Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Other species help children develop empathy.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.
Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.
I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them.
I got a lot of empathy from my mother growing up, and I think it prevented me from ever really just writing people off.
The discoveries of how we can grow and the insights we need to have really come from the inside out. To have genuine empathy, not as a make-nice tool but as an understanding, is essential to the next step.
Empathy has some unfortunate features - it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're often at our best when we're smart enough not to rely on it.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.
Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.