Tag Archive for 'empatia'

Mourinho is searching for an empathic assistant

Mourinho has fired his second coach at Roma for lack of empathy towards the team. This situation has once again highlighted that a very competent professional in terms of technical and scientific skills if these are not accompanied by the ability to know how to communicate and show a high degree of empathy towards the group is rejected.

In fact, empathy stimulates the development of adaptive social behaviors such as cooperation and help. It is also fragile, and commonly disappears in team conflict situations. When an expert does not exhibit this quality in his or her relationship with others, the result is that his or her technical expertise is not heard by the players and is interpreted not as a source of help but as a way to be critical and destructive.

Empathy is therefore essential in professional relationships, as it allows athletes to accept critical remarks about their performance without feeling attacked as a person.

Mourinho e il futuro: "Cerco un club con ambizione ed empatia, come era  all'Inter" - la Repubblica

Empathy and compassion to communicate with the others

Tania Singer e Olga Klimecki (2014) Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24, R875-R878.

“Although the concepts of empathy and compassion have existed for many centuries, their scientific study is relatively young. The term empathy has its origins in the Greek word ‘empatheia’ (passion), which is composed of ‘en’ (in) and ‘pathos’ (feeling). The term empathy was introduced into the English language following the German notion of ‘Einfühlung’ (feeling into), which originally described resonance with works of art and only later was used to describe the resonance between human beings. The term compassion is derived from the Latin origins ‘com’ (with/together) and ‘pati’ (to suffer); it was introduced into the English language through the French word compassion. In spite of the philosophical interest for empathy and the fundamental role that compassion plays in most religions and secular ethics, it was not until the late 20th century that researchers from social and developmental psychology started to study these phenomena scientifically.

According to this line of psychological research, an empathic response to suffering can result in two kinds of reactions: empathic distress, which is also referred to as personal distress; and compassion, which is also referred to as empathic concern or sympathy. For simplicity, we will refer to empathic distress and compassion when speaking about these two different families of emotions. While empathy refers to our general capacity to resonate with others’ emotional states irrespective of their valence — positive or negative — empathic distress refers to a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings. Compassion, on the other hand, is conceived as a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help. By consequence, it is associated with approach and prosocial motivation.

Research by Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg in the fields of social and developmental psychology confirmed that people who feel compassion in a given situation help more often than people who suffer from empathic distress. Furthermore, Daniel Batsons’ work showed that the extent to which people feel compassion can, for instance, be increased by explicitly instructing participants to feel with the target person. Interestingly, the capacity to feel for another person is not only a property of a person or a situation, but can also be influenced by training.

In order to train social emotions like compassion, recent psychological research has increasingly made use of meditation-related techniques that foster feelings of benevolence and kindness. The most widely used technique is called ‘loving kindness training’. This form of mental practice is carried out in silence and relies on the cultivation of friendliness towards a series of imagined persons. One would usually start the practice by visualizing a person one feels very close to and then gradually extend the feeling of kindness towards others, including strangers and, at a later stage, also people one has difficulties with. Ultimately, this practice aims at cultivating feelings of benevolence towards all human beings.”

Empathy and kindness for our children

Very well brief article written about a central topic concerning the parents-children relation. Each of us has to improve in this area.

“When asked, many parents say that they value kindness in their children above many other traits. We instinctively know that social skills like gentleness, kindness, and sharing, are important to the long-term health and well-being of our children. But these social and emotional skills are also linked to empathy, or the ability of a person to understand what another person is experiencing. Without empathy, it is difficult for a person to understand and express many of the feelings that help them get along with others.

According to The Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning at Vanderbilt University, young children experience several stages of development that influence their social and emotional skills from birth—and their empathy. From birth through the first few months of life, babies learn how to react to other people’s actions and emotions from their parents and caregivers. If parents and caregivers express loving, calm attention to their children and others, then babies learn that they are loved, and how to show kindness to others. As very young children learn to understand their own feelings, they also learn to understand, and care for, the feelings of others.

There are many ways that parents and caregivers of young children can help them learn more about their feelings, and how to care and express concern for others. Parents and caregivers can do this by expressing love and attention to their babies from birth. They can also use storytime to talk about how characters in books are feeling—anger, fear, love, or sadness. And songs like “If You’re Happy and You Know It…” can be adapted to express many kinds of feelings.”

(by Too Small to Fail)