in delivery of the last week I talked about altruism in order to try to explain why there were people who would freely help communities affected by the hurricane. One comment I received was that I was forgetting monumentally another aspect that could help us understand that generosity, and empathy was. Actually cost me nothing to accept work that empathy with our fellow citizens affected could be a factor in warning us to help them. But what is empathy? One could say that empathy is basically step into the shoes of others. According to Frans de Waal, a professor in the Psychology Department of Emory University (Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy, Annual Review of Psychology, 2008) is empathy: the ability a) share and be affected by the emotional state of another, b) assess the status of the other reasons, and c) identify with the other, taking their perspective.
How does empathy?
According to de Waal empathy has two sides, one is the cognitive, whereby one adopts the other's views by imagining yourself in the place of another person, and recalling our own experiences to give meaning to the other. And the other side is the emotional connection, which would explain how empathy develops, as when a baby is affected by the mood of the people around you, or as some animals that are passed each other emotional states and are able to respond appropriately to them. That is why it is not enough that one can see the other's perspective, but also must have an emotional connection, otherwise it can not be called empathy.
A very interesting example of de Waal is the behavioral phenomenon of consolation, which is defined as providing support body contact other individuals in distress. I guess most of us have seen as a third party comes to an individual who just lost, and consoles him patting him on the back and shoulders. Well de Waal has observed this behavior in chimpanzees, but not in monkeys, suggesting the chimps might be able to capture the perspective of their peers, showing traits of empathy.
In the picture you can see a young chimpanzee comforting another chimpanzee that had recently been defeated in a Alterac with another of his peers. Photo by Frans de Waal.
Well, once it was clear this important issue, now if I promise to write the next installment on the neural basis of these processes so important to our brain takes place.
0 comments:
Post a Comment