This document discusses Empathy Circles, which are groups that meet online to practice empathy skills. It explores how empathy is studied across different fields and can bring people together. Empathy Circles aim to deepen empathic abilities through mindfulness, perspective-taking, reflection and storytelling. The document suggests Empathy Circles could help build a more compassionate culture and invites people to participate in the circles or research.
1. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Research in empathy and
compassion as a factor for
change:
Lidewij Niezink, PhD
2. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
How our world is Changing
Google Books (corpus English) 1900-2008
3. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
How our world is Changing
Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have
been done for the terms you've entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google
over time.
6. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Input from diverse fields of scientific enquiry:
•Psychology
•Neuroscience
•Biology
•Philosophy
•Arts / Humanities
•Anthropology
•etc
7. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
The Empathy Umbrella: Explosion of output!
8. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
The Empathy Umbrella: We all contribute
9. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
The Empathy Umbrella:
How can we come together?
Combining Research and
Walking the talk:
10. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles
• Open to anyone with a willingness to practice empathy.
• Focussed on deepening different empathic skill
components.
• Offer a platform: from a need to be heard to a space to
listen.
• International: online, through Google Hangouts: on
youtube
12. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Intention
• Stepping out of reactivity into intentionality.
• Behavioral intentions predict intentional behavior
(Ajzen, 1991) depending on ultimate interest.
• I am willing to empathize: from ultimate (society/
culture) to specific (in this circle).
14. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Self-Empathy
• Mindfulness / Open awareness
• Meta-cognition: the ability to know that we know, to
observe that we think (Flavell, 1979).
• Self-Compassion: extremely important for emotion
regulation (Neff, 2003).
• Non-Judgemental
18. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Reflective Empathy
• Rogers: Client Centered Therapy
• When reflected: Better Emotion Regulation
• Less negative affect after describing conflict
• More alignment (language and ideas)
19. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Imaginative Empathy
• Cognitive empathy / theory of mind (ToM) or
mentalizing: the ability to represent and
understand the mental states of others.
• Empathic accuracy: 25-35% (Ickes, 2003)
• Block: projection
• Perspective taking: self vs other
• Story telling / Role play / Fantasizing
20. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Empathic Arising
• Mysterious consequence... Action/creativity
• Arising in the moment, signalled by arousal.
• A feeling of belonging due to the circle process
• Tapping into motivational system
• Building resillience?
22. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Building a Culture
• Restorative Empathy Circles
• Family Empathy Circles
• Mediation Empathy Circles
• Scholarly Empathy Circles
• Charter for Compassion Book Club Empathy
Circles
23. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Empathy Circles: Invitation
• Participate in a circle.
• Help us in researching the effects of the circles
• Join us in applying your findings!
• Want to know more? It is all online ;-)
24. Empathy Circles: A Factor for Change
Blowing our intention into the world
Hinweis der Redaktion
All empathy but: some about brainstructures, other about self reports or observations or tasks or neurons.
And we ritualize this intention by lighting a candle. Not for no reason because Paul Zak, who is doing a lot of work on the role of oxytocin in empathy, suggested to us that ritual might be one way to release Oxytocin. And research shows that o xytocin facilitates closeness and generosity (Depue and Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005; Zak, Stanton & Ahmadi, 2007).
in order to not end up in experiencing just personal distress but rather to be able to empathize, we need a good capacity to regulate emotions elicited in empathy contexts.
As you can see, I fit in nicely too. We get our Mirror Neuron System into gear, we mimic each other as to increase affiliation and positive social judgment. Research shows that we like others better when they mimic us and that mirroring also increases pro-social orientation in general (van Baaren et al., 2004;Ashton–James et al., 2007; Fischer-Lokou et al., 2011.;Guéguen et al., 2011; Stel andHarinck, 2011). If not for all the scientific reasons, I can assure you that mirroring each other is always a very joyful exercise!
Interlocutors tend to automatically align at different levels of linguistic representation, e.g., through repeating each other’s words and grammar (Garrod and Pickering, 2004). Communicates interest and commitment in understanding the other’s perspective, thereby implying that their feelings are valid and worth listening to.
Rime (2009) suggests that socio- affective responses such as comfort and empathy temporarily alleviate a narrator’s negative emotions and generate a deep feeling of relief.