Ideas Of Empathy Research Articles

“I definitely felt like I was there”: enacting empathy and negotiating a virtual reality Indian Residential School

We examine how 20 university students interacted with a virtual Residential School that was designed in partnership with a group of Indigenous Survivors of Canada’s Residential Schools system. We begin by offering a brief history of Canada’s Residential Schools system as well as the origins and ambitions of the Embodying Empathy project. We also reflect on the idea of empathy as it has been taken up both in the design and testing phases of the project and on how student participants enacted their empathy. We demonstrate how participants worked through their immersion in the virtual Residential School, selecting empathy frames that allowed them to grapple with its content and connect with the Survivor narratives presented therein.

Staging resistance matters! Deconstructing structures of power and oppression in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

ABSTRACT Situated on parallel cultural geographies of the global north and south, this study seeks to critically interpret Dario Fo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s theatre as representative of radical theatres of resistance and cultural intervention in their searing reinterpretation of Kenyan and Italian cultural discourse. Through staging narratives of systemic oppression and injustice, these dramatists salvage the history of the subaltern from the ruins of colonial and fascist regimes, thereby transforming their theatre into Marxist tools of counter-information. The concept of theatre as a form of anti-establishment political action and counter-discourse will be analyzed through The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970). Both plays are rooted in specific historical situations that are a part of the collective consciousness of the nation. However, through the use of revolutionary methods – humour, indigenous performance traditions, a critically-invested audience, the rejection of the traditional idea of empathy and catharsis, Fo, Wa Thiong’o and Mugo force spectators in the words of Nicholas Brown ‘to take seriously the possibility that art can be at war – in more than a metaphorical sense – with the state.’

Affective and Cognitive Responses to Musical Performances of Early 20th Century Classical Solo Piano Compositions

Effective audience engagement with musical performance involves social, cognitive and affective elements. We investigate the influence of observers’ musical expertise and instrumental motor expertise on their affective and cognitive responses to complex and unfamiliar classical piano performances of works by Scriabin and Hanson presented in audio and audio-visual formats. Observers gave their felt affect (arousal and valence) and their action understanding responses continuously while observing the performances. Liking and familiarity were rated after each excerpt. As hypothesized: visual information enhanced observers’ action understanding and liking ratings; observers with music training rated their action understanding, liking and familiarity higher than did nonmusicians; observers’ felt affect did not vary according to their musical or motor expertise. Contrary to our hypotheses: visual information had only a slight effect on observers’ arousal felt affect responses and none on valence; musicians’ specific instrumental motor expertise did not influence action understanding responses. We also observed a significant negative relationship between action understanding and felt affect responses. Ideas of empathy in musical interactions motivated the research; the empathy framework in relation to musical performance is discussed. Nonmusician audiences might be sensitized to challenging musical performances through multimodal strategies to build the performer-observer connection and increase understanding of performance.

The many lives of the messy museum: Site, memory and voice

A number of North American artist project spaces established in 2003 activated alternatives to display and programming practices found in mainstream museums, giving voice to artists who did not fit existing durational, disciplinary and authorial parameters. One such site was Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina, an artist residency and living museum set within a 1930s Depression-era thrift store. Here, an archival approach emerged from the mess of thrift store Americana that considered what an artist project space could be if nothing was sold, altered beyond repair or thrown away. Central to the artist organizing practices that emerged on-site are archival principles that enable empathetic connections to form in relation to object meanings, lost subjectivities and neighbourhood relationships. Elsewhere, as a site, offered a means for hidden voices to be heard and alternative archiving practices to be tested as a form of community memory, with their museological presentation indebted to the implications of mess and its endless reordering. This article builds on the idea of empathy as a capacity to be engendered in museum audiences by seeing it also as a structuring principle to invoke organizational difference at every turn. Such structural empathy became tellingly significant in 2020 as racial justice protests and the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the inequities of American life. For Elsewhere, the principles of practice that enabled them to become a platform for imagining and securing hyper-local change are bound to successive reformulations of both the site since 2003 and the resulting archive.

Animal Poetry and Empathy

This article discusses how our ideas of empathy are influenced by the dichotomy of mind versus body, also known as Cartesian dualism. Within the aesthetic field, this dichotomy is seen when researchers define narrative empathy as imaginatively reconstructing the fictional character’s thoughts and feelings. Conversely, the empathy aroused by a non-narrative work of art is seen as an unconscious bodily mirroring of movements, postures or moods. Thinking dualistically does not only have consequences for what we consider human nature; it also affects our view on animals. To show the untenability of dualistic thinking, this article focuses on the animal poetry genre. Using the ideas of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I analyze two animal poems: “Inventing a Horse” by Meghan O’Rourke and “Spermaceti” by Les Murray. The analysis of these two poems suggests that the presiding ideas about aesthetic empathy and empathy in general need re-evaluation.

Honoring the sensate bond between disparate subjectivities in psychotherapy.

Ideas of empathy and genuineness are accepted by practitioners of psychotherapy as a basis for whatever else we do. In taking these ideas almost for granted, there can be a risk of overlooking key phenomenological dimensions of the subjective process to which they correspond. Levinas’ exposition of the multilayered dimensions of proximity between disparate subjectivities safeguards us against substituting understanding for the kind of embodiment he calls “for-the-other” (Levinas, 1974/1998, p. 79). In working through his description, we attempt to reveal the subjective tendencies already operating within us implicitly—tendencies that expose us to the other to the point of the impossibility of turning away. In more fully inhabiting this powerful dimension of our subjectivity, we enter into a proximity with our patients that has the power to nourish the psychological hunger that fuels their emotional pain. In the final pages of this article, we offer some thoughts, including a clinical example, of the tangi...

Epistemic empathy in childrearing and education

The question, what is it like to be a child?, is one that most of us, in our capacity as parents and/or educators, have probably asked ourselves already at some point. Perhaps one might go further and suggest that it is a question we ought to ask (or have asked) ourselves, insofar as the attempt to provide a meaningful response has a significant bearing on childrearing and education. It is a question that presumably frames the processes of cognitive and moral education – i.e. showing respect for the child's point of view and inducting the child into respecting the points of view of others. After briefly discussing the idea of empathy and relating it to ideas such as sympathy or compassion, this paper focuses on epistemic empathy in particular. The relevant characteristics in this regard are knowledge of another's internal state, including her thoughts and feelings; understanding how another is thinking and feeling and imagining how one would think and feel in the other's place. Regarding childrearing and education, the two central questions that concern us here are: what is the role of epistemic empathy in our dealings with our children, learners and students and how can we ensure that they become empathic individuals themselves? In other words, (how) can empathy be taught and learned? After examining several recommendations regarding the nurturing and development of epistemic empathy (exemplification, modelling, acquisition of poetic and general aesthetic skills, and sensitivity, induction, imitation, etc.), I pay closer attention to the idea of modelling epistemic empathy. I conclude the paper with a few thoughts about limits to epistemic empathy.

Empathy beyond the human: Interactivity and kinetic art in the context of a global crisis

Abstract This article explores the use of interactive and kinetic technologies in contemporary art practice as a means by which artists engage with conditions of social and ecological crisis. In a context in which the perpetual exploitation of human and natural resources threatens the sustainability of the planet and all earthy life, the language of interactivity provides perspective into the interconnectivity of organisms and the interdependence of biological, social, economic and political systems. The interactive, kinetic work affords a distilled set of relationships and movements that rely on connection and participation and, as such, serve as simple and relatable models of complex and interrelated systems. By engendering a sense of fragile suspension between sustainability and collapse – a felt experience of the present ecological crisis – the artists discussed incite affective responses through their works that are argued to be distinctly empathic in nature. Contemporary environmental theory provides insight into a shifting relationship between human and ‘nature’ that dissolves the previously instated binary in favour of an empathic consciousness, at the core of which is a recognition of the interdependence of living organisms. Art historical insight of interactivity as a means of production reveals a notable link between interactive art, destruction and trauma. The affective response engendered in contemporary works that grapple with concepts of transience and mortality relies on the very human knowledge of the body as a relatable site of experience, particularly pain and trauma. The idea of empathy as prefigured by violence and loss is particularly resonant in relation to contemporary ecological trauma. Works by artists including Rebecca Horn, Theo Jansen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Alan Rath, Lygia Clark, Alexandra Karakashian and Robert Krishner are discussed in terms of interactivity and kineticism as prompting empathic engagement in the context of environmental entropy.

Mind, Matter, Meaning and Information

This article aims to show how mind, matter and meaning might be united in one theory using certain concepts of information, building on ideas of empathy and intentionality. The concept of intentionality in philosophy of mind (“aboutness”), which is “the ineliminable mark of the mental” according to Brentano, can be viewed as the relationship between model and object, and empathy can be viewed as a form of mental modelling, so that the inclination to attribute mentality can be identified with the inclination to empathise with the relevant entity. Physical information, a concept quite well established within the discipline of physics, is basically a reconceptualization of material form. Daniel Dennett's concept of the intentional stance allows the development of a concept of “intentional information,” a broad term that encompasses mental content and semantic information generally, as encoded within physical information/material form.

Empathy, Rationality, and Explanation

AbstractThis paper describes the historical background to contemporary discussions of empathy and rationality. It looks at the philosophy of mind and its implications for action explanation and the philosophy of history. In the nineteenth century, the concept of empathy became prominent within philosophical aesthetics, from where it was extended to describe the way we grasp other minds. This idea of empathy as a way of understanding others echoed through later accounts of historical understanding as involving re-enactment, noticeably that of R. G. Collingwood. For much of the late twentieth century, philosophers of history generally neglected questions about action explanation. In the philosophy of mind, however, Donald Davidson inspired widespread discussions of the role of folk psychology and rationality in mental causation and the explanation of actions, and some philosophers of history drew on his ideas to reconsider issues related to empathy. Today, philosophers inspired by the discovery of mirror neurons and the theory of mind debate between theory theorists and simulation theorists are again making the concept of empathy central to philosophical analyses of action explanation and to historical understanding.

The Mandate of Empathy

Confucian thinkers seem to have had something like our present concept of empathy long before that notion was self-consciously available in the West. Wang Yang-Ming’s talk of forming one body with others and similar ideas in the writings of Cheng Hao and, much earlier, of Mengzi make it clear that the Confucian traditions not only had the idea of empathy but saw its essential relation to phenomena like compassion, benevolence, and sympathy that are constitutive of the altruistic side of morality. Nowadays, there is increasing interest among Western psychologists and philosophers in the phenomenon of empathy, and it would be lovely and welcome if, having originated these ideas, Chinese philosophers would now take up and help develop what has recently been said and done about empathy, and its relation to altruism, in the West.

Book Review: Feeling Faint

The two books reviewed here address cognitive science’s (in)adequacy in accounting for meaning and feeling, rationality and empathy. Modell offers a broadly psychoanalytic perspective on the creation and transformation of feeling, loosely mixed with some semi-popular philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience. From a Wittgensteinian-hermeneutic perspective, Heal sketches a new idea of empathy (mind reading) intended to mark the divide between hard science and the normative, subjective and rational aspects of mind, and thus to keep eliminativism at bay. Whereas Modell’s book is somewhat casual and ecumenical and draws on empirical science, Heal’s work consists of dense conceptual analysis in the style of analytic philosophy. Unsurprisingly, neither has the final word on explaining human feeling and reasoning.