M13 empathy and awfulness

Empathy / sympathy

Empathy: ability to experience feelings of another, viceral or emotional (I feel your ____, understanding what you're going through, 3)

Sympathy: An emotional response of care or sorrow for another’s suffering, often without fully feeling their emotions. It reflects a more hierarchical or external relation (feeling for, I’m sorry you're experiencing that, 2)

explicit/implicit

explicit: reduce partiality toward one’s sociaal group and decreases stereotyping of outgroups

Implicit: improves capacity to identify and understand subjective states

Compassion / pity

Compassion: An active, relational concern for the suffering of others, often leading to a desire to help. Anthropologically, compassion is seen as socially and morally regulated (wanting to relieve ____, wanting to help, most 4)

Pity: A condescending or distancing feeling of sorrow for another, often reinforcing social hierarchies (acknowledge ____, “such a shame,” least 1)

Empathic distress

A self-focused emotional reaction to another's suffering that leads to personal discomfort rather than altruistic behavior(strong aversive self-oriented response of the feeling of others, excessive negative feelings towards the other)

Aesthetics

a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of are, beauty and taste

Deindividuation

A psychological and social process where individuals lose self-awareness and feeling anonymous and becomes less likely to experience evaluation apprehension

Affective resonance

social interaction and connection that take place through the intensity and tone of another’s emotion

Cognitive empathy

A conscious drive to recognize accurately and understand another’s emotional state

Metaphor

figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action in a way that isn’t literally true but abstractly helps explain an idea or make a comparison

Cruelty / callousness / sadistic cruelty

• Cruelty: unjustified voluntary behavior that causes foreseeable suffering toward an undeserving victim (not dispositional cruel)

• Callousness: perpetrator intentions are not directly cruel and require someone to suffer as means to a secondary goal

• Sadistic Cruelty: perpetrator deliberately intends to cause suffer and receives pleasure from it.

Dehumanization / animalistic / mechanistic

Dehumanization: The process of denying the humanness of another group, often to justify violence or exclusion

Animalistic: a uniquely human characteristic denied to group or person (disgust contempt)

Mechanistic: elements of human nature are denied and mechanical qualities take their place (indifference social distancing).

Apperception / perception

Perception: uncouncious process of becoming aware of something through the sense

Apperception: conscious mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating the body of ideas they already possess

Moral disengagement

process of convincing the self that ethical standards do not apply to oneself in particular context

Empathic concern

Other-orientation emotions elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need (warm, tender feeling like a parent)

Empathy erosion

individual differences and situational factors may modulate the degree to which common people experience more or less empathy in response to human suffering

Otherization

moral exclusion of them from us categorization

Mimicry

The imitative behavior of one group toward another, often under conditions of power asymmetry. Anthropologist Homi Bhabha discussed mimicry as a colonial strategy of partial assimilation that is both threatening and subversive

What are the four levels of engagement with someone else's pain?

1. Compassion (most)

2. Empathy

3. Sympathy

4. Pity (least)

What are four main empathy-related processes in empathic behavior?

1. affective resonance

2. empathic concern

3. cognitive empathy

4. Self

What regions of the brain are involved in empathic distress and empathic concern?

empathic concern: Nucleus accumbers, Medial Orbitoral frontal cortex (inside), vmPFC (caregivering behavior)

empathic distress: premotor regions of cortex (mirror neuron), removes self from other (outside)

What do results from shared network theory tell us about personal pain and the pain of someone else?

pain and compassion networks differed

empahty for pain- increase activation in anterior insula abd anterior middle cingulate cortex

compassion training: activiation in the medial orbital FC, anterior cingulate cortex and ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens

Compassion training doesn’t reduce empathy—it transforms it. From raw emotional resonance (which can overwhelm) to mature, socially constructive care that supports both the person in pain and the caregiver

What are the benefits of cognitive empathy?

• Helps you interpret what others mean, not just what they say.

• You can recognize someone else’s distress without becoming emotionally overwhelmed.

• Reduces bias by promoting perspective-taking.

In a classical view, how can aesthetics "sanctify" images of battle, death, and displacement as being sorrowful, dignified, noble rather than a stark reality of destruction?

Can you provide a metaphor of speech used to describe an action that also describes our physical and mental response?

The sentence landed like a punch to the ribs.

The words poured out like a dam breaking—I could barely hold them back

Why is cruelty perceived on a spectrum rather than as a straightforward action?

• Intent: Did the person mean to cause harm?

• Impact: Did harm occur, regardless of intent?

What three stages of moral disengagement redefine someone to the point of dehumanizing them?

reprehensible conduct (moral justification, redefine norm) → detrimental effects (displacement of responsibility) → victim result (dehumanization attribution)