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Authors: Karla McLaren
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and obvious response to pain or need. However, this focus unnecessarily reduces our understanding of the totality of empathic responses. Empathic responses are just as likely in situations of joy, laughter, and a lack of need as they are in troubling orconsolation-requiring situations. Empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, and skilled empaths work with all emotions, not just the painful ones. Itâs just as empathic to laugh and joke with someone as it is to offer them a shoulder to cry on. Empathy is about perceptive emotional interaction and engagement; itâs not restricted only to consolation.
In renaming this aspect of empathy, I also chose the word engagement carefully. Many empathy researchers focus primarily on action as a sign of empathy, which makes sense in a testing environment, where you have to chart observable, action-based behaviors. In the real world of empathic interactions, however, this focus on action can be very misleading. In many situations, itâs actually more empathic not to act or not to notice the pain of others (if theyâre signaling that they want to be left alone) than it is to make a great show of being outwardly consoling. When you engage with others in a truly perceptive way, the choices you make are not about what you would like or what would work for you (or what would make you look most empathic!); instead, theyâre about the needs of the other. And sometimes others need to be unseen, untouched, and undisturbed. Sometimes the most empathic response possible is to do nothing, to look away, and to ignore people (if thatâs what would comfort them the most).
And yet action-based research can tell us very useful things about the development of empathy. In a wonderful experiment 24 done with toddlers, University of CaliforniaâBerkeley psychology researcher Alison Gopnik placed an adult and a toddler at a table with two bowls of food between them. One bowl contained Goldfish crackers (which the vast majority of children love) and the other contained raw broccoli (which the vast majority of children decidedly do not love). To determine whether the toddlers had developed targeted helping skills, Gopnik asked the adult to mime strong distaste for the crackers and strong, yummy love for the broccoliâand then to ask the child to share some food.
At a certain stage in their development, toddlers will offer crackers to the adult, perhaps, because in their experience, the crackers are delicious, and therefore everyone should want some. Although offering the crackers is very generous (since the children love the crackers), it is not perceptive . Gopnik would call the giving of crackers a selfish and egocentric act and not a fully empathic one, because it is only when the child understands that the adult has entirely different needs that he or she can be seen as being empathically aware. I was fascinated to see that in Gopnikâs study, the age at whichchildren offered broccoli to the experimenter was at around eighteen months, which suggests that babies develop the capacity for the most advanced aspect of our six-part empathy model even before they can speak full sentences.
In Perceptive Engagement, you listen and watch carefully for what another wants and needs; then, to the extent that you are able, you interact based upon those wants and needs (or, sometimes, you donât interact at all, if thatâs what would work best for the other). Perceptive Engagement is the culmination of the previous five aspects of the empathic process. To engage perceptively, you have to be able to share emotions, accurately identify them, regulate them in yourself, take the perspective of others, be concerned enough to want to engage helpfully, and, finally, engage from an unselfish position of empathic knowledge of the other.
That sounds like an incredibly complicated process, but weâve all done it since early childhood, and we continue to do it every
In renaming this aspect of empathy, I also chose the word engagement carefully. Many empathy researchers focus primarily on action as a sign of empathy, which makes sense in a testing environment, where you have to chart observable, action-based behaviors. In the real world of empathic interactions, however, this focus on action can be very misleading. In many situations, itâs actually more empathic not to act or not to notice the pain of others (if theyâre signaling that they want to be left alone) than it is to make a great show of being outwardly consoling. When you engage with others in a truly perceptive way, the choices you make are not about what you would like or what would work for you (or what would make you look most empathic!); instead, theyâre about the needs of the other. And sometimes others need to be unseen, untouched, and undisturbed. Sometimes the most empathic response possible is to do nothing, to look away, and to ignore people (if thatâs what would comfort them the most).
And yet action-based research can tell us very useful things about the development of empathy. In a wonderful experiment 24 done with toddlers, University of CaliforniaâBerkeley psychology researcher Alison Gopnik placed an adult and a toddler at a table with two bowls of food between them. One bowl contained Goldfish crackers (which the vast majority of children love) and the other contained raw broccoli (which the vast majority of children decidedly do not love). To determine whether the toddlers had developed targeted helping skills, Gopnik asked the adult to mime strong distaste for the crackers and strong, yummy love for the broccoliâand then to ask the child to share some food.
At a certain stage in their development, toddlers will offer crackers to the adult, perhaps, because in their experience, the crackers are delicious, and therefore everyone should want some. Although offering the crackers is very generous (since the children love the crackers), it is not perceptive . Gopnik would call the giving of crackers a selfish and egocentric act and not a fully empathic one, because it is only when the child understands that the adult has entirely different needs that he or she can be seen as being empathically aware. I was fascinated to see that in Gopnikâs study, the age at whichchildren offered broccoli to the experimenter was at around eighteen months, which suggests that babies develop the capacity for the most advanced aspect of our six-part empathy model even before they can speak full sentences.
In Perceptive Engagement, you listen and watch carefully for what another wants and needs; then, to the extent that you are able, you interact based upon those wants and needs (or, sometimes, you donât interact at all, if thatâs what would work best for the other). Perceptive Engagement is the culmination of the previous five aspects of the empathic process. To engage perceptively, you have to be able to share emotions, accurately identify them, regulate them in yourself, take the perspective of others, be concerned enough to want to engage helpfully, and, finally, engage from an unselfish position of empathic knowledge of the other.
That sounds like an incredibly complicated process, but weâve all done it since early childhood, and we continue to do it every
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