Empathy and Our Contentment, Cooperation, and Compassion

Empathy and compassion

As humans we are a highly social species: in order to coordinate our joint actions and assure successful communication, we use language skills to explicitly convey information to each other, and social abilities such as empathy or perspective taking to infer another person's emotions and mental state. The human cognitive capacity to draw inferences about other peoples' beliefs, intentions and t...

Changing lives with empathy, compassion and skill.

She persuaded Vodacom Foundation Chairman, Mthobi Tyamzashe (himself born with a cleft lip), to sit in on one infant’s life-changing operation, in spite of his deep aversion to hospitals. To make doubly sure, Naiker got Vodacom’s then CEO, Alan Knott-Craig (who spent the first 5 years of his life in leg calipers and much later suffered a life-changing near-fatal heart attack), to attend a subse...

Compassion and empathy--a Doulas best friends.

Suffering and compassion: The links among adverse life experiences, empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior.

Experiencing past adversity traditionally has been linked to negative life outcomes. However, emerging evidence suggests that heterogeneity exists with respect to links between adversity and resilience, with adversity often enhancing cooperation in the face of joint suffering. Here, the authors present 2 studies designed to examine if the severity of past adversity is associated with an endurin...

Are Empathy and Compassion Bad for the Professional Social Worker?

Recent studies have shown that social workers and other professional helpers who work with traumatized individuals run a risk of developing compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress. Some researchers have hypothesized that helpers do this as a result of feeling too much empathy or too much compassion for their clients, thereby implying that empathy and compassion may be bad for the profe...