Notion Of Empathy Research Articles

Beyond Empathy; Love. Person and Otherness in the Thought of Edith Stein

Debating the nature of social cognition, there has been an upsurge in studies on empathy since the turn of the century. The contribution of Edith Stein’s doctoral dissertation On Empathy has also been brought to the forefront. In her philosophy, there is a continuous concern for the questions of social relations and human community, the explorations of the human person and its unfolding in the encounter with otherness being a leading thread in her work. Still, after her dissertation, the notion of empathy is no longer in use. What does this signify? I propose that the notion of ‘empathy’ proved to be too restrained for what Stein discovers and wants to phenomenologically describe. After her conversion to the Christian faith, working in the intersection of philosophy and theology, she expands and transforms her notion of what it means to be a person and, correspondingly, her intuition of the social relation. In the interpretative readings of this article, I show how Edith Stein’s early intuitions on empathy, alterity, and personhood come to full development in her later writings, where the relation to otherness and the unfolding of the person are conceived as inseparable from the experience of a loving God.

Making room for empathy in contemporary virtual reality cinema

ABSTRACT This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate it. Specifically, this paper considers two forms of embodiment—being and being with—in order to highlight some of the shortcomings of the ‘empathy machine’ discourse. In doing so, I also offer an alternative analogy: a tool for empathy, rather than a machine. Finally, an analysis of two key VR productions that invite users to be with characters—rather than putting users ‘in the shoes’ of a character—allows me to demonstrate how a more productive path towards empathy in VR might instead lay in experiences that create space—or ‘make room’—for the work of empathy to be undertaken by individuals who know and want to use VR as a tool, rather than as an end in itself.

VR as a metaleptic possible world of global citizenship embodiment: a cognitive stylistic approach

Abstract Bringing together narrative elements, virtual affordances, and participants’ embodied interactions, virtual reality (VR) movies instantiate new narrative techniques by offering an immersive experience. This study examines virtual narrative beyond mere interactional engagement and extends the phenomenon to include worlding, metaleptic embodiment, and instantiated possible selves. It aims at exploring VR narrative as idiosyncratic cognitive processes, with a special focus on the notions of empathy and emotional involvement as significant elements contributing to this peculiar interactional and cognitive experience. A cognitive stylistic approach is adopted to explain the functional ability of VR technology in transporting participants to alternate worlds and in making them experience a kind of self-transformation. The immersively metaleptic discourse of Baba Yaga is examined as engaging participants in a quest of how to act as morally and socially empathetic and responsible citizens—global citizens. Baba Yaga narrative deploys the narrative discourses of flashbacks, facework, doubly deictic ‘you’, performatives, and imperatives along with material processes to situate participants in a virtual space of actions and doings and hence encourage them to configure their desired self(ves) across different immersive interactions. The global citizen is embodied in the interactive narrative of Baba Yaga, through invoking various storyworld possible selves (SPSs): the feeling self, the responsible self, and the moral self, which encompasses climate activist self and interculturally aware self who manages to get rid of its own cultural biases as the narrative proceeds. Embodied in these selves, participants transform the virtual world into possible worlds of their own passion, agency, choices, hopes, and desires.

SEEC and CHASE: An emotion-cause pair-oriented approach and conversational dataset with heterogeneous emotions for empathetic response generation

Empathetic Response Generation (ERG) in dialog agents has gained tremendous attention in the recent past. Among various methods used to impart empathy in the generated response, the contemporary one is using the emotion cause. Previous works of ERG have 2 major flaws: (1) usage of the emotion detected using the entire conversation to generate the empathetic response is heavily misleading as the speaker might be going through a completely different emotion in his last utterance. This erroneous emotion detection, in turn, leads to incorrect detection of the cause of that emotion. (2) Usage of entire utterance has proven to be inefficient in the cause extraction task. Consequently, existing works fail to capture multiple emotion clauses and their corresponding emotion causes for efficient ERG. In our work, we introduce a new dataset,11The dataset will be made available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ozYeuACo_He75w0XoNWZntMZ3FkiTHPB?usp=sharing.CHASE, which is a compilation of conversations extracted from various plays to highlight the above-mentioned change in emotion and how one can show empathy in such a case. In this dataset, we use Dr. Brene Brown’s 22https://brenebrown.com/. notion of empathy on how to administer this change in emotion in the response and still sound empathetic by generating golden responses for each conversation. To address the aforementioned flaws, we also propose a model, SEEC, that utilizes the Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction task on the conversation to find various {emotion clause, cause clause} pairs and use these to impart empathy appropriately to the responses. Our qualitative and quantitative results prove the efficiency in generating enhanced empathetic responses of both SEEC and CHASE.

The normativity question in Quine’s naturalism: The context of the language learning situation

Quine has been charged with eliminating the normative dimension from his naturalized epistemology. The aim of the paper is to look at the role of empathy in Quine’s language learning situation, which in its simplest form is constituted by the parent-child relation. We will explore the normativity of the role of empathy thereof by exploiting the sociality of the language learning situation. Since the sociality of Quine’s notion of empathy is implicit, to explore the normativity expression thereof, we will examine the explicit sociality of Wittgenstein’s language learning situation–also constituted in its simplest form by the master-novice relation–and the normative character of it. By explicating the normativity of the calibrating role of the master and of rule following generally, we will parse the moral dimensions of the empathizing role of the linguist in Quine’s language learning situation. Finally, by examining the nature of normativity in empathizing, we will establish that the normativity of empathizing involved in Quine’s language learning situation is socially grounded without denying its individual dimension. We will conclude that the normativity objection against Quine’s naturalism thus stands refuted.

Feminist Legal Theory and #MeToo: Revisiting Tarana Burke’s Vision of Empowerment Through Empathy


 It is my purpose to ground this Article in ubuntu and the politics of radical love as applied to the goals of #MeToo and its pursuit of redress for victims of sexual harms. Part II explores the convergences and divergences of #MeToo with feminist campaigns of an earlier era. Part III questions whether a renewed quest for gender equality, largely spawned by a Twitter/social media campaign, may lead to sustainable change built on notions of empathy and restorative justice, which was the vision espoused by Carrie in her work and which influenced Tarana Burke when she founded #MeToo. Part IV examines restorative justice approaches in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a way to address the harms of sexual violence. I conclude in Part V with possibilities and limitations in the restorative justice approach to redressing these kinds of claims.

Empathetic or sympathetic: What do I want my coach to be?

There appears to be widespread acceptance that a coach should be empathetic. However, there is considerable confusion over what empathy is, and how/if it differs from sympathy, and if empathy leads to better outcomes. The paper reviews the research evidence related to the development of empathy, sympathy, and pro-social and altruistic behaviour and concludes that notions of empathy in coaching are not evidence-based, are largely about marketing, and that one should want a sympathetic, rather than an empathetic coach.

The role of empathy for artificial intelligence accountability

Accountability encompasses multiple aspects such as responsibility, justification, reporting, traceability, audit, and redress so as to satisfy diverse requirements of different stakeholders— consumers, regulators, developers, etc. In order to take into account needs of different stakeholders and thus, to put into practice accountability in Artificial Intelligence, the notion of empathy can be quite effective. Empathy is the ability to be sensitive to the needs of someone based on understanding their affective states and intentions, caring for their feelings, and socialization, which can help in addressing the social-technical challenges associated with accountability. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we elucidate the connections between empathy and accountability, drawing find- ings from various disciplines like psychology, social science, and organizational science. Second, we suggest potential pathways to incorporate empathy.

Empathy in phenomenological research: Employing Edith Stein's account of empathy as a practical and ethical guide

An ‘affective turn’ has come about in philosophy of mind debates and the notion of empathy is increasingly influential. This could usefully extend into psychological research, particularly in counselling and psychotherapy. Edith Stein’s account of empathy bridges gaps between individual psychological experience, embodied interpersonal emotionality, and our collective social moral order. Her philosophy provides ethical and practical guidance for researchers who seek to understand the meaning of what their participants experience in the flow of intersubjectivity and situated living. Researchers can thereby avoid positioning them as ‘different,’ ‘deviant,’ or ‘dysfunctional.’ Methodologies are recommended, based on Stein’s account.

Overlapping and specific neural correlates for empathizing, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing: A coordinate-based meta-analytic study.

While the discussion on the foundations of social understanding mainly revolves around the notions of empathy, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing, their degree of overlap versus specificity is still unclear. We took a meta‐analytic approach to unveil the neural bases of cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy, both in healthy individuals and pathological conditions characterized by social deficits such as schizophrenia and autism. We observed partially overlapping networks for cognitive and affective mentalizing in the medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, and lateral temporal cortex, while empathy mainly engaged fronto‐insular, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex. Adjacent process‐specific regions in the posterior lateral temporal, ventrolateral, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex might underpin a transition from abstract representations of cognitive mental states detached from sensory facets to emotionally‐charged representations of affective mental states. Altered mentalizing‐related activity involved distinct sectors of the posterior lateral temporal cortex in schizophrenia and autism, while only the latter group displayed abnormal empathy related activity in the amygdala. These data might inform the design of rehabilitative treatments for social cognitive deficits.

Postscript

Postscript

Reaping a benefit at the expense of multiple others: How are the losses of others counted?

We investigate individual decisions that produce gains for oneself, while imposing losses on a group of others. We theorize, based on the notion of empathy, that decision-makers consider the magnitude of the pain or loss they inflict on an individual in the group, but are largely insensitive to the number of individuals in the group who suffer losses. Studies involving personal choices or judgments of others’ choices largely confirmed these predictions. They also revealed a dispersion effect, whereby participants made more selfish choices, and judged others’ selfish choices more lightly, when the social losses were dispersed more thinly across a group. It appears that decision-makers’ empathy for others who suffer losses is not readily adjusted to the number of people affected or to the aggregated losses. It also appears that empathy mediates judgments of selfish behavior. The findings are related to theories of empathy, and decisions under conflicts of interest.

‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Empathy, Imagination and Estrangement in Johan van der Keuken's Face Value and Herman Slobbe

This article takes up film and imagination via the problem of empathy. Proposing a different entry into contemporary polemics over empathy, the ‘empathic imagination’ is reconceptualized as a problematic of form rather than psychological experience. That is, instead of adopting a pre-given notion of empathy to illuminate the relation between film and the spectator's moral imagination, this article considers how that imagination is constituted in and through the image to begin with. After tracing the genealogy of empathy ( Einfühlung) in German aesthetics, the concept is put into play through readings of ‘#Look Beyond Borders’, an online video produced by Amnesty International, and two documentaries by Johan van der Keuken – Face Value (1991) and Herman Slobbe (1966). In these works, the facial image is read as the imaginary terrain in which to explore very different notions of what might count as empathy and the empathic imagination in film and media.

Husserl’s Theory of Communication

This article outlines the emergence of Husserl’s theory of ‘communication proper’ ( Mitteilung or Kommunikation) in the context of his genetic analyses of intersubjectivity. It defines the meaning and function of Mitteilung in contradistinction with the notion of empathy and thus demonstrates its distinct generative constitution. I propose that Mitteilung has the capacity to cancel the ‘operative’ opposition between social acts and instinctive intersubjectivity and thus to frame a non-determinist theory of sociality. This capacity is largely ignored by the dominant interpretation, according to which the concept of communication in Husserl is derivative of the more fundamental category of empathy. A major consequence to this argument is that it determines why eminent readers of Husserl such as Derrida have missed an important opportunity when they failed to notice the distinct role of Mitteilung. This alternative view is expanded onto communication media in general by taking Kittler’s project as a vantage point.

L’empathie en médecine

ObjectivesEmpathy is everywhere. It has become a major topic of interest in many disciplines and professions. Cultivating empathy has been prescribed as a solution to numerous social ailments and political problems. One reason for such a proliferation of attention is the lack of a clear conceptual taxonomy and the use of empathy as an umbrella under which definitions vary enormously. It is widely acknowledged that empathy plays a critical role in the physician-patient relationship and has a positive impact in clinical practice. However, the medical profession is struggling to achieve an appropriate balance between clinical distance and empathy. Too much sensitivity to negative affect expressed by patients, without proper emotion regulation, may lead to anxiety and personal distress, which is detrimental to efficient cognitive functioning and can take a toll on the well-being of physicians. Too little empathy may lead to an underestimation of the pain of others and poor rapport with patients. As the field of empathy expands, the lack of conceptual coherence challenges advances in medicine. Moreover, in some cases there is little added theoretical or clinical value in applying the broad/all-encompassing term of empathy, which is by nature multidimensional and interpersonal. MethodsThe number of competing conceptualizations of empathy circulating the literature has created a serious problem by making it difficult to keep track of which process or mental state this neologism refers to in any given discussion. Multiple definitions limit progress in the role of empathy in medicine, and which instruments are appropriate to assess its function and utility. Keeping track is important because the different conceptualizations refer to distinct psychological processes that vary, sometimes widely, in their function, phenomenology, biological mechanisms, and effects on interpersonal relationships. In this article, after considering the polysemic nature of empathy, I briefly review the functions attributed to empathy in medicine. Then I explain how theoretical clarity may be improved by examining knowledge from empirical investigations in psychology and social neuroscience which has led to better define the different components of empathy as well as their neurological mechanisms. One section critically reviews the functional neuroimaging studies that have been specifically designed to examine patterns of brain response in physicians and health professionals. A separate section addresses how social and relational factors, particularly group membership, may impact the expression and effect of empathy in medical care. This new perspective, based on advances in scientific psychology and social neuroscience, has the potential to reduce confusion and ambiguity. This critical and informed analysis of empirical studies in functional neuroimaging with health professionals calls for a nuanced assessment of empathy's functions, that are not necessarily a panacea as some seem to think. ConclusionA provocative and more sober view on the value and the very interest in the notion of empathy in medicine is proposed. Ultimately, cultivating empathic concern (sympathy or compassion in today's medicine) seems more important than other aspects, particularly affect sharing or putting oneself in the patient's shoes.

Fostering Empathy in Clinical Teaching and Learning Environments: A Unified Approach

This paper draws together broad insights into the notion of empathy, with specific lessons learned from current approaches to empathy within both law and medicine. The role of empathy is becoming more central to modern professionalism in both fields as they demonstrate a movement towards partnership-building, with an emphasis on patient-centred decision-making in medicine and more holistic, personalised client care within law. The paper aims to identify fundamental principles to inform the development of a unified approach to the inclusion of empathy within clinical teaching and learning environments. These principles can then be used as a basis to highlight and share best practice and consider common challenges and opportunities, as well as being drawn upon by those working within interdisciplinary clinical partnerships. Identifying and exploring fundamental principles will assist in ensuring that empathy is acknowledged and utilised in a psychologically and emotionally healthy and appropriate manner to benefit the students, clients, patients and other stakeholders involved.

The role of accounting in mediating empathic care for the “other”

Purpose This paper hypothesizes that a system of accounting underpinned by attributions of harm has the capacity, more than conventional accounting, to elicit empathic concern among managers, by becoming the mediating link between organisational responsibility and concern for the “other”. Design/methodology/approach The literature-inspired reflections presented in this paper stem from the theoretical perspective of care-ethics supported by the notions of empathy and proximity to highlight how the propensity to empathise is mediated by attributions of harm and responsibility. Findings The proposed “new” accounting, coined “connected accounting” is proposed because of its potential to make visible the neglected and marginalised segments of society that presently lie hidden in conventional accounting. Accounting for the effects of organisational practice on people and society is expected to strengthen the care-ethic relationship between key actors – managers, accountants and stakeholders. Research limitations/implications The paper is limited by the assumptions that underpin the conceptualised notion of “Connected Accounting”. Originality/value This essay introduces to the accounting ethics literature the role of emotion and empathic care in accounting, including sociological aspects of accounting reflecting the ongoing quest for understanding the processes and consequences of accounting as a social practice.

Empathy in psychiatry and psychotherapy

Empathy is the epicenter of the theoretical and clinical interest of many different scientific domains, constituting a common term in different fields as these of psychology, psychiatry, clinical psychopathology, neuroscience, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Studying the phenomenon of empathy requires distinguishing the empathy as a method of observation of psychological phenomena from the empathy as a component of the therapy of psychopathological phenomena. In this case, beyond the empathic understanding, the optimum responsiveness of the therapist is included. Empathy means sharing the psychological and emotional state of another as if you were able to sense one's private world. This emotional sharing is a temporary situation and concerns the quality but not the quantity of the emotional experience. The modern scientists of neurobiology and neurobehavior distinguish three types of empathy: the emotional, the cognitive and motivational which help the interpersonal relations occurring in complex groups of society where the transgenerational relationships between parents and offspring are essential for the survival of species. Jaspers introduces, already by the beginning of the 20th century in his monumental work ''General Psychopathology'', the notion of empathy as an interpretative and a diagnostic tool in psychiatry and psychopathology. Meanwhile psychoanalysis, mainly during its early course, was not impressed by this term. The answer to this seems to be that the term empathy is related to the intersubjectivity and the interpersonal relationship, fields that were not really attractive at this point of time for the psychoanalytical theory which during the period of the founder of the psychoanalysis was initially mainly focused on the "intrapsychic" field. However, during the course of time and chiefly with the contribution of Kohut and Greenson, the importance of the concept of empathy is emphasized in the clinical psychoanalysis and efforts are made regarding the clarification of the nature and the psychological mechanisms that operate in this complex intuitive (feeling the other through the interpersonal communication) form of knowledge. The quality of the relationship between the therapist and the patient (therapeutic alliance) plays a fundamental role in the positive outcome in any form of psychotherapy. Empathic understanding plays an important role in the quality of the therapeutic relationship. In the field of general psychiatry, the focus of research for the role of empathy and the potential of its application, has been until today limited. The lack of a model for the application of empathy in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic practice is an important challenge for the training of the new psychiatrists.

Extracting Routing Events From Traceroutes: A Matter of Empathy

With the increasing diffusion of Internet probing technologies, a large amount of regularly collected traceroutes are available for Internet service providers (ISPs) at low cost. We show how it is possible, given solely an arbitrary set of traceroutes, to spot routing paths that change similarly over time and aggregate them into inferred routing events. With respect to previous works, our approach does not require any knowledge of the network, does not need complex integration of several data sources, and exploits the asynchronicity of measurements to accurately position events in time. The formal model at the basis of our methodology revolves around the notion of empathy , a relation that binds similarly behaving traceroutes. The correctness and completeness of our approach are based on structural properties that are easily expressed in terms of empathic measurements. We perform experiments with data from public measurement infrastructures like RIPE Atlas, showing the effectiveness of our algorithm in distilling significant events from a large amount of traceroute data. We also validate the accuracy of the inferred events against ground-truth knowledge of routing changes originating from induced and spontaneous routing events. Given these promising results, we believe that our methodology can be an effective aid for troubleshooting at the ISPs level. The source code of our algorithm is publicly available at https://github.com/empadig .

Why Does Empathy Matter for Morality?

In this paper we discuss Prinz’s Kantian arguments in “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” (2011). They purport to show that empathy is not necessary for morality because it is not part of the capacities required for moral competence and it can bias moral judgment. First, we show that even conceding Prinz his notions of empathy and moral competence, empathy still plays a role in moral competence. Second, we argue that moral competence is not limited to moral judgment. Third, we reject Prinz’s notion of empathy because it is too restrictive, in requiring emotional matching. We conclude that once morality and empathy are properly understood, empathy’s role in morality is vindicated. Morality is not reduced to a form of rational judgment, but it necessarily presupposes pro-social preferences and motivation and sensitivity to inter-subjective demands.