Empathy

The empathy (of the old Greek εμ, in, inside and πάθo, suffering, which one tests ) is a complex concept indicating the mechanism Psychologique by which an individual can include/understand the Sentiment S and the emotion S of another person, without feeling them itself. The empathic Perception is related to the function amygdalienne.

Definitions

In the social sciences, the empathy indicates an attitude towards Others characterized by an objective and rational effort of intellectual comprehension of felt other. Excluding particularly any personal emotional drive (sympathy, antipathy) and any Moral judgment .

The empathy is different from the emotional Contagion in which a person tests the same emotional state as another without preserving the distance that one observes in the empathy. The modern theories distinguish also the empathy from the Sympathie which also consists in including/understanding the affections of another person but who comprises in more one emotional dimension : whereas the empathy rests on a capacity of Imagination, sympathy rests more on the emotional proximity with that or that which is the object. Certain researchers prefer speech of cognitive empathy to insist on the fact that the empathy rests on a neutral mechanism Cognitif without bond with the relation which one maintains with the person who is the object.

Many definitions are proposed for the empathy, often confused with sympathy. The empathy implies a process of retreat Intellectuel which aims at the Compréhension states emotional S of the others, while sympathy is a behavior reflex, of reactive type.

Illustration

Within the framework of the artistic programme of accompaniment of the first line of Tram of Strasbourg, the American artist Barbara Kruger created a panel of 18,2 out of 7,6 meters where in large letters the empathy is registered can change the world . This panel is installed in the station of the gallery to in-glass serving the central station of the city. The gallery was destroyed since following the alteration work due on arrival of the TGV.

Neurosciences and empathy

The researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti, director of the department of neurosciences of the medical college of Parma, baptized neurons mirrors those which are responsible for the imitation sympathetic nerve. These neuronal circuits make us adopt the expression of the emotion other, or by identification, feel feelings of comparable nature or of nature considered as similar.

The mirror effect often compared to the return made by the expert of the empathy led to a certain confusion in the definitions.

Theories and theorists of the empathy

This concept was the subject of many reflections on behalf of theorists and experts of the relation: Carl Rogers, which applies it with listening known as benevolent (or listening activates) and some of its pupils, such Thomas Gordon, Marshall Rosenberg…

One can find a notion wide of the empathy in the work " Practical of the Mediation " ED. ESF, of Jean-Louis Lascoux, with the neologism alterocentrage . This term tends to define, in mediation, an attitude and a behavior excluding an unspecified adhesion with the emotions expressed by a third, not to express interpretation and thus, overall, not to be identified with the other: “not to take for oneself what is not oneself” (not inspired of the work of Descartes. The author indicates that the difference of the empathy, the alterocentrage allows this distance compared to the suffering. The concept of empathy implies an attitude centered on the stated suffering, while the alterocentrage does not take the party of the suffering: it allows centering on the interlocutor. It is thus a concept of distance excluding the party taken on what is expressed by the other: “not to take the emotional words or states like unquestionable representations of the lived concrete experiment”.

According to Geoffrey Miller The Mating Mind the empathy would have developed because to put at the place of the other to know how he thinks and perhaps will react constitutes an important factor of survival in a world where the man is unceasingly in competition with the man.

Examples of empathic formulations

a person known as:

- I should not have done that… I did not do it voluntarily
Retour (mirror effect) by means of the empathy:
- You regret what you did and you feel guilty…

a person known as:

- JB prevents to me from doing what I want…
Return:
- You test frustration vis-a-vis JB and you do not manage to affirm you…

a person known as:

- It was brilliant. I spent the holidays of dreams…
Return:
- Your holidays filled with enthusiasm you… and not I am happy for you (which is a projective formulation of oneself and consequently of sympathetic nerve type)… '

" returns empathiques" are relatively " normés" , expressing a feeling or an implicit emotion. They consist in testifying to centering on the person who expresses and restores an emotional dimension, by using the Reformulation (analogy). Like above illustrated for the examples, these returns can be used compared to positive or negative feelings as much.

In other words, the empathy, contrary to the sympathy which is spontaneous (relative with an identification = attraction or rejection) is a intellectual practice which, by definition, is taught and is learned.

Fiction, esotericism and empathy

Since the development of the roleplays, the term of empathy is used in a very close way to the Mentalisme. The empathy is in this context the énième sixth direction which would be founded on the intuition.

Thus, in certain plays, the character who would have the capacity to handle the others while using their emotions, even simply while reading in their thought, would be a Empathe. Esoteric communities adapted these ideas to develop, to even support their magic beliefs .

See for examples:

The same empathic imagination of capacity assists from the scenario from the American series Profiler, created by Cynthia Saunders.

Literature and cinema

Do the American author Philip K. Dick used the concept of empathy in his novel Androïdes dream of electric sheep? . To distinguish the androïdes in escape from the human beings, the Blade runner Rick Deckard uses a test of psychology which highlights the absence of empathy. This test is based on the observation of the emotive reactions through the dilation of the pupil. In this same work, certain human reach a mystical experiment of martyrdom via a box with empathy.

The film " what the women " want; is an electric shock and can be looked under the angle of the message which it conveys as regards empathy…

References

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