Features Of Empathy Research Articles

“Genuine and fundamentally human”: a qualitative study into Dutch humanist chaplains’ conceptualizations of empathy

Empathy has been highlighted as a key concept in chaplaincy care, but its meaning has hardly been explored in depth within this field. This study aims to help develop stronger conceptual clarity by investigating humanist chaplains’ conceptualizations of empathy. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty humanist chaplains working in health care, military, and prisons. A qualitative design was employed to clarify which components and features constitute empathy in humanist chaplaincy care. Empathy emerges as a multidimensional concept that is “fundamentally human.” Chaplains distinguish between true and pseudo empathy based on different features including authenticity and concern. This article provides a conceptual model that combines the different components and features of empathy in humanist chaplaincy care and the relationship between them in light of empathy’s humanizing quality. It may be used for educational purposes and could function as a conceptual framework for future research efforts.

Aesthetic Empathy: An Investigation in Phenomenological Psychology of Visual Art Experiences

Abstract Empathy is a psychologically significant phenomenon. It plays a key role in the development of the self, sociality, and prosocial behaviour. The term empathy originated in 19th-century aesthetics, where the concept was seen as an explanation for aesthetic experience. Despite renewed interest in the relation between empathy and aesthetic experiences, investigations into how empathy shapes experiences of art are still scarce. Given this situation, we ask the following three questions: What does one experience when experiencing a work of art empathetically? What is given during such moments? How is consciousness structured in aesthetic empathetic experience? To answer these questions, we analysed five different experiences with visual art using a phenomenological psychological methodology. We found that a complexity of psychologically significant meaning arises from the empathic experience of art. The core aspects of this meaning are captured in a structure incorporating experience of a foreign subjective sense, reliving and affective adherence, interiorisation, pleasure in sharing, and affective understanding. Based on this structure, we argue that aesthetic empathy features a sense of otherness to a degree not previously recognised and that aesthetic empathy is an inherently intersubjective experience in which the spectator is invited to participate and share feelings expressed in the work of art in moments of aesthetic presence.

Features of empathy among students of the direction "Ecology and nature management" with different mathematical abilities and strategies for conveying meaning

Today, the entire education of the Russian Federation is being reformed, high requirements for the quality of education have been set. The restructuring and integration of the world educational process expects high efficiency of all educational activities, therefore, the problem of the study of mathematical abilities and the ability to convey meaning of students is particularly relevant today. Equally important is the problem of educating socially approved personality traits in the younger generation, including empathy. The study allowed us to establish that students with an average level of development of mathematical abilities have significantly less formed empathy, and vice versa, with the development of communicative properties, there is an increase in empathy abilities. It has been established that empathy is best formed in students of the direction "Ecology and nature management" with an active, emotionally dominant and cognitively dominant strategy for conveying meaning.

Features of empathy in students with different conformities

Features of empathy in students with different conformities

Психологія обдарованості та особливості ділової комунікативної культури особистості

The scientific review of literature on the problem of psychology of giftedness and the formation of business communicative culture of personality is made, its structure is determined. The leading factors that contribute to the formation of a communicative culture of a specialist as a business partner are outlined. The importance of having a communicative personality culture during communication and negotiations is emphasized. The purpose of the study is to identify the components of a communicative culture that contribute to success in business communication. To achieve this goal, the following methods were used: theoretical: theoretical analysis, synthesis, comparison, systematization, generalization of domestic and foreign scientific sources; empirical: observation, use of a psychological survey of university students in order to find out personal characteristics that must be inherent in a specialist with a high level of communicative culture; statistical: methods of descriptive mathematical statistics. It is shown that in the structure of communicative culture the gnostic component is distinguished (the system of knowledge about the essence, structure, functions and peculiarities of communication in general and professional in particular; knowledge about communication styles, in particular, about peculiarities of one's own communicative style; background knowledge, ie general cultural competence, which is non-cultural competence having a direct relation to professional communication, allows to capture, understand the hidden hints, associations, etc., ie to make understanding deeper, more emotional, personal; elicitation, which makes communication a kind of social creativity); connective component (general and specific communication skills that allow you to successfully make contact with another person, to adequately know their internal states, to manage the situation of interaction with him, to apply constructive strategies of behavior in conflict situations; speech culture; expressive skills that express pantomimic accompaniment; perceptual-reflexive skills that allow the partner to know the inner world of communication and self-understanding; domain emotional use of organizing influences in interaction with people (in comparison with evaluators and especially disciplines), emotional component (humanistic setting for communication, interest in another person, readiness to engage with her in personal, dialogical relationships, interest in one's own inner world; developed and high level of identification with professional and social roles performed; positive self-concept; psycho-emotional states adequate to the requirements of professional activity. The conducted study of the components of communicative culture gives grounds for defining the communicative culture of a specialist as a business partner, which is understood as a professionally significant formation, which involves the totality of its general culture, personal properties, emotional-volitional qualities, motivational-needy communication, learned communication skills. and skills, features of empathy and reflection, which are manifested in the process of communication, interpersonal and business communication, interaction, interaction understanding and mutual influence.

Empathy in Chinese eight-year medical program students: differences by school year, educational stage, and future career preference

BackgroudTo examine the psychometric properties of a Chinese translation of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (Student-version, JSE-S), and to study differences in empathy scores among eight-year undergraduate medical students across gender, year of study, and future career preference.MethodsThe JSE-S was administered to 442 participants from December 2016 to July 2017, who were all first- to seventh-year students on an eight-year medical education course at Fudan University. Factor analysis was used to examine the underlying components of the Chinese version of the JSE-S. The data analyses comprised a t-test and analyses of variance.ResultsFactor analysis confirmed four components: perspective taking, compassionate care, ability to stand in patient’s shoes, and difficulties in adopting patient’s perspective. The lowest empathy score was found in the seventh-year students (99.5), while a decline was found across school years. Students in clinical training (sixth/seventh year) had lower empathy than students in premedical study (first/second year), basic medicine (third/fourth year), and clinical medicine (fifth year). Statistically significant differences in empathy mean scores were found in respect of future career preference but not gender. Students who preferred not to become doctors had lower empathy than students who preferred to become doctors, who were undecided, and who did not specify.ConclusionsThe findings support the construct validity and reliability of the Chinese version of the JSE-S for medical students. The study also revealed the features of empathy in eight-year program students, and provided a reliable reference to design interventions to cultivate empathy among Chinese medical students.

We should value competency over empathy

During a recent visit to my general practitioner, I had my blood taken by a medical student. He missed and, as his face paled from empathy to my pain, I leaked blood all over the table. Before he could take another stab at it, a stern faced but more competent nurse swooped in to finish the job. Skim the bibles of modern medical practice, such as Tomorrow’s Doctors or Duties of a Doctor , and you will notice that empathy is regularly cited as a quality all doctors must have.1 Defined as emotional identification with patients, empathy features highly on the entrance criteria of medical schools—part of the general ebb and flow away from biomedical instruction and towards an integrated humanistic curriculum.2 If you don’t have empathy, you must at least …

The Village in the Jungle: An uncolonial novel

This article offers a biographical account of the emergence of The Village in the Jungle, and focuses on Leonard Woolf’s internal conflicts, or deep “psychic archaeology”, at the time of writing the novel. It suggests that the novel’s unique features of empathy and close observation — weighed in relation both to Woolf’s oeuvre, and to colonial writing more generally — emerged out of a special time in his life. He worked through his ambivalences about empire, and about marrying Virginia, through transmuting into narrative form his own closely observed and often already conflicted reports on his experiences as a colonial officer.

The cognitive and neural time course of empathy and sympathy: An electrical neuroimaging study on self–other interaction

Although extensively investigated in socio-cognitive neuroscience, empathy is difficult to study. The first difficulty originates in its multifaceted nature. According to the multidimensional model, empathy combines emotional, automatic (simulation), cognitive (mentalizing) and regulatory (executive functions) processes. Substantial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data demonstrated that co-activations in the mirror neuron system (MNS) and mentalizing network (MENT) sustain this co-recruitment of so-called first- and second-person-like processes. Because of the poor temporal resolution of fMRI techniques, we currently lack evidence about the precise timing of the MNS–MENT combination. An important challenge is, thus, to disentangle how MNS and MENT dynamically work together along time in empathy. Moreover, the role of the executive functions in the MNS–MENT combination time course is still unknown. Second, empathy – feeling into – is closely related to sympathy – feeling with – and both phenomena are often conflated in experimental studies on intersubjectivity. In this electrical neuroimaging (EEG) pilot-study, we tested whether the egocentered vs. heterocentered visuo-spatial mechanisms respectively associated with sympathy and empathy differentially modulate the dynamic combination of the MNS–MENT activations in their respective neural time course. For that, we employed our newly developed behavioral paradigm assessing the visuo-spatial – but not emotional – features of empathy and sympathy. Using a data-driven approach, we report that empathy and sympathy are underlied by sequential activations in the MNS from the insula to the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) between 63ms and 424ms. However, at 333–424ms, empathy triggered greater co-activations in the right IFG and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) (executive functions). Linking together our present and prior (Thirioux et al., 2010) findings from the same dataset, we suggest that this greater recruitment of the right dlPFC monitors the shift from egocentered and first-person-like mechanisms in the MNS to heterocentered and second-person-like mechanisms in the left temporo-parietal junction within the MENT, i.e., reflecting the onset of perspective-change processes in the neural time course of empathy. Contrasting with sympathy, this recruitment of the executive functions could modulate the output end of the mirroring processing in the premotor and sensorimotor cortices.

VICTIMHOOD, IDENTITY, AND AGENCY IN THE EARLY PHASE OF THE TROUBLES IN NORTHERN IRELAND

This article explores the representation of victimhood in political discourse and the relation between victimhood, identity, and political agency. The empirical material is drawn from the early days of the Northern Ireland conflict and covers the debate on internment that was in operation from August 1971 until December 1975. Both those supporting and those opposing internment drew on images of victimhood—images that were vital in the construction of legitimacy and political agency. First, the rendering of detailed stories of individual suffering and victimhood produced compassion and empathy—features legitimising the different approaches. Second, the construction of victimhood involved mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, creating “we-them” dichotomies, producing “collectives of victimhood,” which in many cases worked as a platform from which political agency could be voiced. And third, the construction of victimhood produced political truths. The victim was given a particular status embodying a particular moral integrity to determine the truths about “what had really happened,” a status that made the victim a vital agent in the political battle for “the hearts and minds.” The article stresses the importance of studying the representation of victimhood within particular historical contexts and demonstrates the complex and ambiguous effects of the representations of victimhood in violent political conflicts. The examination shows that victimhood has both humanising and dehumanising effects and, depending on the contextual framework, victimhood can create confidence, empowerment, and agency, but also disempowerment and passivity.