpinning the first-hand experience of emotions. However, whether such overlapping neural activations imply that equivalent neural functions are engaged by empathy and direct emotion experiences remains to be demonstrated. We induced placebo analgesia, a phenomenon specifically modulating the first-hand experience of pain, to test whether this also reduces empathy for pain. Subjective and neural measures of pain and empathy for pain were collected using self-report and event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants underwent painful electrical stimulation or witnessed that another person was undergoing such stimulation. Self-report showed decreased empathy during placebo analgesia, and this was mirrored by reduced amplitudes of the pain-related P2, an ERP component indexing neural computations related to the affective-motivational component of pain. Moreover, these effects were specific for pain, as self-report and ERP measures of control conditions unrelated to pain were not affected by placebo analgesia. Together, the present results suggest that empathy seems to rely on neural processes that are (partially) functionally equivalent to those engaged by first-hand emotion experiences. Moreover, they imply that analgesics may have the unwanted side effect of reducing empathic resonance and concern for others.

The effects of therapeutic bond within a brief intervention for alcohol moderation for problem drinkers.

The quality of the relationship between a therapist and his or her client can make a significant contribution to recovery from substance use disorders. Treatments often harness aspects of therapeutic relationships (e.g., therapeutic bond) to positively affect therapeutic outcomes. Within motivational interviewing (MI), for example, authors theorize that a relational component is 1 active component that affects change. The present study aims to examine the effects of relationships within a treatment setting on drinking. A secondary data analysis was performed on data collected from problem drinkers in a randomized controlled trial. Participants were assigned to MI or relational MI without directive elements (spirit-only MI). Participants answered questions about alcohol use and therapeutic bond before, during, and at the end of an 8-week treatment period. High levels of therapeutic bond and empathic resonance predicted decreased alcohol use at the end of treatment for participants in both conditions. This study highlights the importance of relational components in treatments for substance abuse. (PsycINFO Database Record