Posted by Calthor on 2012-04-16 12:42:36

empathy - the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

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Experiencing/thinking what you would have done in that position is different than experiencing/thinking what that person is feeling/thinking.

Posted by BooAhl on 2012-04-16 12:47:25

But without knowing the person that you want to be empathic to(?) makes it very hard to be empathic? For instance, if you see staving kids in africa, people drowning in Tsunamis or tv from Utöya. You can not be empathic to them, even if you have starved in Africa, had your friends/relatives drown and so on. To be realy empathic you need to know the person really well to be able to know how they would react to a situation.

Is hat correct?

Posted by BlizzBirne on 2012-04-16 12:53:58

i believe that many people use the term like you described of yourself. however, i also believe that is only the first part of showing empathy (see the other comments). but then it becomes so unrealistic that anybody would be empathic about anyone in any situation ever that the term as such would be quite academic i wonder ...
so, anticipating what others feel in a certain situation will demand that you can first imagine yourself being in that situation and what it would do to you. and then, if you know the other person well enough, you can try to switch to that persons' "emotion pattern". unless you go crazy doing so, you will probably have the pleasure of calling your self empathic. if you do go crazy, it might rather be "pathetic" instead ... ;-P

Posted by Wreckage on 2012-04-16 13:27:30

I sometimes get upset about the ABB group too but you should remember it's a large company with representation in over a hundret countries, so it's not surprising it's stepping on some peoples toes from time to time. Sure you may not agree with their buisness plan to buy Thomas&Betts but I'm glad you raised the issue.

PS: I think if Emphasy was still lurking the site he would be upset too.

Posted by SillySod on 2012-04-16 13:39:11

Emphasy - an individual with a fumbbl addiction.

Fun Fact: when he joined fumbbl Emphasy tried to name himself "Empathy" but couldn't spell so ended up with a meaningless collection of letters. (this is actually true btw).

Posted by xcver on 2012-04-16 14:27:54

uhh wreckage I think he is talking about Anders Behring Breivik and not ABB the big swiss company...

Posted by Wreckage on 2012-04-16 14:59:45

Oh now you may have grasped from my response that I didn't understand anything about the first part you wrote about.

But since you were asking a question in the second I could understand I'll try to respond to that more seriously (not really knowing what you saying there above. Anyways..)

I have thought about the various ways to emphasize with people and the implications.

What you describe is the paradigma to put yourself in somebody elses shoes in an attempt to feel the same but to not actually feel the same as that person does. If you sense that you can't feel the same way as the person does in that situation it means exactly that you can't emphasise. But if you are not willing to put yourself in another persons shoes because you are too lazy to think about it, of course you can't emphatisize either.

Because you see.. to put yourself into another persons shoes is exactly the only method how we are able to emphasize with others in first place. There is no way to actually feel what another person feels.
However I have come to believe that the ability to put yourself into another persons shoes is a very fundamental ability for any form of communication and it kind of works like this:

The main purpose of DNA is to create hormones for our body wich in respect regulate and create every part of our personality and our ability to survive in a completely unknown environment when we are born. Ie. our hormones make us feel in a certain way about what we sense around us to help us to survive more efficiently.
Now how do we communicate if we don't speak any language? For this we have something called mirror neurons, wich are particularly specialised on mimicing other peoples feelings.
Imagine you make a sound like "ma" like a baby and you might notice that when you do this trying to emphasize with a helpess being it sounds much like "I want". "ma ma" for example being a good way to say "I want! I want!".
There exist in fact a whole bunch of base sounds "uurgh!" "aah" "ooh" "mmm". They are universally recognisable, but it isn't like we actually understand them when somebody else makes them.
We do however understand them when we try to make them ourselves and transfer the feeling we have about these sounds onto the other person.
Now humans have all fairly similar DNA and respectivly produce all extremly similar hormones wich in turn results in them having very similar feelings about very many things. Meaning if you put yourself in their shoes you will probably feel very similar, given there are not any strong genetical dispositions. You have to understand that any human, no matter where he lives, what his background is and wether or not his genetical code has not met yours in 40000 years (wich is the highest possible time of isolation for humans considering that all humans away from lake victoria got extinct at that time) That ability is of course limited by differences in experiences as well as the fact that even the differences in hormone levels humans have can produce personality nuances wich we would call extreme personalities although they really aren't and just are maybe extreme for us being humans. We should be still able to emphasise with them most of the time. On the other hand it should be much harder for you to emphasise with a woman then say with a male sociopath. However women again are also almost a 100% percent emotionally identical with us.
Now there is another problem wich i mentioned before wich is background. The ability to emphasize is I believe purely emotional. However emotions as we experience them are tied to memories.
It's save to say that humans are basically crippled beings when it comes to instincts. That is why we in difference to almost all other mammals are unable to take care of ourselves when we are born and never actually fully develop the instincts to take care of ourselves either.
One could say: Nature gave us a lot of leeway in the way we are applying our feelings to our environment. Our first impressions work by instinct but from there we start memorizing things by attaching feelings to them. Now if we think about them our body sends out the same hormones it send when we had those feelings the first time. Now it is important to understand that our feelings are more like a coktail of emotions than just one emotion. We are not actually able to feel just one thing and nothing else, just as we have all kinds of hormones in our bodies and get tons of different opposing signals in our brain about what to do at any given time.
This way we are able to recognize an event. This results in that every time we feel something that all events that are tied to the same feeling become recollectable. In response, if you follow those feelings, the coktail of other emotions that are tied to the new event will also return to you. That means, if you have strong emotions about something, different emotions can bring you back to that memory and recreate the feelings you connect to that memory. Ând inevitably tied to all your feelings are all the momeories you connect with them.
Now the problem with empathy is that you obviously can't have the same memories. One could say the cocktail of memories you are dealing with won't be identical to the one of the person you are dealing with. So: There are limits to your ability when it comes to emphasizing with someone who has another history. Especially if you don't know about it but interestingly you can create memories simply by using mirror neurons(ie you can memorize something that happend, even if it didn't involve you but somebody else and have strong feelings about it all your life. )
But I think what people often forget is that.. the part we are unable to emphasize with, the part wich is purely based on past experiences and the emotions tied to them, is the irrational part. What you can understand is what is logical about his feelings. unsurprisingly logic is defined as that what every reasonably thinking person can agree to.
So it shouldn't bother you that you can't look at the bottom on somebody elses head if you judge that persons behavior. That is if you accept reason and rationality as a feasible concept of human interaction.

Posted by BooAhl on 2012-04-16 15:18:30

So what you are saying or just copied(?) from somewhere, is that by putting our self in somebodies shoes is all we can do, and then it depends how like we think with our subject that deciedes how empathic we are at that time.

And the more empathic a person is the more he tries to put him self in other peoples shoes but there is also the the likeness with the subject.

So to put it in to a logical formula: level of emphassy(pun intended) = sum(1->n)(Pn)
where P is the likness we have with each subject(0 to 1), and n is the number of subject's shoes we put on in a life time.
This formula makes older people more empathic so maybe we should divide the level by time to show true emphatic levels. By this standard I am pretty empathic since I put on alot of shoe's during a day.

Posted by hale on 2012-04-16 15:28:46

Rated 1 because I hate human beings.

Posted by Nelphine on 2012-04-16 15:28:55

The main thing is: Empathy is the ability to understand other people's situations and feel what they feel.

Our starting point is first: Understand the situation. The more we understand it, the closer we get to what they feel, the more empathic you are. Second, we attempt to predict what their reaction to a given situation will be, which might be different from our own; the more you can predict their reaction (as opposed to your own), the more empathic you are. The main (in my opinion) way of understanding/predicting how someone else will react is to learn about their situation - so if you want to try feel empathic towards a starving child in Africa, you probably should physically live in Africa, you should experience starving, you should recall what it is like to be a childhood (and if memory doesn't serve well, then you should visit lots of other children), you should learn their religion, their customs, etc etc. The more you learn, the closer to absolute empathy you will get, although you will never fully get there, as there (in my opinion) is no way to learn everything about another person, so you might always be missing some detail that will change how they would react.

Posted by Wreckage on 2012-04-16 16:34:38

Nono; i didn't copy a word from anywhere. You can clearly tell that from the grammar.

Posted by Wreckage on 2012-04-16 16:41:35

And the assumption that old people will be more empathic is actually more contradicting to what I was trying to say.
The more memories you have, the less empathic you are to the logical and recognizable part of emotions because your emotions are tied too strongly to your own memories rather then your instincts.
And what I'm saying is that it is allright not to be able to emphasize with someone when some messed up memories are the only reason why he behaves irrationally.
You have to be able to emphasize with people who make sense and not cut them short. You don't have to accept anything that somebody throws at you.
And putting yourself into somebody elses shoes that's really the best you can do anyways.
So don't demand more of yourself or people will just screw with you.

Posted by BooAhl on 2012-04-16 16:58:57

I was just kidding Wreckage, it was just a wall of text.
Thx for the thoughts.

@xcver: just for facts, ABB is not a swiss company. It is a Swedish/Swiss company.

And probably my future employer. Over 20% probability.

Posted by Overhamsteren on 2012-04-16 18:29:35

I miss the universally recognisable base sound /hurt :*(