Empathy can be learned, and it can be lost.
Every time a person chooses to communicate through text message, email or social media rather than face-to-face, many of the neurological keys to feeling empathy are missing from the exchange.
“Little by little, this sort of shallow interaction chips away at our empathic capacities,” writes Dr. Helen Riess in her new book, “The Empathy Effect: 7 Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences.”
While our interview with Riess focused on technology’s role in empathic growth, it was just one of many areas covered in her book.
Neuroscience has revealed that human beings are more connected to one another emotionally than previously thought.
“The Empathy Effect” outlines what we’ve learned about empathy through science and how we can put it to good use as we interact with the people we come into contact with every day.
At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 20, Riess will be at Powell’s City of Books for a discussion on learning empathy and a book signing.
As a psychiatrist, Riess said she was deeply influenced by psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s theory on empathy, which is that without it, there could be no cure. She set about creating a method for teaching empathy to health care professionals based on the neurobiology and physiology of empathy.
Her method, which is laid out the book, requires being present when you’re communicating. This means making eye contact, paying attention to a person’s tone of voice, expression and body language.
In conversations devoid of these important emotional cues, we are left with words on a screen, which can create a growing sense of detachment and emotional indifference, according to her book.
“Interviews with internet trolls are shocking in that they reveal these online agitators don’t tend to view their victims as real people,” she writes.
FURTHER READING: Portland’s Parfait Bassale uses the arts to teach empathy
Beginning with physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Riess serves as the director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program, nearly 5,000 medical professionals have gone through her empathy training.
It’s helped doctors and nurses to better connect with their patients. This can lead to improved health outcomes while enabling clinicians to find more fulfillment in their work.
Riess is also associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, founder and chief scientific officer of Empathetics, and a core member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. She spoke with Street Roots from her home office in Boston.
Emily Green: At one point in your book you wrote, “Most feelings are mutual.” Can you explain to our readers what you were getting at with that statement?
Helen Riess: Empathy is partly about shared feelings, and the root of that word was originally sympathy, which means “same suffering.” It refers to the fact that when we are in the presence of someone who’s experiencing an emotion, we actually pick up on that because other people’s emotions and facial expressions and experiences of pain are actually mapped onto an observer’s brain, onto our own brains. That is why we feel sad when we’re in the presence of someone who’s very tearful or sorrowful, or why positive feelings like excitement are contagious. There’s actually a neurobiological grounding for saying that “most feelings are mutual.”
E.G.: In your book, you also say that modern methods for communicating, for example texting, emails and social media, “erase empathic keys from our interactions.” Can you explain what you meant by that?
H.R.: When we communicate digitally, most often, we’re not seeing the person’s face with whom we’re speaking. We don’t see their posture, we don’t pick up on physical cues like facial flushing or maybe a misty eye or a little tear, or even looks of surprise or startle, unless we’re FaceTiming, where of course you do see the face. In texting, email and telephone conversations, we are missing out on many layers of how we understand other people’s emotional states.
I think it’s important to note that technology can also connect us; it’s not all bad. It’s very good in many ways. I think the danger is when it becomes a complete substitute for human interaction, and that’s what we need to watch out for.
E.G.: And you note there is also a detachment that occurs from not seeing the human response to our own messages. What kind of an impact does that have?
H.R.: The detachment can result from not fully grasping the full emotional experience of others, and if we don’t perceive that someone is not just a little sad but very sad or that someone is not just a little worried but extremely anxious about something, our response is therefore blunted because our ability to fully appreciate what they’re talking about is only partially communicated.
E.G.: You write about how quickly emoticons and then emoji emerged to replace actual tonal expressions as texts replaced phone calls. Would you say this is becoming a comparable replacement?
H.R.: I think we’re still struggling with that because, as most people can see, the number of emoji keeps increasing, and I think it’s a really strong attempt to get at more of the nuances of human feelings. We’re just used to having smile and sad faces, but now you have looks of perplexed faces, looks of incredibly angry faces, and even there is one that looks like someone is about to get physically sick, so these are all indications that we’re grasping for ways to communicate that are much easier when we’re in person. There is this current technology, of taking your own face and putting it in an Zmoji, or personal avatar, so it’s interesting that technology is trying to keep up with what the human face does so well, but they still can’t get the tone of voice, they still can’t get the volume, the slight inflections, in these two-dimensional images. So I think they’re really at a disadvantage.
E.G.: I think sometimes people use emoji to give the impression they have an emotion that they do not, or maybe it’s exaggerated, or maybe it’s even less extreme than their actual feelings. Do you think that kind of messing with our brains on some level?
H.R.: I don’t know if it’s messing with our brains, but it can certainly be masking how people really feel about what’s going on. I think we’ve all had messages that come across with maybe trying to imply a little bit of disagreement, but then putting a smiley face to almost sort of cover over. It’s almost like, I don’t want this to have a full sting, so I’ll put a smiley face, and then, you’re not really sure: Was that meant to be corrective, or are they OK with that? You’re left wondering how deep the injury or the insult really was.
E.G.: It seems like it wouldn’t be as genuine as an in-person interaction because people on both sides don’t know what that other person’s feeling.
H.R.: Exactly.
E.G.: You also explain that a person’s capacity for empathy is not static. It can be taught, but it can also be blunted. Are we seeing signs that a person’s reliance on text-only forms of communication could lead to actually unlearning empathy?
H.R.: I think there are many reasons for blunting empathy, and that may be one of them. But I also feel other factors that go into blunting empathy, like being overwhelmed and having too much responsibility, having too many competing demands – but I think that just communicating by text is a way to lose some of the flavor and the richness and the nuance of more personal communication.
E.G.: When you say “competing demands,” do you mean for a person’s empathy? Can you elaborate on that?
H.R.: Well, yes, particularly people in helping professions. If they’re facing a lot of people suffering, in need or in pain, or just people who are not at their best – there is a limit to how much one person can meet. And a blunting can occur when the helping person isn’t taking care of their own needs. And to tie that into texting and email, I think when people get overwhelmed, their emails get shorter, their texts might be using an emoji and no words at all. So all these things contribute to short cuts in deeper communication.
E.G.: You also write about how we’re more likely to have empathy for people in our “in-groups,” such as people with our same class status or ethnicity, than for people in our “out groups,” which are people we might not feel we can relate to. Several times you pointed to people experiencing homelessness as commonly falling into people’s out groups – so much in some cases, you write, that they “cease to be considered human beings.” Here at Street Roots, we often share the stories of people on the streets through online methods as a way to illuminate their humanity. But social media also can also bolster out grouping. How do we navigate successfully between these two realities in a way that grows our empathy as opposed to stifling it?
H.R.: I think the first step is self-awareness, and to just check in with ourselves. If anyone lives in a big city, they’re probably passing homeless people every single day, and it’s important to take your own personal pulse on what feelings are elicited in you when you pass them.
If you’re passing by people living on the streets and covering themselves in blankets on freezing cold days and you’re not moved by it anymore, that should make you pause and try to hit the reset button. Because that can happen when you’re seeing people every single day in these conditions and we can become almost deadened to the predicament they’re in. And if you’re moved by it, you might think about any number of ways to try to humanize the situation.
As I said in the book, we can’t save every person, but sometimes making eye contact and saying “Good morning” or “How are you?” may be the most human thing that person gets that day. Some days we may find we have extra pairs of socks or a blanket we’re not using. Some days we will write to our representatives and say, “What’s being done?” or we make a donation to a shelter. If everybody is a bit more awake to the problem, we obviously need politicians working on this, but we also have so many grassroots organizations that we can contribute to and donate clothing and shoes and socks and overcoats.
The most important thing is to check in with yourself and say, “How dull have I gotten to this?” and “What can I do in my power to relieve the situation?”
E.G.: If you get that dull feeling inside, how do you hit the reset button?
H.R.: I find that most people change through conversation and relationship. If you know that you’ve gotten that dull feeling, talk about it with someone, maybe a sibling, best friend or someone you work with, and see if that person feels the same way. In conversation, people might say, “Yeah, I feel that way, too, and I’m really not OK with it,” and maybe some creative idea will come up between you. My co-author on the book, Liz Neporent, we talk extensively about the homeless situation, because she lives in New York, and I live in Boston, and it really bothers us. Through our conversation, she started putting packages together for the homeless and I started becoming more active in my own way here. I know firsthand that can spark some initiative for people to get connected with organizations that are trying to do something about the problem.
I want to draw attention to the work that Street Roots and other organizations like yours are doing to raise awareness of homelessness and to really try to get people back in touch – these are our neighbors. And I now make a practice of trying to learn a homeless person’s story. I can’t do it every day, but when I learn the stories of how some people became homeless, it’s a very thin line between lives we’re all living, and having enough bad things happen that people end up there. I think it’s important that people have empathy for the homeless because some of them are not so different from who we are.
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E.G.: And for the last question, I’m going to ask that you elaborate on a quote from the end of Part I of your book: “Without expanding empathy beyond our in-groups and borders, civilization as we know it will not survive.” Is empathy really that imperative?
H.R.: When we stop caring about other people and we only focus on ourselves or our little town or our little community, or our state, or our nation, I think we do face the peril of our shared human condition not moving forward. We live in a global world these days, and we have to think of global solutions, and I think the more narrow our focus becomes, the more people there are who would never experience the profound reaches of what the human spirit and of what human generosity can do. So I think it’s so imperative that we stay awake and alive for our care for living beings, living creatures, because we all suffer if we don’t.
IF YOU GO
What: Dr. Helen Reiss, author of "The Empathy Effect: 7 Neuro-science-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences"
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019
Where: Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St, Portland
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
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