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EMPATHY

Doesn’t it feel nice and secure to be with a person, who understands how you feel? When you get the feeling, that another person looks at the world through the same window as you, something inside of you gets thrilled. You get a warm, good feeling, and you want to spend even more time with that kind of person. What I am aiming for here is of course the much spoken world of empathy, sympathy and compassion.

Wouldn’t it be great, if other people after meeting you would be in a better mood than before it? What a great goal in life and in encountering others!

Empathy appears in many different forms. The core of empathy is recognizing your fellow human being’s feelings without words. We don’t often express our feelings, but they emerge through:

– tone of voice
– expressions and
– appearance

The ability to interpret these clues is based mostly on enhancing one’s self-awareness. When we understand – and control – our own feelings, we can learn to better understand other people’s emotional states. Empathy is like a radar, that is in action around the clock. Others of us are skilled in the use of this radar better than others. Nevertheless, we all have it. And we can all be better at it.

Robert Levenson has performed extensive scientific studies on empathy. In his tests he has used married couples and their conversations.

In a university laboratory two types of conversations were held between married couples. In the first conversation the spouses went over the day’s events in a neutral ”How was your day today” fashion. In the second conversation they argued about something, that they genuinely disagreed on. During the mild argument Levenson measured the testees’ physiological reactions, like facial expressions and the heart rate. After the argument one of the spouses left and the other stayed in the laboratory. The one who stayed in the room watched the conversation on tape and at the same time told what he/she had been thinking in each situation, although he/she hadn’t said it out loud. Then the person leaves the room, too. Now the other testee comes in to tell about the course of the conversation from his/her point of view.

In the body of some testees significant reactions took place during the experiment. The body started to copy the spouse’s body’s actions and empathize into the spouse’s part. When the spouse’s heart rate quickened while speaking on the tape, also the watcher’s heart rate quickened; if it slowed down, this also happened to the watcher. But note that this didn’t happen to all the testees. Only the empathic ones did this type of emotional following.

This kind of intense following of emotions, empathy, requires for a person to temporarily push aside their own feelings. Otherwise the messages coming from the other won’t get through. When aspiring mutual agreement, it’s crucially important to put one’s own feelings temporarily aside.

When two people meet, their bodies immediately start mirroring each other. They naturally pursue harmony in rhythm, movements, appearance, tone, and posture. This isn’t conscious, it happens automatically, without us wanting it to. It happens deep on our non-volitional side. We can’t help it, for exactly that reason, that the mechanism is located on our non-volitional side. We learn the basic skills of empathy in our early childhood, but it can be practiced throughout one’s whole life. We all have the necessary neural pathways, and practice awakens them to function. When you combine understanding other people’s feelings, different viewpoints and caring about them, the prerequisites for functioning sociality are born.