Encountering Empathy
Critical Issues
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith
Advisory Board
Simon Bacon Ana Borlescu Katarzyna Bronk Ann-Marie Cook John L. Hochheimer Peter Mario Kreuter Stephen Morris John Parry Peter Twohig Karl Spracklen S Ram Vemuri
A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/
The Ethos Hub ‘Empathy’
2015
Encountering Empathy: Interrogating the Past, Envisioning the Future
Edited by
Victoria Wain and Paulus Pimomo
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/
The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-390-1 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii Veronica Wain
Part I Defining Empathy: The First Encounter
The Physiology of Empathy: Theoretical and 3 Practical Implications Yaron Yagil
Empathy as Orientation rather than Feeling: Why Empathy 17 is Ethically Complex Steve Larocco
Three Problems with Empathy 25 Gavin Fairbairn
Part II Encountering Empathy through the Arts
Poetry of Compassionate Empathy 35 Paulus Pimomo
Empathic Fiction: Modelling Understanding across Borders 45 in Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement Jane Chamberlain
Can you see me now? Examining Empathy and Perception 53 through Art Practice Fiona Larkin
Uncertainty Principle: The Locus of Empathy in Breaking Bad 63 Abby Bentham
Das Vermächtnis: Facing a Legacy of Violence with Empathy 73 Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach
Part III Empathy in Action
Empathy in News Reporting: Framing Sexual Minorities in 85 Sub-Saharan Africa LJ (Nic) Theo The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff to Prompt 99 Empathy for People with Dementia Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills
Empathy with the Enemy: Can the Intellectually Gifted 111 Experience Empathy with the Intellectually Impaired? Veronica Wain
Part IV Online Encounters: Empathy in the Digital Age
Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye: Social Media, Disembodied Interaction 123 and the Erosion of Empathy Garry Robson
The Empathic Gamer 139 Poppy Wilde
‘Gays are the New Jews’: Homophobic Representations in 151 African Media versus Twitterverse Empathy Charles King
Part V Evidence-Based Empathy: Research Directions
The Horizons of Empathic Experience 165 Rebeccah Nelems
Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking 177 Camilla Pagani
Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts 189 in Intimate Relationships of Young People Zuzana Hradileková and Ivona Kunertová
Introduction
Veronica Wain and Paulus Pimomo
The historic, picturesque city of Prague provided the ideal backdrop for the first Interdisciplinary Global Conference on Empathy: Imagining the World from the Perspective of Another or Others. The pulse of this vibrant city that both values its past and embraces the new was reflected in the rich and diverse presentations delivered by participants representing nations across the globe. Participants hailed from South Africa, Israel, Slovakia, Ireland, England, Italy, Poland, Australia, Iceland, Canada and the United States. The disciplines represented at the conference were as diverse as the contributors’ countries of origin and offered an array of perspectives on the workings of this human trait we call empathy. This diversity of approach ensured a robust examination of the subject matter, resulting in both clarity and confusion, the location of sites of agreement, borderlines and division that may in some respects, be indicative of the many ‘selves’ implicit in any empathic exchange. From the outset however, a sense of contribution and sharing was apparent. The presentations reflected passion, intent and a collective drive to explore, uplift and enlighten, with the ultimate aim of enriching our global community. As diverse as the approaches were, a number of common themes emerged and are reflected in this volume. Whilst it may be said that our subject matter, in and of itself, remains somewhat of a mystery, the act of expressing and experiencing empathy presents an opportunity for change - positive and otherwise. The potential to misuse this capacity, to be able to imagine what it may be like to walk in an ‘Other’s’ shoes, is explored in varying degrees, as are the possibilities for positive change, when the principles of an ethical, empathic encounter are employed and the self meets the ‘Other’. Indeed the question of what may constitute the ethics of empathy is apparent throughout. The fluidity of the self and the ‘Other’, where neither entity remains static, presenting each with new possibilities of ‘knowing’ one an ‘Other’, was laid bare as we addressed the many faces of empathy. Discussions concerned with the notion of a crowded self, the desire to help or to harm, fear of emotional contagion and of an alien ‘Other’, a fascination with the foreign other and pathways to greater intimacy, allow the reader to access the complexity of the subject at hand. The question of whether empathy may or may not be learned and possible pathways for facilitating that learning, is also a constant throughout the volume. The importance of history as a point of reference in empathy studies became evident wherein if we agree that empathy is a relational domain, then events such as the Holocaust represent extraordinary, mass human failure to relate, in ways that raise inescapable questions about what it means to be human. The tragedy of the Holocaust and its historic echo feature in a number of essays and is the focus of one chapter in particular. viii Introduction ______The creative arts, technology and the media are identified as potentially powerful generators of affective and cognitive empathic experiences in their respective audiences. The chapters concerned with the ways in which creative artefacts, technology and the media can become conduits for understanding the ‘Other’, creating mutually beneficial connections or avenues for isolation are primarily concerned with the ways in which their audiences might experience empathy via their chosen mediums. Here, the ever evolving complexity of the empathic encounter is revealed via artists interrogating their own creative practice and their experimentation with innovative ways of effecting positive empathy within their audiences offering the promise of a more nuanced understanding of the subject than we have today. The volume has been divided into five sections and represents to some degree, the trajectory within which we examined empathy over the course of the conference. Section One, ‘Defining Empathy’, lays a theoretical framework from which to proceed, providing the beginning of an ‘anatomy of empathy’, so to speak. An overview of the physiological aspects attributed to empathy, surveying current directions in neurological research and discussions regarding some possible physical prerequisites for the acquisition and activation of empathy, provide a framework with which to begin. Situating the neurology of empathy within a complex milieu of the physical, the psychological and the environmental, and challenging the belief that manifestations of empathy always lead to ethically positive outcomes, leaves us questioning perceptions of the inherent ‘goodness’ of empathy. It is suggested in this section that reorienting our understanding of empathy is critical; from the limiting notion of it as a caring disposition to a more complex orientation. Potential barriers to empathy such as inherent self-interest, a state which has in part ensured the continuation of our species, are seen to dominate human life, still. Mistaking empathy for sympathy and the unexamined assertion that empathy with an ‘Other’ can be realised simply through imagining the ‘other’s’ plight are discussed. Section One problematizes both the phenomenon and discourse of empathy, revealing the intimate relationship between empathy and the preservation of self, which so often comes at the expense of the ‘Other’. Seeing empathy this way, as the product of a social engine for good and for bad, allows us to recognize its multiple manifestations in individuals and groups. Section Two builds upon the theoretical framework established in the first section and explores ways in which empathy is made manifest and expressed across the arts. How might engagement with, and exposure to, the creative arts provide opportunities for heightening self-awareness and greater cross cultural exchange, perhaps facilitating ‘safe places’ where the protected self may venture into the world of an ‘Other’, as conduits for greater understanding? Various modes of artistic expression and practice encompassing literature, photography, television and film are examined from perspectives ranging from an Veronica Wain and Paulus Pimomo ix ______academic retrospective viewing of the poet and poetry to the self-reflective approach of the auto-ethnographic documentary filmmaker. The section addresses the relationship between art and empathy. The ways in which the various art forms structure and present encounters with the ‘Other’ in their narratives, thereby becoming powerful prompts to empathy and compassion are examined. The challenges that writers and artists face in creating spaces for authentic, empathic encounters when working with cultures and themes that are foreign and alien to them are also considered. For example, the challenge of the privileged, white writer and artist from the West working with minority and non-Western subject is problematized and the question of how this distance may be mitigated is raised. Section Two also examines the manipulation of the viewer implicit in the narrative techniques at play in films and televisual texts, especially when the invocation of empathy is employed as a tool for challenging society’s normative values embedded in ideologically engendered hierarchies. The symbiotic relationship between the arts and the invocation of empathy, however empathy is defined, is revealed via the creative artist’s voice in two chapters in this section where the autobiographical voice is privileged. ‘Empathy in Action’ is the subject of Section Three which focuses on the state of empathy in three areas: healthcare for the elderly, media coverage of sexual minorities, and the influence of intellectual leaders in determining the quality of services to people with disabilities. The need for empathic understanding of the elderly with dementia in the United Kingdom and a healthcare establishment’s response to providing appropriate care in the form of an ethno-drama styled series of films to enhance their staff’s professional performance and training is discussed. The research conducted on the effect of this strategy indicates significant positive change. Increase in the staff’s awareness of the special needs of patients with dementia and their willingness to help them bodes well in this case. However, positive outcomes such as these have been challenged within the disability field, with particular reference to those living with intellectual disability, where the need for more targeted research is lacking. This subject and questions about the usefulness of the impulse to create empathic encounter programs based on the academic works of leading intellectuals is challenged. News reporting on the gay and lesbian community in Sub-Sahara Africa is also subject to critical scrutiny in this section. It is argued that an empathic approach to writing about sexual minorities would require ‘subjectivising’ them; that is to say, representing this minority as people with complex identities, like all human beings, instead of objects of some liberalist public cause. In Section Four, three authors explore contemporary modes of online communication and techniques of engagement to gauge the possible effects on users and audience. Concerns are raised here regarding what is generally perceived as an erosion of empathy engendered by online communication, extending into present day social interactions within our own immediate communities as well as x Introduction ______across cultures. But there are hopeful signs as well. For example, emergent platforms such as Twitter appear to offer opportunities for not just challenging national ideologies and mainstream biases against minority groups such as gays and lesbians, but also helping overcome prejudice against them, offering possibilities for transforming attitudes for the better. Multiplayer, online gaming too it seems, with its multi-dimensional modes of engagement, is attended with both promise and peril: the promise of greater levels of understanding and connection amongst users, juxtaposed with the threat of greater isolation and disconnectedness. The chapters in this section demonstrate the power that resides in the mastery and management of empathetic resources for enhancing individual capacities and enriching community on the one hand, and on the other, abusing the resource for nefarious, antisocial purposes. Section Five presents some current research on the state of empathic relations among young people in three different cultural contexts. North America and Europe are the settings for research presented here. The chapters are concerned with exploring empathic attitudes and behaviours in their respective target groups. Existing evidence in the field suggests two kinds of empathic outcomes are possible from a pedagogical point of view - passive and transformative. Engaging students in exploring the possibility of standing in the shoes of an ‘Other’ may result in momentary, passive empathy, but may not necessarily result in a transformative experience. Here, it is argued that finding the right combination of context and approach is key to inculcating perspective-changing empathy, however the challenge of inherent differences of identity and individual circumstance may be difficult to overcome. A study of Italian youths’ attitudes to immigrants and ethnic minorities indicates, according to written statements by the subjects, that there is a strong case for teaching the youth to go from the binary of us/them ways of seeing and relating to the people they consider ‘Other’, to acquiring greater levels of complex thinking that may enhance their capacity to empathise with the ‘Others’ located within their immediate communities. Initial findings on the causes of conflict amongst young people in Slovakia who are in intimate relationships, and the strategies they employ to resolve conflicts, appear to indicate some gendered differences in reference to both the reasons for conflict and the approaches young men and women take in resolving disagreements. There is an acknowledgement by the authors that further in-depth research is needed to confirm these initial findings. The studies presented in this volume represent a beginning from which to proceed toward greater interrogation into the origin and nature of empathy, and how the positive nature of this human quality may be better understood and shared. These initial findings offer exciting possibilities for the future. As our world continues to change at an unprecedented pace with emergent technologies offering opportunities to engage across cultures around the world, the potential to Veronica Wain and Paulus Pimomo xi ______understand and empathise with the ‘Other’ is enhanced. However, perceived threats of the ‘Other’ have risen across continents, as the number of refugees continues to rise and those displaced seek new homes in foreign lands. Those same technological platforms that offer the opportunity to connect positively with ‘the Other’ can also act as vehicles for hatred and vilification, potentially galvanising segregation along ideological lines -- national, ethnic, religious, cultural, gendered and so forth. This collection of essays featuring interdisciplinary multicultural perspectives - - some challenging the perceived inherent goodness of empathy, others upholding its value, others still questioning the value and effectiveness of current approaches to enhancing empathy in the absence of adequate research -- is both provocative and necessary. Many of the authors have been inspired to contribute to a more extensive volume on empathy, and look forward to reconvening again to continue the conversation. We hope that the work presented here provides a foundation for future investigation and will inspire others to join us as we continue to explore the promise and the risks inherent in empathic encounters.
Part I
Defining Empathy: The First Encounter
The Physiology of Empathy: Theoretical and Practical Implications
Yaron Yagil
Abstract Empathy has been studied through many perspectives. It was suggested to be a ‘single thing’, relating to it dichotomously as either a cognitive or alternatively an affective construct, defining it as an attitude or alternatively a behaviour, as a momentary experience or a stable personal position, as shallow or deep, and as an expressed versus unexpressed capability. Advancements in neuroscientific research propose empathy to be a complex construct. The findings shed light on mechanistic and structural facets of empathy. From a neurological perspective, empathy was described as a construct that consists of several distinct components: (i) visuomotor imitation; (ii) pain sharing; (iii) emotional empathy involving emotional contagion and emotional recognition; and (iv) cognitive empathy which involves cognitive and affective mentalizing. This entire process is related to the ability to differentiate between self and others. Within the current framework, empathy is described as a bottom-up spontaneous response which can be modulated and regulated through top-down processes. Empathy is associated with previous experiences (long term episodic memories and emotional memory). An fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging for measuring brain activity) upon these components demonstrates each of them is reflected by the activation of a corresponding specific region in the brain. Each of these functions may operate separately, but in interaction with other regions/components as well. In order to draw some practical inferences, the discussion could be expanded to include two additional concepts: neurological plasticity (neurological structural change in response to environment) and critical period (a limited period of time in which human skills can be fully developed). The aim of my chapter is to explain this biological perspective and its possible implications over comprehending the complexity of empathy as a trait, as a state, its expressions, and the possibility to elaborate it through training in a wide range of distinct settings.
Key Words: Empathy, affective-empathy, cognitive-empathy, affective-contagion, pain-sharing, mirroring, neuropsychology, empathetic-skills, empathy-training.
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1. Empathy: Definition, Functions and Perspectives Empathy allows one person to observe another person and to think, feel, sense or act/react in response to what he or she perceives. Its roots were found to be demonstrated in newborns as early as at the age of 18 hours, who were capable of reproducing mouth and face movements displayed by adults.1 This observation was 4 The Physiology of Empathy ______suggested to reflect the beginning of a ‘like me’ analogy between newborns and caregivers, which later develops into self-identity and self-other distinction, as the starting point of social cognition.2 This phenomenon was framed as a mirroring process: by watching others we experience ourselves as distinct, unique and individuated (i-identity), and we also recognize similarities (s-identity).3 The concept of mirroring had some contribution to the explanation of a variety of psychological and social phenomena: Bandura’s social learning theory4 and Herbert Mead’s symbolic interaction theory,5 both implicitly rely on mirroring as a pattern of human behaviour. This process is also involved in the human tendency to align behaviour with peers during social interactions.6 Imitation is assumed to stand at the grounds of mirroring. Its association with empathy was suggested by influential philosophers such as Montaigne in the 16th century, Adam Smith in the 18th century, and Nietzsche in the 19th century.7 In 1912, Freud wrote:
… A path leads from identification by ways of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life.8
However, the concept of ‘empathy’ has been seen through different perspectives and has undergone numerous conceptualizations and definitions. According to Gibson, empathy had been sometimes conceptualized as a ‘single thing’, relating it dichotomously as a cognitive or an affective construct, defining it as an attitude or a behaviour, as a momentary experience or as a stable position, as shallow or deep, and as expressed versus unexpressed capability.9 In 1873, Vischer argued that ‘Einfühlung’, the original German word for empathy, can occur on different levels of perception: from simple unconscious taking-in of visual stimuli to an intricate involvement of representational and imaginative functions.10 Therefore it can be experienced through autonomic uncontrollable and unobserved mechanisms or as being deliberately launched and involving high executive cognitive functions. From a totally different perspective, ‘empathy’ emerged in the field of aesthetics and art with Lipps in 1903, where it was used to describe a process whereby the observer of an art object fuses with the contemplated object.11 Later on, Batson enlisted eight distinct common uses of the term ‘empathy’:12 (1) Knowing another person’s internal state, including thoughts and feelings; (2) Adopting the posture or matching the neural responses of an observed other; (3) Coming to feel as another person feels; (4) Intuiting or projecting oneself into another’s situation; (5) Imagining how another is thinking and feeling; (6) Imagining how one would think and feel in the other’s place; (7) Feeling distress at witnessing another person’s suffering; (8) Feeling for another person who is suffering (empathic concern). Yaron Yagil 5 ______Within the realm of psychotherapy, Cal Rogers stressed the importance of empathy as a necessary condition or tool for achieving therapeutic change. In Rogers’s terms, empathy is:
… An accurate, empathic understanding of the client’s awareness of his own experience. To sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality — this is empathy, and this seems essential to therapy.13
However, according to Rogers, the therapist cannot be satisfied with empathic understanding. Achieving therapeutic change in the client requires the therapist to go beyond perceptive empathy with the client onto reflection and ability to foster new insights:
…When the client’s world is this clear to the therapist, and he moves about in it freely, then he can both communicate his understanding of what is clearly known to the client and can also voice meanings in the client’s experience of which the client is scarcely aware.14
In line with Rogers’s legacy, Patterson suggested empathy to involve a three stages process:15 (i) The therapist is receptive to the client’s communicative massages, (ii) The therapist understands these massages, (iii) The therapist communicates to the client his/her understanding. Traux and Carkhuff further suggested ‘the accurate empathy scale’16 for assessing the level of accuracy and sensitivity of the therapist’s recognition of the feelings and/or affect that the client conveys, and the degree to which the therapist’s verbal response contributes to the depth of the client’s affective expressions and to the client’s insights and self- reflection.17 An elaboration of Roger’s perspective was further presented by Hepworth, Rooney, and Larsen.18 They accepted Patterson’s three components model of empathy, but suggested empathy to be a skill that needs to be clearly defined, taught, trained for, and evaluated. In their view, empathy training involves several steps: (1) Developing perceptiveness to feelings and affect through the enrichment of one’s vocabulary of ‘feeling words’, (2) Exercising the use of affective words and phrases in order to condition their use in higher frequencies and more accurately, (3) Exercising the identification of surface and underlying feelings, (4) Learning and exercising the ability to accurately communicate verbal empathic massages. This latter proposition raises the question of whether empathy is an innate or a learned ability. The answer probably lies in the combination of genetic (inherent) and epigenetic (environmental) factors. McDonald and Messinger19 suggested a 6 The Physiology of Empathy ______developmental perspective which relates to Patterson’s model of empathy. In their view a group of ‘within child factors’ (genetics, neural development, and temperament) and ‘socialization factors’ (imitation, parenting, and parent-child relationships) contribute to the perceptive ability of empathy (components 1-2 in Patterson’s model). A second group of factors, which includes ‘behaviour toward others’ (internalization of rules and pro-social behaviour) and ‘social relationships’ (social competence and relationship quality), affect one’s ability to communicate empathy (component 3 in Patterson’s model). This brief literature review encompasses only a small portion of what is assumed to be known about empathy, but it does demonstrate its wide use in a variety of distinct conceptualizations, and with regard to intra-personal and interpersonal, as well as contextual processes, which determine its nature. However, the study of the neurological processes which are involved in empathy may provide additional insights about the nature of empathy, and about training for and practicing of empathy.
2. The Neurology of Empathy From a neurological perspective, empathy involves at least five dimensions: (i) perceptual, (ii) motor, (iii) sensory, (iv) affective, and (v) cognitive. The perceptual and motor pathways (visuomotor pathways) are considered to be the most basic and primitive pathways involved in the basis of empathy. These were demonstrated by the research finding that the very same neurons in monkeys’ brains responded both during action-observation and action-execution.20 Similar results were found among humans. Whenever we look at someone performing an action, besides the activation of various visual areas, there is a concurrent activation of the motor circuits that are recruited when we ourselves perform that action.21 This is the very basic neurological representation of the ‘mirroring’ process. The neurons which are involved in this type of activity are labelled as ‘mirror neurons’ (MNs). However, MNs are activated only when the observed activity is purposeful, and its purpose is understood by the observer. This meaningful account of the observed behaviour is a pre-reflective and pre-linguistic level activity, so that mirroring involves an implicit action understanding.22 This very mechanism may account for the somewhat surprising fact that newborns were found to be capable of reproducing mouth and face movements displayed by adults as soon as 18 hours after being born. This visuo-motor ability and the allied implicit meaningful account seem to be congenital, at a very initial and primitive level. Whenever we observe an action (e.g., hand, leg or mouth movement), certain specific visual centres are activated at the posterior parietal cortex in our brain. This evokes the transmission of signals to a variety of brain regions, one of which is labelled as ‘Broca’s region’. Usually this region has a major role in producing verbal speech, but in the case of the MNs the region is assumed to be in-charge of the pre-linguistic analysis of the observed behaviour.23 However, once the Yaron Yagil 7 ______observed behaviour is assigned with a meaning, a third step occurs: an activation of specific motor activity producing regions (the pre-motor neo-cortex) in the brain. Having learned the neurology of simple mirroring processes (e.g., motor imitation), we now understand that the mirroring process involves three major steps: reception of a stimulus, processing its meaning, and reacting. On the grounds of this comprehension, the additional processes which are involved in empathy can be better understood. For example, beyond the visuo-motor basis of empathy is one’s ability to empathize with the other’s pain. The neurological pathways that are involved in pain sharing follow similar principles as those which have already been described. They involve a three step process: stimuli perception, processing, and reacting. An accumulating number of fMRI studies have demonstrated similarities in the neural circuits involved in the processing of both the first-hand experience of pain and the second-hand experience of observing other individuals in pain.24 For example, it was demonstrated that viewing video clips showing pain and tactile stimuli delivered to others, respectively, increased and decreased the amplitude of the activity of the primary somato-sensory cortex.25 This region is usually activated in first-hand experience of pain. The cognitive and affective regions which are responsible for processing the observed information, in the case of pain, include the ‘anterior insula’, which is the region in which we imagine pain while looking at images of painful events; the ‘dorsal anterior cingulate cortex’, which is responsible for processing cognitive-affective information; and the ‘anterior midcingulate cortex’, which is assumed to play a role in assessing pain intensity and in regulating the emotional reaction to pain.26 A somewhat more sophisticated facet of empathy, which refers to higher mental functions, is ‘emotional empathy’. Like in any other mirroring process, the mere perception of emotion in others activates the same neural mechanisms that are responsible for the first-hand emotional experience, and after having been processed, a motor response corresponding to the particular emotion is activated.27 Emotional empathy is basically rooted in a process labelled ‘emotional contagion’. It is assumed that MNs at the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) are involved in converting observed facial expressions into patterns of neural activity that would be suitable for producing similar facial expressions (motor reaction), and provide the neural basis for emotional contagion.28,29 In a case-report, in which a cortical lesion involving the IFG was diagnosed, impaired emotional contagion was reported, but with an additional central component of emotional empathy: the ability to accurately recognize emotions.30 This evidence implies that the IFG may not just be responsible for ‘emotional contagion’ but also for ‘emotional recognition’ (the processing phase). In order to produce the proper emotional motor response, which matches the perceived and recognized observed emotion, a neurological message is then transmitted from the IFG to the inferior parietal lobe, which is the region assumed to be responsible for the imitation of observed emotional expressions.31 However, emotional empathy is not a bottom-up 8 The Physiology of Empathy ______automatic circuit since it is affected by its interaction with an additional and final component of empathy: ‘cognitive empathy’. ‘Cognitive empathy’ is the process of understanding another person’s perspective, and it involves a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM): the ability to put one-self into someone else’s shoes and to imagine their thoughts and feelings.32 ToM is also known as a ‘mentalizing’ process, that is one’s ability to understand the other’s thoughts, intentions, emotions, and beliefs, and therefore to extract and understand their goals and to predict their behaviour.33 From a neurological point of view, a specific brain region, the ‘medial prefrontal cortex’ (mPFC), was found to be particularly activated when subjects were asked to mentalize other people’s thoughts, intentions, emotions, and beliefs.34 According to Shamay-Tsoory, many studies have considered the mPFC to be functioning as a unit that mediates ToM, but recent studies have proposed a neuro-anatomical and behavioural dissociation between two distinct regions within the mPFC: the dorsomedial and the ventromedial (vmPFC) regions.35 The vmPFC was suggested to be necessary for the affective aspects of ToM,36 while the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex was thought to play a role in the cognitive parts of ToM.37 This leads to a possible division between two types of mentalizing: ‘affective mentalizing’, which refers to inferences one makes regarding others’ emotions, and ‘cognitive mentalizing’, which refers to the ability to make inferences regarding other people’s beliefs.38 If empathy is to occur, it requires one’s ability to discern a distinction between self and others, otherwise individuals would not be able to differentiate between first hand brain activation and second hand activation of MNs. A growing body of evidence suggests that this type of processing is commonly associated with activation of the prefrontal cortex. More specifically, numerous studies have demonstrated that the mPFC is the most consistently activated brain region associated with: evaluating the self-descriptiveness of personality traits; representing and evaluating one’s attitudes, values, mental states, and physical attributes; retrieval of autobiographical memory; thinking about one’s goals such as hopes and aspirations; and the ability to imagine or simulate specific events that might occur in one’s personal future. When directly compared to each other, self- related judgments generally lead to greater activation of the vmPFC than other- related judgments.39 In addition to the neurological components of empathy reviewed above, we need to consider another neurological facet although it has not yet been frequently related to empathy: ‘neurological plasticity’. This is the ability of the brain to change by creating new connections between the various brain regions. Neurological plasticity has been associated with development and learning, two powerful agents of change across the life-span, which were shown to induce robust structural and functional plasticity in neural systems.40 With regard to empathy, emotional plasticity may instruct us about the rehabilitative potential of brain Yaron Yagil 9 ______lesions in which empathic functions are impaired, and about the potential contribution of training programs which aim to improve empathic abilities. Neural plasticity has been studied for decades, but the majority of research has favoured the investigation of neural changes induced by the training of motor and cognitive abilities. The study of neural plasticity underpinning socio-affective competences has been relatively neglected. Although neural plasticity has until recently been difficult to trace or record, it was evidenced by changes which occur in specific functional brain regions following a variety of training programs. In a study that was recently published, the effect of ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ training programs was assessed by fMRI mapping of the relevant brain regions involved in both those processes.41 The investigators demonstrated significant activity changes in several compassion and empathy related brain regions following the training program. These relatively new findings provide some evidence to the impact of environmental factors on empathic abilities, thus supporting the assumption that empathetic skill level is determined by both genetic and epigenetic factors.
3. Lessons to be Learned from the Neurological Facet of Empathy This chapter has covered several of the neurological processes which are involved in empathy, but not all of them. For example, Intentional therapeutic empathy may involve the hippocampus (attention and awareness), the amygdala (emotional memory), and Broca, as well as Wernicke regions (speech production). Not all the involved processes and systems can be detailed within the limitations of such a concise chapter. However, even the few neurological mechanisms involved in ‘empathy’ discussed here help clarify certain perspectives to a useful extent. To begin with, evidence shows that empathic origins are rooted in the congenital MNs system. In early age, it is more of a motor imitating response, but with growth, development and environmental influence empathy expands to include pain sharing, affective contagion, affect recognition, affective mentalizing and cognitive mentalizing. For empathy to take place in a person requires one’s ability to discern between self and other and to differentiate between first and second hand experiences. Some facets of empathy are bottom-up processes since they are evoked automatically, implicitly and unintentionally by mere observation. Thus empathy ‘…enables the observer to penetrate the world of the other without the need of explicitly theorizing about it’.42 However, it is also a top-down process which involves cognitive and affective mentalizing: two processes which are involved in modulating and regulating emotional empathy. From a neurological perspective, empathy is not a single construct but rather a collection of several distinct interconnected activities. Therefore, assessing an impaired or a deficient empathetic ability is a complex task; it needs to be accurately diagnosed in relation to the specific difficulties encountered, as each of them is related to a distinct specific brain region and involves specific neurological 10 The Physiology of Empathy ______associations. Such data may lead to the specific functions which need to be rehabilitated or improved through training. However, the ability to fully develop empathy through training interventions should be regarded with reserve due to the limitations of the ‘critical period’ principle. According to this principle, empathy can fully develop under the proper conditions during the right periods along the lifespan (i.e. in infancy). Any later attempt to develop empathy may result in developing a variety of compensating capabilities, but not real empathy. However this principle needs to be empirically anchored in further research. Finally, the neurological perspective shows empathy to be a complex, multifaceted human ‘trait’ and approaches its investigation in empirical ways. On the other hand, the perspective could also suggest that empathy is merely an ‘outcome’ of a combination of numerous neurological processes which, for the purpose of the current discussion, may be called ‘ingredients’. Perhaps each of these ingredients is involved in more than just one trait, in a manner which might suggest that fine and more sophisticated characterisation of any person should refer to each of these ingredients as well as to their combination, and not in a somewhat simplistic manner to ‘whole traits’. If indeed, each individual carries a large number of ‘ingredients’ which combine with each other in a very unique manner, out of an endless number of possible combinations, then empathetic abilities of one individual are expected to be unique and distinct from another’s empathetic abilities.
Notes
1 Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, ‘Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures’, Child Development 54 (1983): 702-709. 2 Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks, ‘Like Me’hs a Building Block for Understanding Other Minds: Bodily Acts, Attention, and Intention’, Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, eds. Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses, and Dare A . Baldwin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 171-191. 3 Vittorio Gallese, ‘The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity’, Psychopathology 36 (2003), 171-180. 4 Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (New York: General Learning Press, 1971). 5 Herbert Blumer, ‘Sociological Implications of the Thought of John Herbert Mead’, American Journal of Sociology 71 (1966): 535-544. 6 Matthew D. Lieberman, ‘Social Cognitive Neuroscience: A Review of Core Processes’, Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 259-289. 7 Marco Iacobony, ‘Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons’, Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009: 653-670.
Yaron Yagil 11 ______
8 Quoted in: Elisabeth A. Baxter, ‘Concepts and Models of Empathy: Past, Present and Future’, Jefferson Journal of Psychiatry 12 (2011): 6-14. 9 Susan B. Gibson, ‘Understanding Empathy as a Complex Construct: A Review of the Literature’, Clinical Social Work Journal 39 (2011): 243-252. 10 Quoted in: Gustav Jahoda, ‘The Odor Lipps and the Shift from “Sympathy” to “Empathy”’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 41 (2005): 151– 163. 11 Christiane Montag, Jürgen Gallinat, and Andreas Heinz, ‘Theodor Lipps and the Concept of Empathy: 1851-1914’, American Journal of Psychiatry 165 (2008), 1261. 12 C. Daniel Batson, ‘These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena’, in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, eds. Jean Decety, and William Ickes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 13 Carl R. Rogers, ‘The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change’, Consulting Psychology 21 (1957), 95–103. 14 Ibid. 15 Cecil H. Patterson, The Therapeutic Relationship: Foundations for an Eclectic Psychotherapy, (Monterey, California: Brooks/Cole, 1985), 52-59. 16 Charles B. Traux and Robert R. Carkhuff, Toward Effective Counselling and Psychotherapy, (Chicago: Aldline Publishing Company, 1967). 17 Godfrey T. Barret-Lennard, Carl Rogers’ Helping System: Journey & Substance (London: Sage Publications, 1998). 18 Dean H. Hepworth, Ronals, H. Rooney, and Jo Ann Larsen, Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skills (6th Edition), (Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole, 2002). 19 Nicole M. McDonald and Daniel S. Messinger, ‘The Development of Empathy: How, When, and Why’, in Free Will, Emotions and Moral Actions: Philosophy and Neuroscience in Dialogue, eds. Ariberto Acerbi, José A. Lombo, and Juan. J. Sanguineti, Roma, Italy: I-F Press, 2011, viewed 5th September 2014, http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/emot/McDonald- Messinger_Empathy%20Development.pdf. 20 Vittorio Gallese, et al., ‘Action Representation and the Inferior Parietal Lobule’ in Common Mechanisms in Perception and Action: Attention and Performance (vol 19), eds. Wolfgang Prinz, and Bernhard Hommel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 334–355. 21 Giovani Buccino, et al., ‘Action Observation Activates Premotor and Parietal Areas in a Somatotopic Manner: An FMRI Study’, European Journal of Neuroscience 13 (2001), 400–404. 22 Gallese, ‘The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity’, Psychopathology 36 (2003), 171-180.
12 The Physiology of Empathy ______
23 Ibid. 24 Jean Decety, Stephany Echols, and Joshua Correll, ‘The Blame Game: The Effect of Responsibility and Social Stigma on Empathy for Pain’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22 (2009), 985-997. 25 Haria Bufalari, et al., ‘Empathy for Pain and Touch in the Human Somatosensory Cortex’, Cerebral Cortex 17 (2007), 2553-2561. 26 Decety, Echols and Correll, ‘The Blame Game’. 27 Simone G. Shamay-Tsoori, ‘The Neural Bases for Empathy’, The Neuroscientist 17 (2011), 18-24. 28 Christian Keysers, and Valeria Gazzola, ‘Towards a Unifying Neural Theory of Social Cognition’, Progress in Brain Research 156 (2006), 379–401. 29 Lauri Nummenmaa, et al., ‘Is Emotional Contagion Special? An FMRI Study on Neural Systems for Affective and Cognitive Empathy’, Neuroimaging 43 (2008), 571–580. 30 Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, Judith Aharon-Peretz, and Daniella Perry, ‘Two Systems for Empathy: A Double Dissociation between Emotional and Cognitive Empathy in Inferior Frontal Gyrus versus Ventromedial Prefrontal Lesions’, Brain 132 (2009), 617–627. 31 Shamay-Tsoory, ‘The Neural Bases for Empathy’, The Neuroscientist 17 (2011), 18-24. 32 Simone Baron-Cohen, ‘Autism: the Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) Theory’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1156 (2009), 68–80. 33 David M. Amodio, and Chris D. Frith, ‘Meeting of Minds: The Medial Frontal Cortex and Social Cognition’, Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 7 (2006), 268–277. 34 Sarah, J. Carrington, and Anthony, J. Bailey, ‘Are there Theory of Mind Regions in the Brain? A Review of the Neuroimaging Literature’, Human Brain Mapping 30 (2009), 13–35. 35 Shamay-Tsoory, ‘The Neural Bases for Empathy’. 36 Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, and Judith Aharon-Peretz, ‘Dissociable Prefrontal Networks for Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind: A Lesion Study’, Neuropsychologia 45 (2007), 3054–3067. 37 Elke Kalbe, et al., ‘Dissociating Cognitive from Affective Theory of Mind: a TMS Study, Cortex 46 (2010), 769–780. 38 Shamay-Tsoory, ‘The Neural Bases for Empathy’. 39 Arnaud D’Argembeau, ‘On the Role of the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Self Processing: The Valuation Hypothesis’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013), Viewed 5th September 2014, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3707083/pdf/fnhum-07-00372.pdf. 40 Adriana Galvan, ‘Neural Plasticity of Development and Learning’, Human Brain Mapping 31 (2010), 879-890.
Yaron Yagil 13 ______
41 Olga M. Klimecki, et al., ‘Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect after Compassion Training’, Cerebral Cortex 23 (2013), 1552- 1561. 42 Gallese, ‘The Roots of Empathy’, 174.
Bibliography
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Bandura, Albert. Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press, 1971.
Baron-Cohen, Simone. ‘Autism: the Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) Theory’. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1156 (2009): 68–80.
Barret-Lennard, Godfrey T. Carl Rogers’ Helping System: Journey & Substance. London: Sage Publications, 1998.
Batson, Daniel C. ‘These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena’, in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, eds. Decety Jean, and Ickes William. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Baxter, Elisabeth A. ‘Concepts and Models of Empathy: Past, Present and Future’. Jefferson Journal of Psychiatry 12 (2011): 6-14.
Blumer, Herbert. ‘Sociological Implications of the Thought of John Herbert Mead’. American Journal of Sociology 71 (1966): 535-544.
Buccino, Giovani, Binkofski Ferdinand, Fink R. Gereon, Fadiga Luciano, Fogassi Leonardo, Gallese Vittorio, Seitz J. Ruediger, Zilles Karl, Rizzolatti Giacomo, and Freund Hans-Joachim. ‘Action Observation Activates Premotor and Parietal Areas in a Somatotopic Manner: An FMRI Study’. European Journal of Neuroscience 13, 2001: 400–404.
Bufalari, Haria, Aprile Taryn, Avenati Alessio, Di Russo Francesco, and Aglioti S. Maria. ‘Empathy for Pain and Touch in the Human Somatosensory Cortex’. Cerebral Cortex 17 (2007): 2553-2561.
14 The Physiology of Empathy ______
Carrington, Sarah J. and Bailey J. Anthony. ‘Are There Theory of Mind Regions in the Brain? A Review of the Neuroimaging Literature’. Human Brain Mapping 30 (2009): 13–35.
D’Argembeau, Arnaud. ‘On the Role of the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Self Processing: The Valuation Hypothesis’. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013), Viewed 5th September 2014, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3707083/pdf/fnhum-07-00372.pdf.
Decety, Jean, Echols Stephany, and Correll Joshua. ‘The Blame Game: The Effect of Responsibility and Social Stigma on Empathy for Pain’. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22 (2009): 985-997.
Gallese, Vittorio. ‘The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity’. Psychopathology 36 (2003): 171-180.
Gallese, Vittorio, Fogassi Leonardo, Fadiga Luciano, and Rizzolatti Giacomo. ‘Action Representation and the Inferior Parietal Lobule’ in Common Mechanisms in Perception and Action: Attention and Performance (vol 19), ed. Prinz Wolfgang and Hommel Bernhard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 334–355.
Galvan, Adriana. ‘Neural Plasticity of Development and Learning’. Human Brain Mapping 31 (2010): 879-890.
Gibson, Susan B. ‘Understanding Empathy as a Complex Construct: A Review of the Literature’. Clinical Social Work Journal 39 (2011): 243-252.
Hepworth, Dean H., Rooney H. Ronals, and Larsen Jo Ann. Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skills (6th ed.), Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole, 2002.
Iacobony, Marco. ‘Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons’. Annual Review of Psychology, 60 (2009): 653-670.
Jahoda, Gustav. ‘The Odor Lipps and the Shift from “Sympathy” to “Empathy”‘. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41 (2005): 151–163.
Kalbe Elke, Schlegel Marius, Sack T. Alexander, Nowak, A. Dennis, Dafotakis Manuel, Bangard Christopher, Brand Matthias, Shamay-Tsoory Simone, Onur A. Oezguer, and Kessler Josef. ‘Dissociating Cognitive from Affective Theory of Mind: A TMS Study’. Cortex 46 (2010): 769–780.
Yaron Yagil 15 ______
Keysers, Christian and Gazzola Valeria. ‘Towards a Unifying Neural Theory of Social Cognition’. Progress in Brain Research 156 (2006): 379–401.
Klimecki, Olga M., Leiberg Susanne, Lamm Claus, and Singer Tania. ‘Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect after Compassion Training’. Cerebral Cortex 23 (2013): 1552-1561.
Lieberman, Matthew D. ‘Social Cognitive Neuroscience: A Review of Core Processes’. Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 259-289.
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Meltzoff, Andrew N. and Brooks Rechele. ‘Like Me’hs a Building Block for Understanding Other Minds: Bodily Acts, Attention, and Intention’. Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, eds. Malle F. Bertram, Moses J. Louis, and Baldwin A. Dare, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, 171-191.
Meltzoff, Andrew N. and Keith M. Moore. ‘Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures’. Child Development 54 (1983): 702-709.
Montag, Christiane, Gallinat Jürgen, and Heinz Andreas. ‘Theodor Lipps and the Concept of Empathy: 1851-1914’. American Journal of Psychiatry 165 (2008): 1261.
Nummenmaa, Lauri, Hirvonen Jussi, Parkkola Riitta, and Hietanen K. Jari. ‘Is Emotional Contagion Special? An FMRI Study on Neural Systems for Affective and Cognitive Empathy’. Neuroimaging 43 (2008): 571–580.
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Rogers, Carl R. ‘The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change’. Consulting Psychology 21 (1957): 95–103.
16 The Physiology of Empathy ______
Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G. ‘The Neural Bases for Empathy’. The Neuroscientist 17 (2011): 18-24.
Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G. and Aharon-Peretz Judith. ‘Dissociable Prefrontal Networks for Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind: A Lesion Study’. Neuropsychologia 45 (2007): 3054–3067.
Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G., Aharon-Peretz Judith, and Perry Daniella. ‘Two Systems for Empathy: A Double Dissociation between Emotional and Cognitive Empathy in Inferior Frontal Gyrus versus Ventromedial Prefrontal Lesions’. Brain 132 (2009): 617–627.
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Yaron Yagil, MSW, PhD, Social Work Department, Tel-Hai College, Upper Galilee, Israel. Dr. Yagil is engaged in psycho-social therapy, research in health settings, supervising MA students, and lecturing in BSW and MSW programs. Empathy as Orientation Rather than Feeling: Why Empathy Is Ethically Complex
Steve Larocco
Abstract There has been a recent spurt of interest in empathy, fashioned in part by the tragedies of our times, in part by the growing interest in the emotions, the rise of neuroscience, and the discovery of mirror neurons. There has also been a sentimentalization of empathy, a sense that empathy is inherently positive and lies at the core of community, morality, and care for the other. There is some truth in this. However, empathy is a much more complex phenomenon, functioning in diverse ways in interpersonal and group relations. There are several reasons for this: first, empathy itself is not an emotion, but rather an orienting of feeling and cognition toward and through the other. It is structured ‘between’ people, having no specific content of its own; whom it imitates and what feelings it mimes are situationally and subjectively specific. Second, empathy is not simply emotional, but invariably a combination of emotion and cognition (structured by prior learning, yet also, at times, highly imaginative). Third, empathy is selective, culling out, often non-consciously, specific others and specific feelings of those others to reproduce. Fourth, empathy can produce feelings that are potentially destructive (one can empathize with resentment, aggression, contempt, disgust, etc.). Consequently, empathy needs to be considered not simply as a disposition to care, but as a multivalent structure of social orientation. Empathy is at the core of life together, but it functions in complex ways: oscillating between facilitating interpersonal bonds by the sharing of feelings and minds, but also providing much of the affective infrastructure for the kinds of contagious groupthink that lead to the aggressive sanctioning of those within a collective as well as the shared hostility towards those outside. Empathy opens us to the feeling-life of others. How we use that possibility remains ethically complex and, at times, troubling.
Key Words: Empathy, emotional contagion, orientation, distress, perspective- taking.
*****
1. Empathy as Orientation There has been a fresh spurt of interest, both scholarly and otherwise, in the phenomena aggregated together by the term ‘empathy.’ The primatologist Frans de Waal, in a recent book on the subject, dubbed ours ‘the age of empathy.’ This interest has been fashioned in part by the tragedies and empathic failures of our times, in part by the ongoing migrations of diverse populations globally who bring cultural difference and attendant, distinct emotional palettes with them to their new 18 Empathy as Orientation Rather than Feeling ______homelands, in part by global media, which press divergent populations into virtual contact without migration, in part by the still burgeoning cultural force of psychotherapy in first-world nations, and in part by the growing interest in the emotions, the rise of neuroscience, and the discovery of mirror neurons. This interest responds to the two major domains in which empathy seems to operate: as a form of intersubjective apprehension, an ability to understand (and/or interpret) minds other than our own—their aims, their motives, their framing of the world;1 and the ability to feel what others feel, not simply reactively, as in emotional contagion, but projectively, by an openness to feeling beyond oneself. Concurrently, there has also been a sentimentalization of empathy, a sense that empathy is inherently positive and lies at the core of community, morality, and care for the other. There is some truth in this. However, empathy is a much more complex phenomenon, functioning in diverse ways in interpersonal and group relations. There are several reasons for this: first, empathy itself is not an emotion or feeling; it is not a content. Rather, it is an orienting of feeling and cognition toward and through the other. It is structured ‘between’ people, having no specific content of its own; whom it imitates and what feelings it mimes are situationally and subjectively specific, and may not have much to do with care for the other. Typically, empathy is construed as feeling the other’s distress, though there is no necessary reason to limit it to that. Second, empathy is not simply emotional, but invariably a combination of emotion and cognition (structured by prior familial experiences and culturally specific learning, often in the form of conditioning, yet also, at times, highly imaginative). Third, empathy is selective, culling out, often non-consciously, specific others and specific feelings of those others to reproduce. One doesn’t empathize with all of the other’s feelings or with the other’s full world-orientation, but only with what one finds to be the salient aspects of that otherness (with that salience being defined by intensely subjective as well as other- oriented processes). And one clearly doesn’t empathize with all others. Empathy is allocated according to subjective biases. Fourth, empathy can produce feelings that are potentially destructive (one can empathize with resentment, aggression, outrage, contempt, disgust, etc., or one can focus only on the feelings in oneself that empathy generates—empathy can be a staging for narcissistic assimilation of the other’s emotions). Consequently, empathy needs to be considered not simply as a disposition to care, but as a multivalent (bimodal) structure of interpersonal orientation. Empathy is at the core of life together, but it functions in complex ways: oscillating between facilitating interpersonal bonds by the sharing of feelings and minds, but also providing much of the affective infrastructure for the kinds of contagious groupthink that lead to the aggressive sanctioning of those within a collective as well as the shared hostility towards those outside. It does not only involve an orientation that induces pro-social behaviour. Empathy does open us, in sometimes accurate and in sometimes distorted ways, to the feeling-life and world- Steve Larocco 19 ______orientation of others. How we use that possibility remains ethically complex and, at times, troubling.
2. What Empathy Is Part of the problem I am pointing to in how ‘empathy’ functions results simply because of differing conceptions of precisely what empathy is. Daniel Batson, for example, sketches out eight different possibilities for how the term ‘empathy’ is used.2 And as Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie outline in their introduction to their 2011 Oxford anthology on empathy, researchers on empathy often diverge on whether and to what extent empathy involves what might be called higher and lower level processes.3 Typically, what are designated as lower level processes are those that are more automatic and entail less involved cognitive processing. What is at stake in this is the extent to which empathy not only involves the simulation or replication of the emotional and/or cognitive states of others, but also whether such an orientation or matching will ‘lead one to respond with sensitivity and care to the suffering of another.’4 The move from emotional (and cognitive) matching to caring behaviour is neither simple nor straightforward, with what is termed lower order empathy typically regarded as less likely to induce an altruistic or pro-social response (as if that were the only or predominant aim of empathy!). Take, for example, the phenomenon of emotional contagion, an often non- conscious and non-intentional form of emotional transfer or synchronization, which perhaps serves as the base level for lower level empathy and even for empathy as a whole. Some thinkers would argue, conversely, that emotional contagion isn’t a form of empathy, as it involves no necessary other orientation or hint of perspective taking. One simply feels what others feel, seemingly automatically and often with no reference to the other. If I am at a sporting event, my emotions will tend to match those of other spectators, somewhat independently of what happens on the field. My jubilation over a team victory will be dramatically enhanced if others around me are also jubilant. I may believe that it is simply the success of my team that is producing my feeling, even though my elation would almost certainly be substantially curtailed were I alone. Similarly, if I am in a crowd that panics, I will be very likely to panic too, even if I don’t know what is inducing the panic. What is crucial in emotional contagion is that there is emotional transfer but no necessary, connected orientation. In emotional contagion, I assume other’s feelings often without knowing I am doing so, as if the emotional difference between self and other has, to some degree, vanished. The neurological work on mirror neurons points to the human capability of such kinds of response to others.5 However, as Batson points out, in a situation in which an other is distressed, emotional contagion or mirroring may simply make one also feel distressed.6 Paradoxically, as Batson argues, this may actually inhibit the desire to relieve the other’s unease, as it leads one to focus on and try to relieve one’s own distress 20 Empathy as Orientation Rather than Feeling ______rather than attending to that of the other.7 The often aggressive response to persons in distress, particularly when that distress cannot be easily alleviated, is one result of emotional transmission. The very permeability or porousness of our emotional boundaries to the feelings of others makes us susceptible to emotional dysregulation due to the other’s distress or suffering, and this can lead to an aggressive effort to force the other to self-regulate or to the empathizer’s reactive distanciation (entailing either cultivated indifference to the other’s feelings and plight or physical separation). Our propensity to mirror the emotions of others can and often does induce defensive responses that foster care of the self rather than care of the other. But is emotional contagion empathy? Amy Coplan argues that it is not, for it doesn’t require perspective-taking, which to her is a necessary attribute of empathy.8 She would relegate emotional contagion to a lesser or crude form of affective matching, as it is ‘a direct, automatic, unmediated process,’9 rather than one that involves some aspect of imaginative perspective-taking. At stake is the effort to distinguish differing possibilities of emotional transmission, with those that involve a subject who is imaginatively open to the other but appropriately bounded being the highest, as only this form provides ‘experiential understanding.’10 As much as this definition is alluring, it tends to want to exclude the ambiguity of empathy as an orientation. Because one orients towards the other, even towards the other as other and not as a version of oneself, does not mean that one is altruistically concerned with the other’s suffering or distress or that one will act towards that other pro-socially. One strategy in the current military when thinking about an opponent who one wishes to kill is to empathize selectively with that other (which means, to use Coplan’s rubric, to be able to simulate or at least match the other’s affect, to imagine the other’s perspective as the other experiences it, and to maintain self-other differentiation). Now in this circumstance emotional matching may be thin, but as Batson and Coplan herself points out in the case of emotional contagion, feeling what the other feels may have no ethical or care dimension to it at all. Because one is oriented to the other doesn’t mean that one cares about or for the other. While imaginative perspective-taking may be crucial to an other-oriented ethics, to take such a perspective doesn’t necessarily entail either feelings or acts of care.
3. The Problem of Ethics as an Orientation There is a three-fold problem with empathy as an orientation. The first problem is that as an orientation, empathy has no necessary content, and consequently, in isolation, it is not necessarily pro-social. In this I am to some degree following de Waal’s distinction between empathy and sympathy, in which he defines empathy as ‘the process by which we gather information about someone else,’ making it an orientation and a mode of apprehension.11 In contrast, he defines sympathy as an inclination that ‘reflects concern about the other and a desire to improve the other’s Steve Larocco 21 ______situation.’12 While some writers may treat what de Waal terms sympathy as a form of empathy, his distinction between the two gets at the difference between empathy as a mode of orienting to, feeling with and experiencing the other and the related but separate issue of how one feels towards and treats that other. Empathy as an emotional, cognitive and often imaginative opening of oneself to the other remains ethically limited without supplementation. I would add, however, the caveat that empathy’s absence is anti-social, as not having an open orientation to the other will have necessarily adverse effects for life in community, which is how all humans, to a greater or lesser extent, live. If I can’t feel the other’s feelings or motivations in some way, the other’s behaviour will simply appear to me as incomprehensible, irrational and therefore as aberrant. Moral aggression is a typical and often socially licensed response to what one perceives as the other’s aberrant behaviour or emotional states. The second problem with empathy as an orientation is that empathy is selective. This selectivity has two dimensions: first, one doesn’t empathize with all people. We are selective in whose emotional lives and minds are of concern to us. In situations of social hierarchy, for example, there are conventions (or, perhaps, more powerfully, ideologically driven rules) about with whom one can or ought to empathize. As feminists have pointed out, men in sexist societies have often had a very poor record of empathizing with the lives of women. Part of the reason for this is the failure of other-oriented perspective taking, the most significant aspect of empathy in Coplan’s model. But part of this failure also involves a non- conscious defensive response to potential emotional contagion, in which what one does is block access to the other’s emotions in order to avoid the possibility of dysregulation of one’s own. Emotional contagion can be a form of vulnerability, because emotional regulation is often hard. Consequently, there is often a defensive bias against certain kinds of affective matching; such a bias typically emerges when the other’s affects are dystonic or negative or would create ethical dissonance. Culturally cultivated dispositions shape and support such biases. This phenomenon produces empathic dis-orientation. A related but second selectivity concerns empathy’s orientation towards only some and not all aspects of the feelings and world-perspective of the people with whom one empathizes. I may empathize with my partner’s distress about her family, but not her distress about my behaviour. There are clearly ego-related inhibitions in terms of empathic orientation, and we may be much less inclined to empathize with the feelings of the other that we perceive as dystonic or hostile to our selves. Additionally, the other’s feelings may be complex, and empathy may only be able to orient itself towards the dominant portion of the palette of the other’s feelings. Someone who is angry may also feel shame or humiliation or sadness or even remorse, but the anger may block those from empathic availability. Such a limitation may distort the apprehension of the other that one derives from empathy. 22 Empathy as Orientation Rather than Feeling ______The third problem is that empathy, as orientation, is not itself a form of motivation. It can generate emotions, but how one responds to those emotions depends on the complex set of inclinations and dispositions that that person has developed in relation to his or her emotional repertoire and life history.13 If I am (or have been) disposed to care, then the distress of the other can lead to prosocial behaviour, but only if I don’t feel overwhelmed by the distress I experience by emotional contagion and by perspective taking, identification and by other- inflected imagining. If I am already prone to emotional dysregulation, even if I am disposed to care and engage with the other empathically, I may not be able or willing to help, and whatever care I feel I may strive to damp or curb (and start defensive processes to isolate myself from the other’s distress). If I am not disposed to care, either characterologically or situationally, I may feel the other’s distress, but only as an irritant; if I have trouble with emotional regulation and am prone to cathartic outbursts, empathy may lead to defensive violence, even if I imagine the other’s perspective, either from my own vantage point or from the other’s. There is nothing inherent in the empathic orientation itself that mandates how the emotions and thoughts conjured in me by opening myself to the other will actually play out.
4. Conclusion Consequently, and in contrast to much that has been written, the relation between empathy and ethics is complex and at least at times ambiguous. While a lack of empathy clearly has adverse ethical consequences as it accentuates the other’s difference, the presence of empathy doesn’t necessarily establish a relation of care or pro-social behaviour towards a given other. That depends on other factors, especially the relations between the empathizer’s emotional repertoire and conditioned dispositions and other learned forms of social orientation and behaviour. One doesn’t care automatically because one empathizes, at least not in a way that means alleviating the other’s distress or suffering. As we know from the behaviour of toddlers, the distress of others may simply lead to empathic distress. You cry because you’re sad; I cry because you’re crying. Whether such distress is adequately shared, leads to other-oriented perspective taking, or, more significantly, to an emotional orientation of care and behavioural action remains uncertain. Empathy may be a necessary aspect of the better angels of our nature. But by itself it is not enough to ensure that those angels don’t emulate the feelings and behaviour of their darker doubles.
Notes
1 There is debate in the field about whether such ability derives from one developing a theory of other minds, or from a process of simulating other minds. I would argue that both kinds of processes may be at work simultaneously. See Amy Steve Larocco 23 ______
Coplan and Peter Goldie, ed. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xxxii-xxxiii. 2 C. Daniel Batson, ‘These Things Called Empathy: Eight Distinct but Related Phenomena,’ in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes, (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2011), 8. 3 Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Empathy, xxxii-xxxiii. 4 C. Daniel Batson, ‘These Things,’ 3, 9-10. 5 It is worth noting that the research on mirror neurons is empirically stronger and more extensive on the simulation of action (imitation) rather than feeling (empathy) (Iacoboni, ‘Within Each Other,’ 48-55). For speculative applications of this research to empathy issues, see Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature (2011) and Marco Iacaboni, Mirroring People (New York: Picador, 2009). 6 C. Daniel Batson, ‘These Things,’ 10. 7 Ibid. 8 Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy,’ 10. 9 Ibid., 8-9. 10 Ibid., 17. 11 Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. (London: Souvenir Press, 2009), 88. 12 Ibid. 13 See Jesse Prinz, ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’ in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, (NY: Oxford UP, 2011), 219.
Bibliography
Batson, C. Daniel. ‘These Things Called Empathy: Eight Distinct but Related Phenomena.’ In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes, 3-11. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2011, 3-15.
Coplan, Amy. ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects,’ in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 3-18. NY: Oxford UP, 2011.
Coplan, Amy and Peter Goldie, ed. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
De Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. London: Souvenir Press, 2009.
24 Empathy as Orientation Rather than Feeling ______
Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador, 2009.
Iacoboni, Marco. ‘Within Each Other: Neural Mechanisms for Empathy in the Primate Brain.’ In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 45-57. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Keysers, Christian. The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature. Social Brain Press, 2011.
Prinz, Jesse, J. ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’ in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 211-229. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Steve Larocco teaches theory at Southern Connecticut State University in the USA. He is currently working on a book on forgiveness and has recently published work on shame, forgiveness, ideology, memory and personality theory.
Three Problems with Empathy
Gavin Fairbairn
Abstract In this chapter I will discuss three problems with empathy, an attribute which anyone who relates to other people arguably possesses to at least some degree. However, although most people possess the ability to empathise, not everyone is aware that they do, and oddly, for such a common attribute, not everyone knows what it is that they possess. Indeed some confuse empathy with other, related but distinct, attributes, which is actually the second problem to which I want to draw attention – the confusion of empathy with sympathy. However, I begin by talking about what we might refer to as the ‘cosy’ view of empathy - the very common idea that it is always a good thing, which probably arises from its being so closely associated with the practice of caring professions such as nursing, counselling and social work. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the problems that can be caused by the idea that empathy is simply about being able to imagine what one might feel if one was standing in another person’s shoes.
Key Words: Empathy, sympathy, bullying, torture, sexual abuse.
*****
The First Problem The first problem with empathy to which I wish to draw attention relates to its most often being conceived in purely positive terms. In other words, it is believed that having the developed ability to empathise with others will inevitably lead a person to act in good, that is, careful, caring and supportive ways. This rather comfortable and cosy view fails to take account of the fact that empathy can pave the way for destructive, cruel and negative behaviours, just as easily as it can lead to helpful, positive and life enhancing behaviours. For example, as I have pointed out elsewhere:
It is empathic skill that allows a skilled salesperson to persuade you to buy something you didn’t know you needed, with money you didn’t know you had…and that allows the best torturers to practice their art so well.1
Salespeople, especially those who work in retail settings where earnings depend at least to some extent on commission, are often more concerned to ensure that customers part with as much money as possible, than they are with ensuring that these customers have the opportunity to buy what best fulfils their needs. Empathy is clearly helpful to them in developing their understanding of what makes 26 Three Problems with Empathy ______customers and potential customers tick. As a consequence, salespeople often develop a wide array of empathic gambits to utilise in eliciting responses that will allow them to form a picture of who they are dealing with, in order that they can decide on the best way to pitch their product, with the aim of closing the deal on a sale, thus enhancing their earnings. Turning to torture and empathy, while it might seem that these two do not go readily together, it is clear that the ability to imagine how his subject feels, what his values are and who and what is important to him, can help a torturer to plan how best to approach his task with each individual. Importantly, empathic ability on the part of a torturer must be combined with the ability to ‘turn off’ sympathy and/or an absence of good will. In this, torture is close to bullying of all kinds because despite the common view that bullying results at least in part from a lack of empathy, it is clear that as with torturers, the ability of bullies to bully their victims, both psychologically and physically, is enhanced by well-honed empathic skills, which enable them to understand their victims, and what will upset and harm them most. The negative potential of empathy has a much wider reach than the instances I have cited so far might suggest. For example, as has become obvious from wave after wave of stories in recent years about current and historic sexual abuse in the UK, there is no doubt that empathy is an extremely useful skill for those who sexually abuse others, in particular children and young people, because abusers can employ it in ‘grooming’ vulnerable youngsters either face-to-face, as might happen where the abuser is a teacher, clergyman or other significant adult, or via social media. So one problem with empathy is the way in which it is commonly misconceived in purely positive terms, which can distract us from noting the part it plays in many of the most destructive human behaviours, including torture, bullying and sexual abuse. Not only that, but viewing empathy as always and necessarily a good thing can lead to the unhelpful belief that its development is, of itself, worthwhile. Having spent a great many years working in education, disability and mental health, I naturally recognise the important part that empathy can play in practice. I would support the view that it is good to facilitate the development of empathy in children and I wholeheartedly believe that it is essential for anyone who works in close contact with people, especially in areas such as health, education and social care, where the focus is on human flourishing. However, it is important to recognise both the negative potential of empathic skill, and the need for empathy to go hand in hand with goodwill, kindness and awareness of others as people who, like us, have hopes, fears, wishes and values that matter to them, if it is to fulfil the positive expectations we have of it.
Gavin Fairbairn 27 ______The Second Problem The second problem with empathy I want to raise relates to its being commonly conceived as something like: The ability to imagine what one might feel like, were one standing in another’s shoes. This view of the nature of empathy seems to suggest that there is nothing more to empathising than checking out what seems to be going on for a person and imagining how we would feel if it was happening to us. If this was all there was to it, empathy would be fairly easy for anyone who had reasonable recall about things that had happened to him in the past and of how they had affected him, along with the ability to extrapolate this information, thus allowing him to make informed and reasoned guesses about how he might experience other situations and events. But empathy is surely more complicated than this. Rather than being the ability simply to imagine what one's own experiences - one's own perceptions and feelings would be were one to find oneself in another person’s shoes, surely it is about the attempt imaginatively to inhabit the other's world as if we were them, in other words to understand, to experience, and to feel things as the other person might feel them. The idea that empathy is simply about imagining what we might feel in another person’s situation, depends on the assumption that our imagined experience of another’s situation would be pretty similar to those of the other person, in other words, on the idea that our experience of that situation would pretty much mirror what that person is experiencing, feeling and thinking. This is problematic, because of the differences between people – differences in prior experience; knowledge and understanding; values; support networks and so on, all of which are important in determining how we experience things and respond to them. It will be most problematic of all in situations in which the recipient of attempted empathy is a vulnerable person who is in need of care, but is unable to communicate his or her needs and wishes. Consider, for example, how difficult it might be to empathise with the situation of Mary who, following a glittering career in law, entered politics, rose quickly through the ranks to a senior post in government, which she occupied for several years, until traumatic brain injuries left her profoundly disabled, both physically and intellectually; unable to undertake the most basic personal care tasks or to communicate her needs and wishes. To make things even more difficult, the nature and extent of Mary’s injuries have led to the settled view that this is pretty much what the future holds for her. In situations of this kind, my view is that if they are to treat the person for whom they are caring with respect, those who have to decide how to act in relation to her, should act, so far as is possible, in accordance with what she would choose, were she presently able to make her wishes known. Achieving this will require the ability to empathise with someone whose life not only differs greatly from their own lives, but also from the life the person in question once lived. In other words, those who hold the future of such a person in their hands, need to bear in mind that 28 Three Problems with Empathy ______they are thinking as able bodied and able minded people, or perhaps, to speak in a more inclusive way, as people who are not disabled in the same ways and to the same extent as a person who has suffered such grave brain injuries that her life and potential is now wildly different from what it was before. After all, while we might perceive life for a person who has changed, and whose life has changed beyond imagination, as a tragic and horrid existence devoid of meaning, such an individual, cut off as she is from her previous life, might be enjoying the simple pleasures her new life brings. And while, for example, we might find the necessity for round the clock intimate physical care demeaning, such a person might take pleasure in it, even though, in her former life, her view would have been very different. Those who think they merely have to imagine themselves inhabiting the life of another to be able to know something of what that person is feeling and thinking, are likely to make mistakes in deciding how to act. Or at least this will be the case if they agree with my view that the right thing to do is to act, so far as is possible, in accordance with what the individual in question would choose, were she able to make her wishes known.
The Third Problem Like the ability to feel sympathy, the ability to empathise with others, by imagining their experience, is arguably an indicator of our humanity. Sometimes empathy may be triggered by sympathy, as when someone who is moved by another person’s situation, tries to understand it in order to be able to help and support that person. However, we can empathise with people for whom we feel no sympathy, and we can empathise even in situations in which sympathy is either inappropriate or impossible. And so, though they are sometimes connected, empathy and sympathy do not depend on one another and they are distinct from one another. Yet they are sometimes confused with one another, and this is the third problem with empathy to which I wish to draw attention. Whereas we feel sympathy, which is an emotional response, uninvited and unplanned, empathy is more complex. Sympathy comes from the gut; immediate and uncontrolled, it sometimes overwhelms us. By contrast we have some control over empathy, which we can consciously employ, and consciously leave to one side. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we can decide to ‘turn up or turn down the volume’ on our empathy, intensifying or diminishing the extent to which we apply our empathic sense. Whereas sympathy for another just hits us without warning and can at times disable our ability to help and support them, empathy is a skill or rather a set of skills that can be used to listen and observe, and allow us in the end to imagine the other’s experience, in ways that can allow us to understand, support and care for her more fully, more effectively and more ethically. Gavin Fairbairn 29 ______Another difference between sympathy and empathy is that unlike empathy, sympathy may be felt in the absence of any knowledge of the person towards whom or about whom or for whom, sympathy is expressed. Not only that, but we can feel sympathy even when the experience of the individual for whom we are feeling it does not warrant or invite it. This would be the case, for example, if the sympathy we felt resulted from our identifying, not with that individual’s actual experience, but with what we imagined or expected their experience to be. Such sympathy is clearly misplaced, because it has nothing at all to do with the feelings or experience of the individual for whom it is felt or expressed. Imagine for example, that on hearing of the death of Fay’s husband, Elizabeth feels great sympathy for her and writes to Fay to express her sympathy, unaware as she does so that Fay, who she has known all her life and who seemed to have loved and cherished her husband of thirty years, actually despised him. Far from being distraught, in other words, Fay is secretly elated that her husband has died and that, as she sees it, she is free of him at last. Sometimes the confusion between empathy and sympathy manifests itself merely in an individual’s use of the words ‘empathy’ or ‘empathise’ in ways that suggest that what is going on is more to do with sympathy. I am thinking, for example, of folk like Jane who, when she finds herself identifying closely with another person whose situation she could easily imagine being in herself, is likely to say something like ‘I can really empathise with her.’ Imagine, for example, that she has heard a story on a television news broadcast, about a man who has lost his job and is worried about how he will manage to feed his children, or who is faced with caring for a wife, recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, who has little time to live. When, in relating this story to a friend, Jane says that she can ‘really empathise’ with this man, she will clearly be well meaning. Most probably she will feel sorry for him and sympathise with him in his plight; no doubt she will be able to imagine how she would feel were she to be in a similar situation. However, it seems unlikely to me that what is going on here is empathy, because in general empathy needs more information than Jane will have gathered from the news broadcast, both about the situation and more importantly, about the individual with whom empathy is being claimed. It is important that I should acknowledge the possibility, or even the likelihood that someone with highly developed empathic skills could make a reasonable stab at imagining the experience of a person about whom she knew only as much as could be communicated in a TV news item, such as the one that Jane claimed to be able to ‘really empathise’ with, especially if she had encountered folk with relevantly similar lives in the past. However, such a person would be unlikely to talk of ‘really empathising’, because she would make her guess at how the individual in question might be feeling, not as a result of having attempted to empathise with him, but because she was able to draw on her experience of individuals whose lives in some ways were similar to the individual with whose 30 Three Problems with Empathy ______life she was attempting to identify. This is what expertise looks like. Among other things, it comes to those who have highly developed empathic skills and have accumulated a large store of experience that they are able to access in an apparently effortless and ‘intuitive’ way in making guesses about what might be going on for people – what they might be feeling and thinking; hoping for, and fearing, in a similar situation. Confusing empathy and sympathy in the way that Jane did in describing how she had been affected by a story from TV, could, of course, happen even in situations in which the individual doing the confusing has had much closer contact with the person with whom she claims to be empathising. Imagine, for example, that Angela is moved to tears when Sandra tells her about a traumatic experience from her childhood. On relating Sandra’s distressing story to her husband over dinner that evening, Angela talks about how she feels ‘empathy’ for her. Angela’s use of the word ‘empathy’ seems to suggest that she is engaging in the attempt to comprehend Sandra’s experience in a fairly deep way. However, in the absence of any discussion about how she views Sandra’s situation, or any attempt to say how she imagines that Sandra will be feeling and what she will be thinking, the fact that she talks of ‘feeling’ empathy for her friend makes it more likely that she has simply been moved to sympathy by Sandra’s story. The mistake of believing that identifying closely with a person somehow equates with empathy, as in the stories of Jane, who felt able to ‘really empathise’ with the person she heard about via a TV news broadcast, and Angela, who claimed to ‘feel empathy’ for Sandra, after hearing about her traumatic experience, is arguably related to another mistake. This is the mistake of believing that the ability to empathise somehow depends on a person’s having had relevantly similar experience to the person with whom she wishes to empathise, so that if she has not had or perhaps could not have, such experiences, she will not be able empathise with that person and with her experiences. I am thinking, for example, of the claim I have sometimes heard, that men can never empathise with women about matters that relate to their capacity (or lack of capacity) to bear children, as if the lack of a womb makes men incapable of imagining what a woman might experience and feel in this area of her life. The truth, as I have argued elsewhere, is that it will often be possible to empathise with others who are living lives very different from our own.2 So, for example, given sufficient life experience, a well-practised imagination and sensitivity to others, I could empathise with someone who was living with a life threatening disease or in poverty so bad that he was unable to provide food for his family, even though these are things I have never experienced, and hopefully never will experience. It is even possible to empathise with people in experiences that we could never have and with people whose values and beliefs differ very much from our own. That is why, for example, I could empathise both with a woman who had just given birth to a stillborn child, and with one who was facing Gavin Fairbairn 31 ______the reality of an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. And it is why I could empathise with a suicidal person who saw no way out of the prison that life had become for him, other than by arranging his death, even if, as is the case, I believed that suicide is morally mistaken because of the damage it can do to others. I could even, if I tried hard enough, empathise with a self-centred person who cared so little for fairness and human care, and so much about her own welfare and satisfaction, that she was willing to harm others to gratify her own desires.
The Tip of an Iceberg In this chapter I have begun to explore three problems with empathy – viewing it always in positive terms and failing to recognise its negative potential; characterising it terms of a person’s imagining what they would feel were they to occupy another person’s situation, and finally, the confusion of empathy with sympathy. Actually I think these three are only the tip of an iceberg of problems.
Notes
1 Gavin J. Fairbairn, ‘Empathy, Sympathy and the Image of the Other’, Peace Review, 21.2 (2009): 188-197. 2 Gavin J. Fairbairn, ‘Storytelling, Ethics and Empathy’, Ethical Space 2.3 (2005): 48-55.
Bibliography
Fairbairn, Gavin J. ‘Storytelling, Ethics and Empathy’. Ethical Space 2.3 (2005): 48-55.
Fairbairn, Gavin J. ‘Empathy, Sympathy and the Image of the Other’. Peace Review 21.2 (2009): 188-197.
Gavin Fairbairn, Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Language at Leeds Beckett University, UK, is an applied philosopher and ethicist. A practitioner in teacher education, mental health and learning disability, he has published widely on, for example: suicide; disability; sexuality; education and professional development; peace and reconciliation; storytelling; empathy, and academic writing.
Part II
Encountering Empathy through the Arts
Poetry of Compassionate Empathy
Paulus Pimomo
Abstract Empathy has been subjected to close scrutiny in the last two decades from within and across the academic disciplines and professional fields. The intricacies of what is and what is not empathy are being laid out, as well as empathy’s potential transfer to both prosocial and antisocial actions, or to no action at all. The variegated explorations show the complex nature of empathy which the traditional idea of empathy could not have anticipated. And yet the current discourse of empathy has not dislodged the old conviction of empathy’s potential for good. The old belief in the empathy-altruism hypothesis is gone, but not the idea and practice of empathy as active participation in the world of becoming with others. Some human endeavours, including art and literature, invite their audiences/readers into such participation. This chapter follows the conventional idea of empathy and discusses the ways in which some poems on nodal moments of life like pregnancy, parent-child relations, and dying, enact emotional experiences leading to empathy and compassion in the imagined characters and through them in the readers. It argues that the protean quality of the poet’s identity allows him/her to construct states of emotion and cognitive-intensive situations that resolve in mental clarity and calm, and which in turn can act as gear for empathic becoming through participatory identification with others. The discussion begins with space-clearing for such a reading of poems, by locating empathy in the larger family of emotions in both Western and Eastern (Buddhist) traditions of emotions studies.
Key Words: Literature and emotion, poetics of empathy, compassion, Buddhism.
*****
1. Context: Empathy’s Terrain When it comes to terminology we learn that Empathy has been in the English language for just about a hundred years. Despite its brief tenure, however, empathy’s genealogy reaches back to centuries if not millennia. Not just through its association with 19th century German intellectual discourse of einfühlung, or feeling into the experience of another so as to gain innerness with the other’s reality, but through family ties with the word sympathy (feeling sorry for another) since the 16th century, and even further back with classical Greece’s empatheia, or passion.1 What this ancestry traces is empathy’s origin in the large family of emotions, which quickly suggests two basic things: like most emotions, empathy is a universal human phenomenon and can cut both ways, hence the general recognition that it also needs to be controlled, managed, or worked through, to promote people’s emotional well-being. Plato famously argued against 36 Poetry of Compassionate Empathy ______performance of tragic drama on the ground that such imitative art excited people’s base passions and rendered them less capable of rational and responsible citizenship.2 He was obviously focused on the negative emotions. Aristotle, on the other hand, recognizing the inevitability of such emotions, recommended poetic tragedy as a type of safety valve, as means to working through, instead of succumbing to, the same passions that Plato saw tragedy promoting.3 The strength of Aristotle’s position over Plato’s lies in the assumption that negative emotions exist in a state of potentiality for deformation and healthy redeployment through a vicarious process of emotional excitation and release. For instance, fear and horror may be put through an imaginative, experiential process leading to emotional calm and intellectual clarity, and possibly to prosocial behaviour. Since Aristotle’s approach to emotions implies that emotions exist in the context of other emotions -- harmful and beneficial -- the challenge is to recognize and study them, especially the harmful ones, and find ways of addressing them. This is the view Western disciplines and professions have by and large taken, although their methods of tracking and dealing with them differ. Disciplines like social psychology, psychiatry, evolutionary biology, and more recently neuroscience,4 are in the main all engaged in the study of emotions or the treatment of emotional disorder along this trajectory. Theoretical disciplines like philosophy tend toward the phenomenology of emotions,5 but even they claim an ultimate practical purpose for their investigation: contribution to human flourishing and the good life. Literature has had a foster child-like status in the Western family of emotion experts and specialists, but about that later.
2. Buddhism’s Approach to Emotions In the East, Buddhism has had the longest and most developed theory of emotions, and a practical discipline that goes with it. Buddhism’s ‘ultimate doctrine,’ Abhidhamma, also Abhidharma, was compiled after the death of Gautama Buddha. It is an intricate theory of mind and considered the classic text of Buddhist epistemology and psychology. Since it was meant to be a practical guide for spiritual growth, it recommends tracking spiritual progress with mathematical precision: for instance, ‘how often and how strongly wholesome versus destructive emotions grip’ the practitioner. Knowing this allows the enlightenment seeker to measure and modulate his meditative practice toward sukha, that is, inner equanimity and contentment which enables him to abide above the ups and downs of everyday life.6 Another Buddhist text, Abhidharma-kosa, a companion to Abhidharma, lists more than fifty mental faculties categorized into four mental factors: omnipresent, ascertaining, variable, and wholesome. The list also includes the Three Poisons: craving, aversion, and delusion.7 Taken together, Buddhist scriptures refer to the figurative number of ‘eighty-four thousand’ afflictive or negative emotions, which in part goes to show the complexity with which Buddhist Paulus Pimomo 37 ______thought approached the phenomenon of emotions and the challenges they posed to the attainment of mental clarity and spiritual perfection. The good news is there are as many remedies and antidotes as there are destructive emotions, though hard to get to. Further, these destructive emotions can be boiled down to mainly five: hatred, desire, confusion, pride, and jealousy. At the heart of them all is desire. Desire generates craving and leads to grasping, and craving and grasping produce a network of attachments that distort our perspective and make us see things in a way they are not. In other words, desire and attachment create a world of delusions anchored in concepts of certitude and permanence, when in reality everything is in a state of flux and continuous transformation. Chief among these false certitudes is the entity called ‘I’, which is the subject-source of all emotions. But the supposed stable ‘I’ we cling to is itself an illusion, according to Buddhist teaching. ‘It is just a name one gives to a continuum, just as one can point to a river and call it Ganges or Mississippi.’8 The enlightened consciousness comes to realize that the ‘I’ is as evanescent as everything else. All that the ‘I’ is are traces of a changing self in and with others, and vice versa, along an intricate continuum of life that merges into a reality that lies beyond all conceptual notions, or ‘emptiness.’ Emptiness of the positive kind, that is, since the web of traces and interconnections exists beyond the individual entities. There are no free-standing, independent entities here. Only traces; the positive ones among them take the form of the five virtues: dana (giving), metta (kindness), mudita (sympathetic joy), karuna (compassion), and upekkha (equanimity).9 Karuna/Compassion emerges as the mother virtue in Buddhist teaching, so that when it comes to the question of goals and ends, raising compassionate human beings may be the Buddhist equivalent of eudemonia and the good life in Western thought. The Tibetan term for compassion is tsewa. According to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and current Dalai Lama, tsewa is rooted in the fundamental human need to care for oneself and others, especially relieving sentient beings of suffering. It is simply expressed in the wish:
“May I be free of suffering, and free of the sources of suffering.” And then there is empathy, on the basis of which one can recognize the kinship of self and others, and then feel compassion for others. But all comes under the rubric of one term, “compassion.”10
3. The Terrain of the Poetry of Compassion and Empathy The point of this two-paragraph summary of Buddhism’s millennia-long systematic engagement with the emotions is threefold. First, empathy is subsumed in the larger wholesome virtue of compassion only as an element. It is not seen as a separate entity by the most sophisticated theory and management of emotions we know of. This is not to suggest that empathy therefore does not have or should not 38 Poetry of Compassionate Empathy ______be accorded a category of its own, or that the research and work being done on it are misguided. On the contrary, the more reason further explorations should be encouraged. Meanwhile, though, literature’s approach has been to stay with the integrative compassion-empathy model as in Buddhist thought. The second point is that empathy’s inclusion under the rubric of compassion gives it a positive, rather than neutral or negative, character. In this, too, the issue is not about restricting the exploration of all possible aspects of empathy; it is rather about being mindful of purpose in the extent and degree of research we do on empathy in isolation. In other words, research into the nuances of empathy is important, but could there be a point of paralysis by hair-splitting analyses? And how would we know when we have reached such a point? Buddhism’s management of destructive emotions, however many, was rooted in a clear human and this-worldly purpose, even while the goal of its meditative discipline remained deeply spiritual, which brings me to the third point. The presence of a secular purpose in Buddhism’s non-minatory spiritual practice could point a way to keeping moralism (religious and secular) out of the study of emotions such as compassion and empathy. We could easily do worse than adopt the Socratic question, ‘How should one live?’ Literature in general, and in particular the poetry of compassionate empathy, belongs with this Socratic idea of life as open and meaningful terrain for exploration. But it is because of its location here that literature has been relegated to the status of a secondary field in emotions studies. When it comes to the practical uses of literature, Plato’s ancient charge against it as an instrument of negative emotions has been modified and replaced by the idea of literature as a questionable source for real emotions on grounds of the fictional nature of its subject matter. So we have what is called the ‘paradox of fiction’11. The logic goes like this: the emotions we have in response to fictional characters and situations cannot be really real because we do not in the first place believe in the reality of the characters and situations. Literary studies’ response has simply been that imaginative people spontaneously ‘suspend their disbelief’ when they encounter works of fiction and do experience emotions that are real. The point then seems to be that the problem of the paradox of literary experience is one of theory, not of praxis. Creative writers don’t seem bothered by it. We can see this in the ways poets have written about emotion-intensive situations – theirs and other people’s, actual and imagined – that generate cognitive shifts in themselves and in the reader. I’ve chosen poems that focus on scenes of compassionate empathy in pregnancy, growing up, and dying.
4. Identity-Free Poets and Einfühlung/Empathy One of the earliest English poems on pregnancy is Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible.’12 It has nine stanzas that can be divided into five parts. The poem opens with a salutation, with Paulus Pimomo 39 ______the expecting-mother greeting her unborn baby in the first two lines: ‘Germ of new life, whose powers expanding slow/ For many a moon their full perfection wait.’ The mother then invites the baby out of the womb to the delights of spring’s new life waiting outside. This section ends with: ‘Haste, infant bud of being, haste to blow [bloom]!’ Section three is the heart of the poem, where the expecting-mother engages in an intimate monologue, with the baby as her audience. She recounts for the baby the preparations being made for his/her arrival, but focuses on her longing ‘to lay her burden down,’ resume it with ‘a mother’s kiss,’ and welcome the ‘crown’ of ‘nature’s sharpest pangs.’ The fourth section is the exhortation where the mother urges the baby to ‘Come, reap thy rich inheritance of love!’ ‘Haste, little captive, burst thy prison doors!’ The poem ends with a stanza of prayerful blessing for the ‘Soon to become Visible.’ The poem’s point of view is of immediate interest. The poet is self-imaging as an expecting mother and identifying herself with the baby inside her as well. She speaks from an insider’s perspective about the baby’s situation, which she is able to do because the baby is part of herself -- yet also not her. The mother realizes that the baby is only her ‘guest’ and ‘to herself unknown.’ The sixth stanza captures this two-in-one-to-two mother-baby relationship nicely. Speaking in the third person addressing her baby, the mother says of herself:
She longs to fold to her maternal breast Part of herself, yet to herself unknown; To see and to salute the stranger guest, Fed with her life through many a tedious moon.13
If the baby inside the pregnant woman is ‘soon to become visible,’ the woman is soon to become a mother. They are united in their hopeful expectations. But the mother’s empathic identification with the baby is not just expressed in the poem; it is ‘embodied’ in the image of the pregnant woman herself. The poem turns the physical pregnancy into a metaphor for einfühlung/empathy, and leaves the reader wondering if the image of a joyful pregnancy -- the ‘burden’ that the mother asks to lay down and the ‘living tomb’ that the baby is impatient to emerge from -- may not be the shared primal scene that goes to define much of the nature of human relationships. American poet Linda Pastan’s ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’14 takes mother- daughter relationship to a time a few years later. The mother is teaching her eight- year old daughter how to ride a bicycle. The stage is set for emotional intimacy. The phenomenology of empathy requires two subject-agents. The poem starts with an ‘I’ and a ‘you’: ‘When I taught you/ at eight to ride/ a bicycle….’ Daughter is on her bike, mother is by her side, helping the daughter to stay on the bike. Suddenly the daughter finds her balance on the ‘two round wheels’ and is off, leaving the mother behind, speechless, with her ‘mouth rounding’ wide open, like 40 Poetry of Compassionate Empathy ______the ‘round wheels’ on which the daughter is now speeding away. The daughter’s sudden separation is what triggers the mother’s empathic connection with the daughter’s thrill mixed with apprehension. Their emotional states are identical for that moment. But the rest of the poem enacts the widening distance -- physical and emotional. While the mother sprints to catch up, fearful of a ‘thud’ from her girl’s crashing fall (the mother has now moved from empathy to sympathy), the daughter is ‘pumping’ and ‘screaming with laughter,’ her ‘hair flapping’ like a ‘handkerchief waving/ goodbye.’ At least three emotional states are present in this poem: empathy, sympathy, and various states of caring. We can isolate the emotions for analysis, but the experience of them happens as a holistic event. The poem is about growing up, leaving home, going away, parting, goodbyes, and the family of emotions that come together at such times fall under the umbrella virtue of compassion: the universal human capacity to care for oneself and others. It is precisely this human disposition for compassion that drives American writer William Stafford’s poem ‘Traveling through the Dark.’15 This is how the poem opens:
Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.16
The poem then recounts what the driver does and thinks, not what he feels emotionally. ‘I dragged her off,’ he says, matter of fact, ‘she was large in the belly.’ He feels with his hand down the side of the doe; it’s warm: ‘her fawn lay there waiting,/ alive, still, never to be born.’ He hesitates, standing in the mountain road, notices the steady sound of his car engine running, and ‘could hear the wilderness listen.’ The poem ends with the lines: ‘I thought for us all – my only swerving --,/then pushed her over the edge into the river.’ The poem presents an ambivalent scene. The driver could swerve around the dead deer and drive on, which would be dangerous for other drivers. He could try and save the fawn that was ‘never to be born’, or push the doe over the canyon. We know what he does, but that’s not as important as what happens inside the driver. Despite its clinical tone the poem’s focus is on the ambiguity of emotions the scene evokes in the driver, and the quality of his reflection leading to the final action. He feels sorry for the doe and the fawn; he has compassion for fellow travellers who might come behind him; he feels his own helplessness and knows the limits of what he can do for the fawn. He senses his human consciousness surrounded by dark, inert landscape -- a human being in an inhuman environment. All he can do is feel, and think a decent human way out of the surrounding wilderness. In short, the poem is about an unfortunate ordinary event, but the event is reconfigured to Paulus Pimomo 41 ______address a weighty question about life and death. Stafford puts himself in the driver’s seat, empathically, persuades his readers to do the same, and takes us through an intricate experience of understated emotions and serious reflection that leads to emotional release and mental clarity. This is the kind of experience Damien Freeman, in Art’s Emotions17, attributes to artworks at their best. They afford readers/audiences a ‘plenary experience of emotion.’ Poets get a lot of emotional and mental work done through their protean creative identities. They can assume any subject-position they wish. In Thomas Hardy’s ‘Afterwards,’18 the poet is talking about his future dead self by empathically identifying himself with his neighbors and acquaintances, so he can wonder about how they will perceive him after he is gone. He calls up carefully observed incidents and natural sights and sounds with which he wishes to be associated and remembered for, scenes having to do with caring, warmth, compassionate nature. And each scene concludes with the poet’s imagined sentiments of the people who knew him: ‘He was a man who used to notice such things’; ‘To him this must have been a familiar sight,’ or ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm/ But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’ Lastly, ‘And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom’: ‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’? Poets are like Buddhist practitioners in one way. They don’t seem to believe in having a stable ‘I’ when they do their work. According to John Keats, the poet has ‘no Identity’ so he is continually
filling some other Body -- The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who […] have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity … he has no self.19
Keats’ words are from a letter he wrote his friend and literary adviser Richard Woodhouse in 1818. English poets were no strangers to einfühlung/sympathy even before the word came into the language. And etymologically speaking, for 19th century German intelligentsia, einfühlung was said to be the faculty with which ‘the reader comes to appreciate the emotional tone of a poem’20.
Notes
1 Psychologist Edward Titchener is credited with one of the earliest uses of the word in place of the German, Einfühlung, in a 1909 book. In the 1920s, James and Alix Strachey, English translators of Freud’s works, were not sure about empathy as an appropriate equivalent for the expressive intimacy of einfühlung. See David
42 Poetry of Compassionate Empathy ______
Woodruff Smith, The Circle of Acquaintance: Perception, Consciousness, and Empathy (Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 115. 2 Plato, The Republic, Chapter X, trans. H.D.P. Lee (Middlesex: Penguin Books), 1955. 3 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920 or reprints). 4 See for instance Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, (Cambridge, MA: Bradford, 2009); and Richard Davidson, ‘The Neuroscience of Emotion,’ Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions: How to Overcome Them (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 179-204. 5 For phenomenological approach to emotions, specifically empathy, see Edith Stein’s seminal work, On the Problem of Empathy (1917), trans. Waltraut Stein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). 6 Richard Davidson, ‘The Protean Brain,’ Goleman, Destructive Emotions (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 334-353. 7 Alan Wallace and Thupten Jinpa, ‘The Anatomy of Mental Afflictions,’ Goleman, Destructive Emotions, 110-111. 8 Mathieu Ricard, ‘A Buddhist Psychology, Goleman, Destructive Emotions, 78- 79. 9 Nancy Einsenberg, ‘Empathy-Related Emotional Responses, Altruism, and Their Socialization,’ Richard Davidson and Anne Harrington, Visions of Compassion (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 133. 10 Alan Wallace and Owen Flanagan, ‘The Western Perspective,’ Goleman, Destructive Emotions, 60. 11 The ‘paradox of fiction’ has been summarized this way: 1. We have emotions concerning the situations of fictional characters. 2. To have an emotion concerning someone’s situation we must believe the propositions that describe that situation. 3. We do not believe the propositions that describe the situations of fictional characters. Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 187. 12 Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible’ (ca. 1795 and published in 1825. This may indeed be the earliest English poem on pregnancy). David Damrosch, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2. (New York: Longman, 1999), 32. 13 Anna Letitia Barbauld, 32. 14 Linda Pastan, ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home,’ The Norton Anthology of Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 525. 15 William Stafford, ‘Traveling Through the Dark’, R.S. Gwinn, Literature: a Pocket Anthology, 5th ed. (Boston: Penguin, 2010), 650.
Paulus Pimomo 43 ______
16 William Stafford, 650. 17 Damien Freeman, Art’s Emotions: Ethics, Expression and Aesthetic Experience (Montreal & Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 2012. See esp. chapter 4. 18 Thomas Hardy, ‘Afterwards,’ Damrosch, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 2091. 19 Damrosch, ‘John Keats, Letters,’ Longman Anthology of British Literature, 794- 809. 20 David Woodruff Smith, The Circle of Acquaintance: Perception, Consciousness, and Empathy, 115.
Bibliography
Bain, Carl, Jerome Beaty, and J. Paul Hunter. The Norton Anthology of Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Decety, Jean, and William Ickes. The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, MA: Bradford, 2009.
Damrosch, David. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 2 vols. New York: Longman, 1999.
Davidson, Richard, and Anne Harrington. Visions of Compassion. Oxford: OUP, 2002.
Davis, Mark H. Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach. Boulder, Colorado: Westview/Harper Collins, 1994/1996.
Freeman, Damien. Art’s Emotions: Ethics, Expression and Aesthetic Experience. Montreal & Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.
Goleman, Daniel. Destructive Emotions. New York: Bantam Books, 2003.
Gwinn, R. S. Literature: A Pocket Anthology, 5th ed. Boston: Penguin, 2010.
Margulies, Alfred. The Empathic Imagination. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.
44 Poetry of Compassionate Empathy ______
Smith, David Woodruff. The Circle of Acquaintance: Perception, Consciousness, and Empathy. Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy (1917). Translated by Waltraut Stein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970.
Titchener, Edward. Elementary Psychology of the Thought Processes. New York: Macmillan, 1909.
Paulus Pimomo, professor of English at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA, teaches colonial-postcolonial studies, African American literature, and theory. His latest publications are on the Nagas of northeastern India.
Empathic Fiction: Modelling Understanding across Borders in Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement
Jane Chamberlin
Abstract ‘How are we ever going to live in a multicultural world and have a conversation across perceived borders if the assumption is that we’re not even capable of imagining the experience of another?’ This question, posed by British-Canadian author Camilla Gibb, reflects the dilemma of prose writers struggling to represent the ethnic ‘other.’ Postcolonial critics often condemn the appropriation of marginalized voices as hegemonic, particularly when those voices arise from historically oppressed countries. But surely we need to tell stories about the tensions between developing and developed nations. We must ask ourselves, then: Can authors find a sound ethical platform from which to animate characters from developing nations? And in an increasingly global world, where the relationship between culture and place is increasingly tenuous, will cultural appropriation continue to matter? In this chapter, I will argue that novels like Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement, which model and foster empathy, offer a way for authors to avoid concerns about cultural appropriation as they represent characters from marginalized cultures. According to literary theorist Shameem Black, border- crossing novels demonstrate nuanced responses to various forms of otherness, exemplifying an openness toward social differences. These novels incorporate ‘crowded self’ characters that are vulnerable and open to change in response to the needs of others. I will use The Beauty of Humanity Movement, a novel told predominantly from the perspective of Vietnamese characters, to show how characters can learn, through empathy, to open themselves to other people and become receptive to change. By analysing a metafictional thread in the text, and by exploring narrative theories on empathic reader responses to novels, I will examine the multiple layers of empathy that help Gibb’s readers discover new perspectives on the marginalized ‘other.’ Gibb leads her readers on a journey of understanding across America and Vietnam, creating sympathetic characters that transcend hegemonic portrayals of a developing nation.
Key Words: Empathy, prose, fiction, Shameem Black, Camilla Gibb, Jane Chamberlin, postcolonial.
*****
I’d like to talk to you about a corner. It’s an ethical corner that fiction writers have been in for a long time, and I think empathy offers a way out. It’s an uncomfortable space, and it has to do with writing about people who are socially different. In other words, imagining people of different cultures, genders or classes. 46 Empathic Fiction ______Imagining their lives, their desires, their thoughts. This problem is partly rooted in the days when colonies and former colonies were struggling to raise their voices against their colonizers. Writers from formerly oppressed cultures have had good reason to insist on writing their own experiences. As literary critic Shameem Black explains, scholars are apprehensive about texts that cross borders informed by histories of oppression.1 We might well ask if it is possible to imagine the perspective of another person without doing violence to that person. If not, are writers locked into their uneasy positions, unable to empathize their way into characters, unable to create characters that evoke empathy from readers? What concerns me about this problem is the state of international relations today. As much as we might like to picture our world as coming together in a sort of global village, the fact of the matter is that we’re still pretty far away from that. A quick glance at the latest news about Ebola will show that our world is still defined by a huge gap between developed nations and developing nations. The West and the non-West. Although we now see images of people from other continents all the time on our phones, our tablets and our televisions, it’s easy to get through the day without losing sleep over it. So this is a difficult time for writers to stay backed into that corner, fenced in by fears of cultural appropriation. Because if we are going to reflect on issues of globalization in literature, we need to tell stories about relationships between nations. Which involves writing characters from other cultures. British-Canadian writer Camilla Gibb was asked about this issue, and she said: ‘I think the weight of cultural appropriation put us into these corners where there was nothing left that we could say, except to talk about our own navels. And the logical trajectory, in that case, is …the death of all art.’2 This is certainly extreme. We do need to be mindful of concerns about misrepresenting people from other cultures – those concerns are founded in centuries of disturbing examples. But surely we should take advantage of the potential of literature to get readers to look at the world from new perspectives, to empathize – over an extended period of time as we read – with a range of characters – people who are just not available in everyday life. I should point out that scholars disagree on the effects of empathizing with fictional characters, before we start to think that novel-reading might save the world. Some, like philosopher Martha Nussbaum, believe that reading canonical novels is crucial in building global citizens who are compassionate and caring, even for unknown others3. Narrative theorist Suzanne Keen cautions that the link between narrative and altruism is tenuous – although, discussing a novel or studying it formally can strengthen that link. Keen does believe that readers tend to empathize with characters, but it’s a complex process. Factors such as the context, timing and relevance of the narrative experience have a bearing on empathy levels. But Keen points out that novels do open up safe spaces for readers to try out the perspective-taking side of empathy.4 Reading Ian McEwan’s book, Saturday, for Jane Chamberlin 47 ______example, lets you think about the implications of a hostage-taking, from the comfort of your arm chair, without the distress levels of the actual situation. So it seems important that we find ways to write stories about people from other cultures. Surely now more than ever, our supposedly shrinking global community would benefit from novels that ask readers to feel what culturally disparate characters are feeling, and to reflect about different world views. So, as Camilla Gibb puts it, ‘How are we ever going to live in a multicultural world and have a conversation across perceived borders if the assumption is that we’re not even capable of imagining the experience of another?’5 In her novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, Gibb tackles the issue of cultural appropriation head-on. She finds a way to tell a Vietnamese story without doing violence to her subjects, by creating a metafictional moment that shows the difficulties of empathy and the challenges of writing across cultural borders. This metafictional moment mirrors Gibb’s own challenges as an author, raising questions like: Can an outsider be qualified to represent a culture? Do the benefits of writing about other cultures outweigh the problems of appropriation? So let’s look at this metafictional scene. We are in a café in Hanoi, Vietnam – and it’s the mid-1950s. In the café sits Dao, bold leader of the communist cultural movement. He’s eating pho and writing a play about the devastation of Vietnamese peasants following violent communist land reforms. The trouble is, he is not a peasant. He is a city boy; he knows the streets of Hanoi, not the fields beyond. So he lifts his pen and asks his server, a peasant named Hung, for some input from a worker’s point of view. ‘I just need a few lines,’ says Dao. ‘Something that sounds natural. Realistic.’6 What Dao does not realize is that Hung has actually been devastated by the land reforms; his entire family and village were destroyed. Hung knows that Dao is all for the rights of the proletariat, but he is not qualified to write about the peasant experience. He says, ‘Dao was still, in the end, an educated young man of Hanoi, schooled in the western way, who had never done manual labour or gone hungry. Dao could feel outraged by things in the abstract that he would obviously never feel in his bones.’7 Although Hung respects Dao as an activist and writer, he knows that he cannot accurately represent people who have worked the land, owned a small square, and paid for the soil with their lives. The scene draws our attention to the fact that we are reading a story, and within that story is a story about storytelling. I think Gibb is saying, Hey, in case you thought I just sat down and banged out a story about these people from Vietnam, think again. She’s saying, I am totally aware of the problems of representing other people in a responsible way – in fact, let’s all think about this together. So the moment we read this scene, the moment we see Dao masquerading as a writer who understands the peasant class, we start thinking about Gibb. We wonder if she, like Dao, has simply scrounged around for a few authentic lines to put in the mouths of her characters. 48 Empathic Fiction ______Of course Gibb doesn’t leave that question hanging. She offers a solution to the problem of representation – in the form of empathy. Dao doesn’t just offer Hung pity; he takes steps to try and understand the communist land reforms from the peasants’ point of view: he travels to the countryside to see the destruction for himself. He forces himself to witness the after-effects of the communist party’s brutality, touring villages that have been gutted by torture and executions. But his motive for the journey does not come solely from a desire to understand what Hung is going through. Dao begins to change after a personal loss. His new-born child, slipping blue from his mother’s womb, has been strangled by a midwife who decides that ‘A child like this will be of no use to the revolution.’8 This traumatic event has taken away Dao’s confidence in himself and his cause. He sees now that ‘the revolution would not stop short of murdering everyone who stood in its way.’9 Dao then records his epiphany in a poem dedicated to Hung, and it elicits a profound, even physical reaction. Hung says the poem captures ‘the tragedy of the countryside so viscerally that [he] could taste blood on his tongue.’10 He realizes that Dao truly understands the catastrophe, and is atoning through poetry, to span the differences between their worlds. Dao’s poem is an aesthetic gesture that embodies a shared emotion, giving them a common frame of reference to understand the communist party and its violence. And Dao is as weakened by the violence as Hung is. He returns from his excursion to the countryside in silence, his verbal prowess shattered by what he witnessed in the villages. Dao has made himself vulnerable by sharing this horrific experience, and it has indeed changed him. But why is it the death of Dao’s child that sparks this progression toward empathy? Gibb raises questions here about how we can truly empathize if we haven’t experienced similar events. Would Dao have attained the same depth of empathy if his child hadn’t been killed in the name of the revolution? Could he have related to Hung’s grief if he himself had not been grieving? Could he have imagined the true magnitude of Hung’s pain? Let’s look at the theories of Shameem Black to sort through these questions. She suggests that a certain kind of character can model a true openness to others, and she calls these characters ‘crowded selves.’ In these fictional people, ‘the borders of the self jostle against the edges of others, and this mediating position allows for the contours of each to become more porous and flexible. Characters attempt to see the world as another does without wholly letting go of their own original vision, because this perspective-taking exercise may alter that initial point of view.’11 Black is careful to point out that the goal of this exercise is not heightened self-knowledge or self-completion, but it does involve change. She says, ‘The crowded self expands to include diverse, sometimes contradictory, and occasionally even threatening points of view.’12 This definition echoes with the cognitive side of empathy. It sounds similar to Amy Coplan’s definition of other-oriented perspective-taking. Coplan points to a need to Jane Chamberlin 49 ______focus on the other, and move beyond our own experience, as we try to simulate what someone else is experiencing from their point of view. The process requires mental flexibility, and it requires suppressing your own perspective. It gets even harder when the target is socially different.13 So when Gibb emphasizes the painful nature of Dao’s empathy experience, she reminds us that no empathetic act is simple. And yes, empathy is probably easier when we share an experience. But by portraying Dao’s and Hung’s connection as challenging and complex, she creates complex characters, and she avoids the essentialized characters that make cross- cultural representation such a problem. So this metafictional story of Dao sets a standard for Gibb’s project. It suggests steps writers should take in writing about the cultural ‘other’ with authenticity. First, they should immerse themselves in their subject matter, and second, undergo an emotional experience that provides a common frame of reference. They then create an aesthetically powerful text that resonates with socially different readers. This metafictional scene suggests that representing social differences is best done by what Shameem Black would call a border-crossing novel – a novel that represents those who are socially different, and uses their characters to address the same issue. So they openly meditate on the many challenges around representation. Characters often strive to imagine life from a contrasting character’s perspective. These crowded-selves are self-aware and vulnerable, and are ‘willing to change in response to the needs and demands of other.’14 Does Gibb’s own process follow the guidelines she set up in that metafictional scene? Whether she shared a similar experience as her characters is a difficult question. She certainly didn’t experience the history of Vietnam in a literal sense, and has not experienced the sort of war-related horror that Hung went through during the 60s and 70s. So the experiential link seems broken or at least weak. Did Gibb immerse herself in her research as she wrote this novel? She is certainly not a stranger to this process; she’s an anthropologist, and for a previous novel, she actually embedded herself in Ethiopia for a year before writing. But Gibb’s research for The Beauty of Humanity Movement was more library-based than field- based. As she wrote this novel, Gibb chose to focus on the importance of particularizing the individual, rather than a broader portrayal of a nation-state’s history. She says, ‘I don’t know Vietnam or Vietnamese history, but I know the characters and their stories. I know the way they’ve experienced their own lives in a particular context.’15 (264). Although she did not embed herself in a Vietnamese community, she did perform the sort of research that Dao might recommend. She spent a month in Vietnam, and her textual research was quite comprehensive – she delved into Vietnamese poetry, the life of Ho Chi Minh, the café culture of Hanoi and peasant life in Vietnamese villages. She also developed relationships with people from Hanoi, including a young man who inspired her to write the book. In the end, she was able to create multiple Vietnamese characters, who all have their 50 Empathic Fiction ______own internal logic, who all struggle and change. But is this good enough? Does it make up for the fact that Gibb herself is not Vietnamese? Shameem Black supports the idea that textual research does not have to be trumped by lived experience. She contends that the self is constructed of a wide range of experiences: She suggests that ‘subjectivities are forged in the libraries as well as on the streets, in the cacophony of written histories as well as in the crucible of embodied encounters.’16 To follow this line of thinking, then, what we learn or what we imagine, based on prior knowledge, can provide an experience that competes with the richness of embodied experiences. This idea seems especially likely given the technologies we can now use to experience different parts of the world. And it seems to give the role of empathy a potential boost. Empathy is also a sort of secondary experience, one step removed from the experience itself. We feel what others are feeling and imagine what they’re going through, without actually living through it ourselves. So Black’s contention suggests that empathizing is a valid way to represent people across social differences. And Gibb’s novel certainly puts empathy into play. By overtly showing crowded-self characters struggling to feel along with others, she creates a border- crossing novel that could help readers change along with the characters. Even if they are uninspired toward prosocial behaviour, readers might begin to reconsider the ethics of imagining people who are socially different. As Dao models a relationship with Hung that turns the expected power hierarchy upside-down, he may help readers imagine ways to use empathy as a response to difference. But, looking ahead, will it matter, in forty or eighty years where Camilla Gibb was born? Will this writers’ corner still exist? Will anyone care that a London-born woman has told a story about Hung and Dao? Perhaps not. Globalization theorists like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt envision a future that transcends borders, where cities are gathering places for cooperating humanities, where people are in constant motion across the earth.17 This manifesto leaves little room for pedantic concerns over novelists who appropriate other citizens’ cultures. But for now, Camilla Gibb has found a way to imagine herself into a Vietnamese story. She foregrounds the politics of representation, with characters who model the perspective-taking skills of crowded selves, and she manages to squeeze out of the cultural appropriation corner.
Notes
1 Shameem Black, Fiction across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (New York: Columbia UP, 2010), 3. 2 Smaro Kambourelli and Hannah MacGregor, ‘Throw Yourself Into the Deep End,’ University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 82.2 (2013): 262 Jane Chamberlin 51 ______
3 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 90. 4 Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 4. 5 Kambourelli and MacGregor, ‘Throw Yourself into the Deep End,’ 265. 6 Camilla Gibb, The Beauty of Humanity Movement (Canada: Anchor, 2010), 144. 7 Ibid. 144. 8 Ibid. 159. 9 Ibid. 159. 10 Ibid. 184. 11 Black, Fiction across Borders, 47. 12 Ibid. 47. 13 Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy Its Features and Affects,’ Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford UP, 2011). 14 Black, Fiction across Borders, 47. 15 Kambourelli and MacGregor, ‘Throw Yourself into the Deep End,’ 264. 16 Black, Fiction across Borders, 37. 17 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, ‘The Multitude against Empire.’ Literature and Globalization, ed. Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh (London: Routledge, 2011), 92.
Bibliography
Black, Shameem. Fiction across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.
Coplan, Amy. ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Affects.’ Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 3-18.
Gibb, Camilla. The Beauty of Humanity Movement. Canada: Anchor, 2010.
Kamboureli, Smaro, and Hannah McGregor. ‘Throw Yourself into the Deep End.’ University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities. 82.2 (2013): 261–277. ProQuest.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt. ‘The Multitude against Empire.’ Literature and Globalization, edited by Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, 87–92. London: Routledge, 2011. 52 Empathic Fiction ______
Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Jane Chamberlin is a second-year PhD student in the University of Calgary’s English Department (Canada), specializing in creative writing. Her dissertation project will focus on empathy and global citizenship, and will take the form of a novel. Can You See Me Now? Examining Empathy and Perception through Art Practice
Fiona Larkin
Abstract In this chapter I will be using my own artwork to explore empathy by reflecting on empathy and art from a phenomenological perspective. As philosopher Theodore Lipps defined it, empathy is a kind of imaginative projection or inner imitation of our own feelings into/onto an object or artwork. In short, Lipps’ theory states that the work of art enhances our capacity for empathy in that ‘beauty derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object’.1 Empathy as derived from the German Einfühlung literally translates as ‘feeling into’. In this account, I am not concerned with exploring our ability to feel empathy with people as such, that is, compassion for others directly, but with figurative art as a method of activating empathy in viewers, what Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft might term ‘perspective shift’,2 particularly with regard to images. For both William Worringer and Theodore Lipps, ‘The form of an object is always its being-formed by me, by my inner activity’.3 So I will be looking at my own art work as a means of exploring orientations, ways of looking, looking as an active process, and how this activity explores imaginative projection through empathetic engagement. I highlight four key areas within the practice and consider if and whether empathy is manifest in the art work. The discussion is presented under the following subheadings: Empathy and Recovery, Empathy and the Substitute, Empathy and Doubt, and Empathy and the Loop.
Key Words: Empathy, art, perspective, orientation, proxy, doubt, loop, translation, phenomenology, Samuel Todes, Edith Stein.
*****
1. Empathy and Recovery Here I want to address the idea of recovery and the document. I consider that in artwork ‘recovery’ is achieved through a process of expanded collage. We know collage to mean a form of joining one image to the next. I am using the term expanded collage to mean a layering process that may happen beyond the image itself, a conflation of media or a method of developing and making additions to the original document. This occurs through the practice in many ways. For example, one aspect of my practice is to take snapshot images of strangers in the street and then submit the images to a process of opening up, often through engaging others in some form of response. I consider viewers’ responses a form of layering; it is as though they make additions to the original photograph or foundational image. In the work Yellow De 54 Can You See Me Now? ______Ne Pouvoir Etre Seul (2012) (Image 1), comprising of photography and video, my chance sighting of a girl in a gallery with an odd yellow mark provided that foundational image, from which began a process of collecting images of everyday yellow things. Ostensibly, this activity was carried out as a means of getting closer to the girl and explaining her yellow mark; however, after a long time collecting images, it becomes clear that it only serves to delineate a portrait of my everyday life. The video also makes use of a kind of stratified perspective to offer the viewer a more dynamic role. The camera angle places the viewer in my place; my hands become your (viewer’s) hands. While this act of orientation may seem subtle, it isn’t incidental.
Image 1: Installation shot of Yellow De Ne Pouvoir Etre Seul, by Fiona Larkin, video, © 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in his essay ‘The Pensive Image’, talks about the image as containing ‘unthought thought which cannot be attributed to the intention of the person who produces it’.4 So when presented with an image like this:
Fiona Larkin 55 ______
Image 2: Backstory, by Fiona Larkin, c-print, © 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Where does that unthought thought go? In Backstory (2013) (Image 2) I used a photograph I had taken of a woman in a contemplative state to prompt and invite response/interpretation/translation from writers through an open call. The image presented has the quality of an intimate moment, captured and focused on. However, this snap shot is part of the documentary tradition of street photography. The motivation in offering this image to others was, much like my intention in the artwork Yellow de ne pouvoir etre seul, to move it beyond the limitations of the documentary. Here, the ambiguity in the original photograph acts as a space for imaginative exploration, or fictive reverie. In the photographic document there is always the suggestion that something is missing, and it is this gap that prompts imagination. But to imagine, we must engage with the image in a particular way, an empathetic way. This practice of inviting engagement and opening artwork up to the influence of others isn’t new. Umberto Eco wrote about it in 1962 in ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’. He says: ‘The invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author’.5 In Backstory, the viewers/writers allow themselves to be led by my image, but equally by the stranger in the image. This idea of orientating and 56 Can You See Me Now? ______following another, echoes phenomenologist Edith Stein’s assertion that to experience empathy is akin to being ‘led by the foreign experience’.6 In the work I received back from the writers, comprising of scripts, prose, short stories, there was a clear sense that they made an effort to recover the supposed missing parts. In Backstory their story telling acts as a kind of recovery. It offers the silent figure a voice. Artist Thomas Hirschhorn says: ‘Collages possess the power to implicate the other immediately’.7 In Backstory I see my method of working as a kind of expanded collage where the viewer-writers added texture and colour to the original image. But perhaps collage is an act of substitution rather than a recovery, mixing the silence of this figure and matching it to the voices of various writers. Or perhaps the figure is a mold into which we can cast our own projections. If this is the case, what we call imaginative projections are perhaps simply substitutions, proxies.
2. Empathy and the Substitute Phenomenologist Samuel Todes offers this useful definition of the relationship between perception and imagination:
What strains my imagination to the breaking point (e.g., imagining a round square) thus seems also to limit what can possibly exist. Perception is self-evidence – in the literal sense that something is itself made evident to us by this way of experiencing it. But imagination is proxy-evidence – in the sense that only a representation of something is made evident to us by this way of experiencing it.8
However, if we consider empathy as a kind of parallel to the imaginative experience9 connections can be drawn where empathy is seen as a form of substitution. We are used to hearing empathy described as an ‘in the shoes of’ experience, which is a simple metaphor for the act of substitution. To characterise how our perceptual self is interchangeable with our imaginative self, Todes uses the example of seeing someone from behind and construing from this vantage point whether or not they might be an attractive person. ‘It is for example by perception rather than imagination that we are aware of the (hidden) far side of a perceived object.’10 So, for Todes, seeing the back of something helps to explore the phenomenology of the imagination (or limitations thereof). In this instance we have no actual evidence but we have ‘proxy-evidence’– our perceived version of them from the front. This has parallels to the art historical tradition of the Rückenfigur11 associated with German Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich. He frequently employed Fiona Larkin 57 ______images of a person seen from behind, contemplating a view, to encourage a kind of active viewing from the audience. Here the incomplete nature of the figure encourages curiosity. This brings me to my own practice of collage. In offering participants images to contemplate, am I creating a space to explore ‘representations of possible, though not necessarily actual’12 ‘other’? The imaginative ‘proxy evidence’ that Samuel Todes examines prompts the question: Is imaginative engagement acting as a substitute for the limitations of the image in the work? If the image acts as a prompt to imagination by its missing parts (the unseen but imagined parts), then all of our empathetic reverie is a kind of substitute for what is/was really there, beyond the edges of the image. My viewer/writers’ versions also made me aware that there was a possibility for endless versions and revisions, the possibility for many substitutions. Also, it seems that at least in my work, this substitute, authorized and solicited to act on behalf of the gaps, is in some way cut loose, unbridled, and perhaps a little mad. In the film, Scene Three: Where It Is Written, we are seeing through the lens as though it were writing, and also orientated towards the lake so that the camera becomes the eyes of the woman sitting and looking. It seems that speaking on behalf of an unknown other can be liberating. The proxy is also a way of thinking about authorship in the work, one that addresses the participants (in this case, writers). They provide the ‘proxy evidence’, so the resulting agent/image might not be of my making or at least not solely of my making. This provokes a kind of instability regarding authorship, one that Roland Barthes posits in the ‘The Death of The Author’:13
It will always be possible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.14
And so the more versions and substitutions, the more unstable the position of the author, the more we are made aware of the fissures and gaps. This, however, is often the point or motivation for empathetic engagement in the first place.
58 Can You See Me Now? ______3. Empathy and Doubt
Image 3: Scene Two: She is Camera, by Fiona Larkin, still from video, © 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
So, the substitute is tinged with doubt. In the video Scene Two: She is Camera (Image 3), a simple inversion along with the mirroring effect of the lake prompts the viewers to doubt what they see. Doubt becomes an interruption to the fictive reverie. It is by perceiving the gap that empathy is set in motion, therefore it is impossible to engage empathetically with the image without being first aware of the separation between self & other (self and the object/image in this case). It would be difficult to talk about contemporary art and empathy and not mention Jill Bennett’s Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art.15 Bennett defines empathy as a kind of oscillation and, like Nikos Papastergiadis, she sees it as ‘a constant tension of going to and fro’.16 Discussing the work of William Kentridge, she notes that ‘Spivak has spoken of translation as essential to an encounter with the other, not simply because it renders the experience of the other transparent – it cannot, in fact, achieve this- but because it forces an awareness of difference.’17 In my Backstory project the act of translation was applied to the image, where writers were invited to respond and communicate what they saw in the figure of the stranger presented. The variety of response was rich; however, in offering multiple readings we are made aware of the individual bias of each writer and hence a sense of a fracturing in translation. It would seem in discussing empathy, it is impossible Fiona Larkin 59 ______not to be drawn to an examination on the nature of interpretation and vicariousness, and here enters doubt. While there is an argument against the limitations of the subjective nature of affect, Bennett demonstrates how art can become a kind of conduit through which subjectivity is negotiated, harnessed even, in order to expose and explore doubt.
Image 4: Scene One: Her Translation, by Fiona Larkin, still from video, © 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Edith Stein says: ‘Furthermore, this psycho-physical individual only becomes aware of its living body as a physical body like others when it empathically realizes that its own zero point of orientation is a spatial point among many.’18 Having made the effort to project into the image, to see this other perspective, there is an interruption in our experience of this thing that we see, how might we know it mirrors the other’s vantage point? We don’t. At best, it is a way of understanding others that doesn’t ‘bridge the gap’ but allows us to be ‘led by the foreign experience’,19 implying that empathy is a curious and an uncertain process of following.
4. Empathy and the Loop If as art viewers and translators we are following the image, then where are we going? Is the relationship one of influence or appropriation? Following might be misleading and is certainly sticky in terms of questions both of authorising substitutions and of authoring in Barthes’ sense. If we return to Worringer and 60 Can You See Me Now? ______Lipps understanding that, ‘The form of an object is always its being formed by me, by my inner activity’,20 then are we merely meeting ourselves coming back? In her novel Aliens and Anorexia Chris Krauss says; ‘Therefore, empathy is not a reaching outward. It is a loop. Because there isn’t any separation anymore between what you are and what you see.’21 If indeed the perception of an object is an ‘inner activity’ and if in empathy ‘what you are and what you see’ have merged in a loop, then there is room for perspective shifts in the interior life of viewers and translators brought on by artwork. If empathy is a loop then there is room in our perspective shift for an inward turn. In my practice I am led by a response to a photograph, often an image of a figure, to build something, to construct new images through gesture, text and engagement with others, which are all strongly motivated by intuitive response. This intuition or sense is the inward turn. As Stein suggests, empathy is not just perception or representation ‘but a sui generis’,22 a unique experience.
Notes
1 Rhys W. Williams, William Worringer, Oxfordartonline.com, viewed on 19 May 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092269. 2 Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). 3 William Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (London: Routledge, 1963), 6. 4 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London, N.Y.: Verso, 2009), 107. 5 Umberto Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, Participation, ed. Claire Bishop, (Massachusetts, London: MIT Press 2006), 36. 6 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989), xvii. 7 Thomas Hirschhorn, ARNDTBerlin.com, viewed on 10 March 2013, http://www.arndtberlin.com/website/artist_1030. 8 Samuel Todes, Body and World (Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2001), 130. 9 Edith Stein’s account introduces a closer examination of imagination and its comparative links to empathy. 10 Samuel Todes, Body and World, 130. 11 Rückenfigur, usually considered to be an image of a person seen from behind, often contemplating a view. 12 Todes, Body and World, 132. 13 Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1993). 14 Ibid, 2 Fiona Larkin 61 ______
15 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, (California: Stanford University Press, 2005). 16 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, 10. Here she is quoting Nikos Papastergiadis from ‘Faith without Certitudes: A Conversation with Nikos Papastergiadis’ by Mary Zournazi, 2002. 17 Ibid, 121. 18 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (Washington: ICS Publications, 1989). 19 Ibid., xvii. 20 Ibid., xviii. 21 Chris Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2013), 150. 22 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy.
Bibliography
Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. California: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1993.
Currie G. and I. Ravenscroft. Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. London: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Eco, Umberto. ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’. Participation, ed. Claire Bishop. Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2006. 20-39.
Kraus, Chris, Aliens and Anorexia. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2013.
Hirschhorn, Thomas. Arndtberlin.com, Viewed on 10 March 2013. http://www.arndtberlin.com/website/artist_1030.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London, N.Y.: Verso, 2009.
Stein, Edith. On The Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989.
Todes, Samuel. Body and World. Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2001.
Williams, Rhys W. Oxfordartonline.com, Viewed on 19 May 2014. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092269.
62 Can You See Me Now? ______
Worringer, William. Abstraction and Empathy, A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. London: Routledge, 1963.
Fiona Larkin is an artist and researcher currently working toward her PhD at Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Uncertainty Principle: The Locus of Empathy in Breaking Bad
Abby Bentham
Abstract When Vince Gilligan pitched the idea for Breaking Bad to studio bosses at AMC, his description of it as ‘a story about a man who transforms himself from Mr Chips into Scarface’1 proved to be enough of a hook to take the show into production. However, whilst this transformation is indeed breath-taking, perhaps the most fascinating thing about the series has been its manipulation of the viewer. As the show opens, the locus of empathy is Walter White; a terminally ill high school chemistry teacher desperate to provide financially for his disabled, teenaged son and unexpectedly pregnant wife. However, as the narrative arc develops, Walter undergoes a dramatic transformation. His shift from shambling underdog to drug lord poses interesting moral questions which increasingly act as a barrier to empathy and identification with the character. My chapter charts the development of Walter White and the characters around him, exploring how their representation in the show affects and manipulates viewer identification. Via consideration of the narrative and cinematographic techniques at play, I demonstrate how reception of Walter shifts from sympathy to empathy and ultimately to revulsion. I also explore the contingent nature of categories such as hero and villain, and reflect on why such development is denied to the show’s unremittingly negative female characters.
Key Words: Empathy, Breaking Bad, Walter White, morality, evil, hero, villain, misogyny.
*****
In the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White tells his students: ‘Technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change... It is growth, then decay, then transformation.’ The series itself could also be viewed in these terms, as it charts Walt’s evolution from underachieving, downtrodden, cancer victim to the feared kingpin in a multi-million dollar methamphetamine empire. Whilst that is undoubtedly an audacious premise for a drama series, the most startling thing about the show is not its subject matter but its skilful manipulation of the viewer’s emotions. Of course, film and television have a long history of producing charismatic anti-heroes, with characters such as Michael Corleone, Tony Soprano and Dexter Morgan taking privileged places in popular culture. Empathy with such characters is established by a variety of narrative and cinematographic techniques which suggest complicity and encourage identification with the focalising character. In his article ‘Nobody Here But Us Killers: The Disavowal of Violence in Recent 64 Uncertainty Principle ______American Films’,2 Thomas M. Leitch describes a number of disavowal techniques by which the viewer can reduce the cognitive dissonance that arises from the passive enjoyment of subversive or troubling material. These techniques typically include the use of music or comedy, or the stylisation of violence, all of which are at play in Breaking Bad. Where Breaking Bad diverges sharply from its televisual and cinematic forebears, however, is in its shifting locus of empathy. Walt’s development takes the reader from feelings of sympathy to empathy to revulsion and (almost) back again, but the show doesn’t provide the viewer with an alternative, easy figure of identification. Every character is flawed and complex and it is this depth and diversity that makes the series so interesting. Much of the show’s success rests in its ability to create multiple points of affinity which allow the viewer to relate to Walt and his situation. He is middle- aged and regretful of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential. His salary is insufficient to meet his outgoings – a fact that certainly resonated with audiences when the show first aired during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Henpecked at home and under-appreciated at work, Walt’s masculinity is in crisis but he resignedly accepts his lot whilst seething with unexpressed resentment and rage. In the first episode, everything about him screams disappointment and conformity, from his drab, outdated home, to his practical car in an insipid shade of green. A close-up on a dusty certificate reveals that in 1985 Walt’s ground-breaking research into photon radiography contributed to a project that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet whilst his former colleagues Elliot and Gretchen Schwarz went on to become billionaires, Walt ended up as an overqualified, underpaid high school chemistry teacher forced to work a second job as a cashier at a car wash, simply to make ends meet. Significantly, it is Walt’s diagnosis of terminal stage-3 lung cancer that shocks him back to life. His precarious financial position means he is unable to provide his family with long term economic security, an unsettling proposition given that his wife is unexpectedly pregnant; he has a disabled teenage son, and the family has little in the way of savings. Inspired by a news bulletin which showed his DEA agent brother-in-law busting a meth lab from which $700,000 was recovered, Walt decides to start producing meth which he intends to sell with the help of his former student, Jesse Pinkman, who he is blackmailing into co-operating with the plan. Jesse is a habitual drug user and low-level meth cook, with an attitude problem and questionable friends. In the show’s early binary positioning of right and wrong, good and bad, he is figured as a potential source of moral contamination or danger to the straight-laced White family, yet, as the show progresses, Jesse increasingly provides its moral centre and his empathetic representation provides a stark counterpoint to Walt’s progressive evil. Walt’s understanding of the criminal underworld is gleaned from popular culture, and his gauche attempts to adopt the hyper-masculine performance of the drug lord or gangster are the source of much amusement both at the level of Abby Bentham 65 ______diegesis and outside of the narrative performance. As I noted earlier, comedy plays an important role in helping the viewer to disavow his or her ambivalent response to Walt and Jesse’s decision to supply a dangerous drug. Walt’s naivety and his unintentional physical comedy are essential to the creation and maintenance of empathy for the character. In the first two seasons, he is relatable and funny, and the viewer wants him to succeed in his plan to provide for his family, even though by episode three of Season One he has already killed two men. These murders, which are admittedly in self-defence, should be troubling, but empathy is unthreatened and identification remains intact by the juxtaposition of Walt and the ‘real’ criminals that he comes into contact with. Characters such as Krazy-8, Emilio and Tuco are ruthless and deadly and when Walt is viewed against them, the audience is reminded that he is a good man doing bad things for good reasons. Walt’s justification for his crimes, that he is acting altruistically to protect and provide for his family, is crucial to the creation of empathetic acceptance and identification in Season One. It provides a utilitarian moral framework for an immoral act and it aligns Walt with John Stuart Mill’s ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’, which holds that ‘actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness’.3 By this rationale, Walt’s decision to cook and distribute methamphetamine is acceptable, even desirable, because it will provide an inheritance for his family which will ensure their comfort and wellbeing after his death. Walt is able to override his knowledge of the personal and social problems caused by meth addiction by focusing on his own agenda and the positive outcomes he envisages for Skyler and the children. However, as the series progresses, Walt’s characterisation as beleaguered, moral family man becomes increasingly problematic and this has a serious impact on viewer empathy. His alter-ego, Heisenberg, which he established as a means of protecting his identity, becomes progressively central to Walt’s characterisation. The Heisenberg persona is the embodiment of the ‘badass’ that Walt Jr. jokingly says his father looks like when he is forced to shave his head during chemotherapy. The name derives from Werner Heisenberg, a brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who is remembered as a pioneer of the quantum mechanics which govern the physics of the atomic world, and for his role as the leader of Germany’s nuclear fission programme during World War 2. Heisenberg can therefore be taken as a symbol of intellectual might, and of destructive power and threat. The fact that he was awarded the Nobel Prize reminds the viewer that Walt also had that potential. Significantly, given Werner Heisenberg’s link to nuclear fusion, the adoption of the Heisenberg persona converts Walt’s thwarted potential into invigorating kinetic energy and imbues him with masculine potency. Walt first gives his name as Heisenberg during a tense meeting with psychopathic meth distributor, Tuco Salamanca, where Walt creates an explosion with fulminated mercury in order to get Tuco to agree to his terms. In an earlier 66 Uncertainty Principle ______chemistry lesson, Walt used fulminated mercury to demonstrate to his class how rapid chemical reactions can cause otherwise harmless substances to explode and it is apparent that that is also what we are seeing in the evolution of Walt’s character. It assists the viewer’s empathetic identification with Walt as we see this ‘harmless’ man forced to respond in extreme ways to circumstances which appear to be spinning out of control. The notion of control is particularly pertinent to this narrative of masculine crisis, and Werner Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’ has particular resonance here. The ‘Uncertainty Principle’ governs the behaviour of chemical molecules and decrees that ‘the more precisely the position [of a moving particle] is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known’. In layman’s terms, this means that one can never be sure what will happen in any given situation as there are always unknown variables that cannot be controlled. So, even as the viewer is celebrating Walt’s success with Tuco, circumstances are established which will ultimately place Walt and Jesse in a far more precarious position. It’s interesting to note that, as the Heisenberg persona develops, he also takes on a physical presence by way of the pork pie hat and sunglasses that Walt wears as a disguise. At first glance, the hat simply looks like the misguided choice of a man trying, and failing, to look like a gangster. Hollywood has established a strong visual image of the archetypal gangster and, as Stella Bruzzi notes, ‘[i]n his armoury, the most consistent of the overdetermined accessories is the essential sharp felt hat’.4 Freud viewed the hat as a symbol of masculinity5, a notion that gained great cultural currency and which is of great significance in the context of Walt’s self-making and embattled masculinity.6 The ‘sharp felt hat’ of the gangster comes most commonly in the form of a fedora or homburg, so Walt’s choice is instantly at odds with the traditional image. This demonstrates the performative and initially uncomfortable nature of Walt’s ‘gangster’ masculinity, and points to what Esther Sonnet and Peter Stanfield, in their discussion of the retro gangster movie cycle of the 1990s, describe as ‘the dense symbolic exchange around the liminal and provisional status of criminal identity.’7 However, although the pork pie hat is not the traditional signifier of gangster masculinity, it has important forebears in both history and popular culture which add to its resonance and empathetic power. One of its earliest famous wearers was Buster Keaton, the American actor best known for his physical comedy and stoicism. Other notable wearers include Gene Hackman as Jimmy Doyle in the 1971 film The French Connection, and Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy in Mean Streets from 1973. The prominence of these characters in popular culture means that the connection brings a dialogic slew of positive associations which act as cultural shorthand for viewer acceptance of the Heisenberg persona. Significantly, the pork pie hat was also favoured by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, and this association brings a darker and more menacing context to Heisenberg’s destructive potential. Abby Bentham 67 ______Walt’s evolution from shambling family man to ruthless megalomaniac is played out carefully over the full five seasons of the series, and the psychic difficulties of the changes he undergoes are unflinchingly depicted. As viewers, we empathise with him when he weeps as he strangles Krazy-8, and we appreciate the anguish and remorse he feels at his decision to stand and watch as Jane chokes to death on her own vomit. Walt’s first cold-blooded killing, when he drives into two dealers then shoots the surviving one in the head, marks his moral turning-point but it too has an arguably ethical justification – the men had just murdered a 12-year old child and in killing them, Walt is saving Jesse from being murdered. By the end of Season Three, however, Walt’s corruption is revealed when he orders the strategic murder of harmless Gale Boetticher. The pursuit of power has become Walt’s primary motivating factor and, as hubris takes over, audience empathy begins to wane. When a terrified Skyler hears of Gale’s murder, she fears for the family’s safety and begs Walt to go to the police. His scornful reaction – ‘I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!’ – demonstrates the pride and pleasure he takes in his new-found potency. The man who had earlier vowed to do just 11 more cooks to net the $737,000 he estimated would provide for his family for the next 25 years now declares himself to be in the ‘empire business’. The extent of Walt’s moral deterioration is laid bare when he poisons a 6-year-old boy so as to trick Jesse into thinking that Gus is responsible and enlist his help in orchestrating Gus’s murder. This cynical power grab makes for compelling viewing and whilst the audience may marvel at Walt’s cunning and audacity, empathy for the character is lost by this point in the narrative. Significantly, it is never fully restored8 and Walt is shown to be thoroughly corrupted. Of course, Walt is not the only character to undergo change; empathy for Jesse also fluctuates. Although he is largely a likeable character, identification is strained at times. After Jane’s death, Jesse enters rehab where he is counselled that his goal should be self-acceptance rather than personal betterment. Jesse’s response is to embrace his ‘bad guy’ persona and set about making ‘some serious cheddar’ by selling meth. His attempt to seduce a gas station cashier into accepting blue meth in lieu of payment is highly disturbing, as it reveals the injurious potential of both drugs and drug dealers – an element of the meth business from which the viewer has been shielded until this point in the narrative. Jesse’s decisions to push drugs to the members of his Narcotics Anonymous support group and to derail the rehabilitation of his friend Skinny Pete are equally alienating to the viewer. However, the knowledge that Jesse’s grief is at the core of his behaviour ensures that empathy for the character is never fully eradicated. Indeed, the depth of the pain that Jesse feels at Jane’s death serves to bolster viewer empathy and, as the narrative progresses, his essential goodness becomes increasingly apparent. This is revealed particularly via his relationship with children such as Brock Cantillo and the unnamed youngster in the home of Spooge and his partner, whom he tries to 68 Uncertainty Principle ______shield from the effects of methamphetamine use.9 When an innocent child is shot dead by Tod Alquist during the methylamine heist, Jesse feels unable to continue in the business and subsequently suffers a minor breakdown. Although disturbed by events, Walt’s instinctive response is to protect and expand his empire. The juxtaposition of Walt’s cynical strategising and Jesse’s psychologically appropriate response reveals how the binary positioning of good and evil that the two characters originally represented has been transposed and exaggerated. Interestingly, identification with Hank Schrader, Breaking Bad’s heroic lawman, is also challenged at the series’ end. Hank is a wisecracking, alpha-male DEA agent who represents truth and justice. The heroic police officer is a central feature of standard crime fictions and police procedurals that offers an uncompromised model of hegemonic masculinity. However, Hank’s masculinity is in crisis following several traumatic and life-threatening experiences, and Seasons Two, Three and Four show him struggling to reconcile his earlier machismo performances with the panic attacks and depression brought on by his post- traumatic stress disorder. Despite this, he remains a good husband to Marie and a faithful friend and brother-in-law to Walt and Skyler, all of which encourage viewer empathy. Empathy is threatened, though, when Hank realises that Walt is Heisenberg and is determined to make an arrest, despite the fact that Walt pleads with him to spare Walt Jr. the anguish of finding out the truth about his father. Hank has the option of waiting for Walt to die of cancer, but his masculine pride demands the glory of an arrest and triumph over Walt. Hank’s failure to prioritise the wellbeing of the family alienates the viewer, and the final vestiges of empathy are eliminated when he attempts to manipulate Skyler into implicating her husband, then risks Jesse’s life in pursuit of obtaining taped evidence against Walt. Crucially, the privileging of family in the narrative does not lead to elevated positions of importance or empathy for either of the leading women. Skyler and Marie are negatively portrayed, with Skyler a ball-breaking adulteress, and Marie a mentally unstable kleptomaniac. Both are detrimental to the masculine potency of their menfolk. This is a show about masculine crisis, about fathers and family, and invidious womanhood is largely a narrative device used to strengthen the viewer’s attachment to Walt and Hank. The characterisations do fluctuate – Marie is stoic and supportive of Hank during his rehabilitation, despite his terrible treatment of her, but her mental frailty marks her as undeserving of uncompromised approbation. Skyler is more complex in that in many ways her behaviour mirrors Walt’s – she will do whatever it takes to protect her family, whether that is laundering drug money, sending in the heavies to ensure that Ted Beneke pays the IRS, or suggesting that Walt kill Jesse to prevent him from informing on them to the DEA. When she is engaged in the more audacious – more manly – illegal or immoral activity, audience approval10 of her is higher than it is when she is demonstrating more stereotypically female traits such as hectoring or being fearful of her dangerous husband. There is an implicit suggestion that femininity is the real Abby Bentham 69 ______danger in the show – and this is demonstrated repeatedly via central characters such as Lydia and Jane, and supporting figures such as Saul’s PA and Ted Beneke’s receptionist. Somewhat unexpectedly, the exception to this rule is the meth-addicted prostitute Wendy. Wendy is a useful ally for Jesse, providing an alibi for him to Hank and standing up to four hours of questioning despite being desperate for a hit of meth. She even agrees, reluctantly, to provide ricin-tainted fast food to the dealers who killed Tomas. Supportive, compliant and sexually available, her unconflicted portrayal suggests that she could just be the perfect woman. Empathy for Wendy is won equally via the humour of her characterisation and the pathos of her situation – here is the desperate, depressing reality of methamphetamine addiction, which the viewer consumes as entertainment. The conflict this represents crystallises the premise of the show as a whole: that empathy is shifting and contingent, that heroes and villains are not absolute, and that beauty and horror co-exist in the modern condition despite our best efforts to control it.
Notes
1 Paul McInnes, ‘Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan: The Man Who Turned Walter White from Mr Chips into Scarface’, Guardian, 19 May 2012. Viewed on 25 February 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/may/19/vince- gilligan-breaking-bad. 2 Thomas M. Leitch, ‘Nobody Here but Us Killers: The Disavowal of Violence in Recent American Films’. Viewed on 21 January 2014, http://www.rc.vt.edu/popculture/violence/files/NobodyHere.pdf. 3 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Longmans, Green and Co., 1879), Kindle edition. 4 Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 76. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Hat as a Symbol of a Man (Or of Male Genitals)’, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin, 1991), 478-480. 6 The potency of the symbol becomes increasing apparent as the series progresses, with Walt donning the ‘Heisenberg’ hat at key points in the narrative and with increasing frequency as his megalomania develops. A loose thread on the hat in episode four of Season Five indicates that Walt’s tightly wrought alternative reality is unravelling. 7 Esther Sonnet and Peter Stanfield, ‘“Good Evening Gentlemen; Can I Check Your Hats, Please?” Masculinity, Dress, and the Retro Gangster Cycles of the 1990s,’ Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, eds. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 163-184. 8 Although in the final episodes of Season Five Walt does begin to make amends to the people he loves (e.g. by providing Skyler with information she can trade with 70 Uncertainty Principle ______the Feds; supplying co-ordinates which will lead the authorities to Hank and Gomey’s bodies and allow Marie the closure that burial will bring; rescuing Jesse, etc.), it is not enough to eradicate the memory of him coldheartedly telling Jesse that he watched Jane die. Walt’s other actions were explainable in the name of business, survival or expediency, but his revelation about Jane was an act of pure cruelty that changed forever the viewer’s empathetic connection with Walt. 9 The parents of both Brock and the unnamed child are meth users and Jesse is determined that the children should not be harmed, compromised or disadvantaged by their parents’ drug habits. When Jesse intervenes on behalf of twelve year old Tomas Cantillo, who sells meth on a street corner for two of Gus Fring’s men, Tomas is murdered. Walt’s attempt to control the situation leads to events spinning further out of control. 10 Audience opinion of Skyler can be measured by the many vitriolic web pages and Facebook groups dedicated to castigating the character. Worryingly, this hatred also spilled over into ‘real life’ when Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler, became the target of death threats, rape threats and personal abuse. See New York Times, 23 August 2003, Viewed on 16 October 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/opinion/i-have-a-characterissue.html?_r=0.
Bibliography
Breaking Bad. Creator Vince Gilligan. AMC, 2008-2013. Netflix.
Bruzzi, Stella. Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.
The French Connection. Directed by William Friedkin. D’Antoni, 1971. DVD.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Penguin, 1991.
Gunn, Anna. ‘I Have a Character Issue.’ New York Times, 23 August 2003. Viewed on 16 October 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/opinion/i-have-a- characterissue.html?_r=0.
Leitch, Thomas M. ‘Nobody Here but Us Killers: The Disavowal of Violence in Recent American Films.’ Viewed on 21 January 2014, http://www.rc.vt.edu/popculture/violence/files/NobodyHere.pdf.
Abby Bentham 71 ______
McInnes, Paul. ‘Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan: The Man Who Turned Walter White from Mr Chips into Scarface.’ Guardian, 19 May 2012. Viewed on 25 February 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/may/19/vince- gilligan-breaking-bad.
Mean Streets. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Universal, 1973. DVD.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1879. Kindle edition.
Sonnet, Esther and Peter Stanfield. ‘“Good Evening Gentlemen; Can I Check Your Hats, Please?” Masculinity, Dress, and the Retro Gangster Cycles of the 1990s.’ Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, edited by Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield, 163-184. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Abby Bentham lectures at the University of Salford, where she was recently awarded a PhD for her thesis ‘Empathy for the Devil: The Poetics of Identification in Psychopath Fiction.’ Her broader research interests include film and television studies, psychoanalysis, transgression, gender and popular culture. She has published on subjects as diverse as Dickens and Dexter, and her latest project considers the curious appeal of anti-heroes such as Tony Soprano.
Das Vermächtnis: Facing a Legacy of Violence with Empathy
Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach
Abstract This chapter refers to and discusses two short excerpts from the experimental documentary Das Vermächtnis (2012), a film conceived for a German audience. It exists in its German original as well as in a translated English version, and aims to pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. Text inserts, vocal music, voice-over narration, documentary and archive footage are used to create an audio-visual collage that stimulates viewer reflection. Based on interdisciplinary research that shows the correlation between violence and a lost sense of interconnectivity, the film acknowledges and aims to restore the lost emotional bond that facilitated the genocide. The urgent need for a revised perspective in which the ‘other’ is recognised as a reflection of the self is also made clear. Empathy is, in this context, seen as a vital link that can enable this perspectival revision.
Key Words: Holocaust, experimental documentary, archive footage, audio-visual collage.
*****
1. Approach and Link to the Excerpts The 14 subheadings of this chapter fall into four sections: In the first section, I briefly mention my own personal background and my connection to the subject matter; section two (subheadings 3-7) refers to the multidisciplinary research that informed the making of the film; section three (subheadings 8-13) discusses the film in general and the two excerpts in greater detail; section four (subheading 14) concludes the chapter. The excerpts can be viewed through the following link: www.crinklefilms.ie/excerpts.html
2. Personal Background I was born in Germany in 1962. Both my grandfathers fought in World War I. My father was a soldier in the Wehrmacht in World War II and I grew up in a late post-war environment where the violence of the past was indirectly present but not discussed or reflected upon. When I became a parent, I realised that I could not hand on my own national and cultural heritage in a meaningful way without addressing and processing the dark legacy that was attached to it. As I had trained as an artist and filmmaker, I chose to undertake a practice-based PhD to address this topic. This form of enquiry enabled me to conduct thorough research and gave me the opportunity to address the subject-matter through the medium of film.
74 Das Vermächtnis ______3. Interdisciplinary Research Perspective I started with a quest into the origins of violence, and explored trauma as a potential cause from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including neurobiology, psychotherapy, sociology and history. I also enquired into the ways in which cultural media like film can address and facilitate the processing of a collective experience that can, in its effect, be compared to trauma. To facilitate this enquiry I was looking for a pattern that would enable me to make a comparison between individual psychology and micro- and macro-social behaviour. The pattern I identified is predisposition, a predisposition towards a state of connection that can become disrupted, thereby facilitating violence that causes further experiences of disrupted connection, the violence thus perpetuating itself.
4. Disrupted Connection in the Context of Individual Psychology For the individual, the predisposition towards a state of interconnection is given through the plasticity of the brain that allows for a fluent adaptation to changing conditions as synapses between brain cells grow and decay in response to sensory stimuli.1 This state of fluent interconnectivity becomes disrupted by the persistent nature of trauma memory, as experiences of serious threat can lead to the formation of synaptic connections that are maintained permanently, irrespective of outside stimulation.2 The experience of disconnection caused by a memory that persists and reoccurs out of context contributes to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic re-enactment directly relates to violent behaviour.3
5. Disrupted Connection in the Social Context The predisposition towards a state of interconnectivity in the social context that is comparable to the individual’s is the inclination towards a sense of group solidarity that can be achieved through meaningful interaction. Randall Collins describes how group members gain emotional energy in a process in which each member attunes to the micro-rhythm of other members, which results in an amplification of emotional energy for every participant.4 Collins describes emotional energy as a vital asset5, which shows that a sense of disconnection from access to meaningful group interaction as experienced in the emotions of shame and humiliation can be sensed as a serious threat to the individual.6 A causal link between such an impression of lost social connection and violence is apparent in Collins’ description of dominant interaction in which a perpetrator struggles to establish an authoritative micro-rhythm over the victim, thereby gaining the emotional energy that the oppressed loses in the process of domination.7 Dominant or violent interaction can in this case become an alternative means of emotional energy gain if access to meaningful group interaction is sensed as restricted, which can be caused by experiences of shame and humiliation. This conclusion is supported by Evelin Gerda Lindner’s study in which she compares the Rwandan Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach 75 ______genocide with German National Socialism and identifies in both cases the dynamics of humiliation and counter-humiliation as a major contributor to conflicts that escalated into cycles of violence.8 In the macro-social context it is the need for a sense of collective cohesion and belonging that can be identified as a predisposition towards interconnectivity. The disruption can be caused by collective experiences of social crisis such as war and revolution.
6. Reconnection through a Raised Sense of Awareness While a disruption of our sense of connection can cause violence, this disruption can be addressed and processed, so that a reconnection can be fostered through a raised state of awareness. In individual psychology, trauma therapy methods facilitate a revisiting of the initial trauma-inducing experience under non- threatening circumstances, thereby allowing for a release of the persistent trauma memory and a return to a more fluent state of interconnectivity. According to Thomas Scheff, in the social context it is the acknowledgment of the lost connection that facilitates the mental and emotional reconnection to the self as well as to the other, thereby enabling a reprocessing and a prevention of the perpetuation of violent and traumatic experiences.9 Jeffrey C. Alexander describes a process of public acknowledgement in which the traumatic status of an event that caused a sense of disruption in the collective is claimed through its representation. Cultural media can play a key role in this process and contribute towards a raised public awareness that facilitates the restoration of the lost sense of collective cohesion.10
7. A General Perspective of Lost Connectivity and Its Potential Revision While single events and experiences can cause a disrupted sense of connection that can become self-perpetuating, they can also cause the formation of a world- view in which loss of connection is perceived as a given natural state. Such a perspective can be traced in European history back to a statement by Aristotle in which he establishes a view of humanity as split into those that are born to rule and those that are born to subjection, thereby legitimising violence.11 According to Benjamin Isaac it was this perspective that was at the base of early imperialist politics, which was adapted and implemented by the Roman Emperors12 and continued to significantly influence the social and political development in Europe to the present day. Any attempt to restore the lost sense of interconnectivity therefore needs to acknowledge and raise awareness of the fact that it is this perspective that perceives some as ‘others’ that needs to be revised to promote a state of social interconnectivity that is sustainable.13 Marshall Rosenberg proposes a revision of our way to communicate to establish such a perspective. He highlights the key role of empathy in this context to enable a reconnection to the self and to the other.14 76 Das Vermächtnis ______8. Das Vermächtnis as an Example of an Audio-Visual Production that Aims to Facilitate Emotional Processing and Reconnection The film Das Vermächtnis aims to foster the process of reconnection in a variety of ways. It claims the Holocaust as a trauma that did not just affect the victims, but also German society as a collective. It points towards the mental origins of violence and refers to historical events that affected the population that later became the German nation in its sense of collective belonging. It hopes to facilitate moments of empathetic reconnection to the self (in this case to the German collective) as well as to the other (the victims of the Holocaust). It aims to stimulate a reflection on the past that allows for memories and emotions to emerge in a way that is fluent and amenable to reprocessing. Text, voice-over narration, photographic images, archive footage, as well as songs and music are used to this end. Conceived to be staged in front of a German audience as part of a live music performance that also includes large scale slide projections, well-known classical music as well as traditional children’s songs and lullabies are used to establish a link to a familiar cultural heritage, while the over-all format of an audio-visual collage that contains no linear narrative promotes the active mental participation necessary for personal engagement and emotional reprocessing.
9. Excerpt 1 The first excerpt of the film referred to here focuses on the victims, re- establishes their visibility and promotes empathetic connection to the audience. Searching the Berlin film archive for footage of those victim groups that were visually identifiable, I found a total lack of representation within popular formats such as weekly newsreels and documentaries. It seemed that the victim groups were visually excluded before they were physically eliminated. Their imagery had however become part of propaganda and Nazi documentation films that contained mostly authentic material that regained its neutrality once it was edited out of its defaming context. Among this material, I found a surprising amount of footage where those that were filmed had established eye contact with the camera, thereby making a conscious and sometimes desperate effort to be seen. I felt compelled to use this footage and to re-establish the visibility of the victims, also hoping that the opportunity to establish eye contact with the viewer would further facilitate emotional reconnection. I have used some of the footage superimposed over documentary sequences that show contemporary German urban environments to reintroduce the image of the victim into the social context that it was excluded from. Other footage was used together with music to stimulate an emotional response. In the song ‘Das Bucklich Männlein’ (The Little Crooked Man) the footage was used to illustrate a children’s song from the compilation ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’, compiled and edited by the romantic poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. This compilation would have been very popular in the 19th and 20th century and is still considered an important part of the national Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach 77 ______cultural folk heritage. The song describes a feeling of increasing antagonism towards a little crooked man and is written from a child’s perspective. In the last verse (which was added by Brentano himself) the situation changes as the crooked man is given the opportunity to speak and reveals that what the child had experienced as intrusions had really been his attempts to be included. The plea of the little crooked man to be remembered in the child’s prayer coincides with footage in which inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto establish eye contact with the camera in the hope to be seen. The song, which I used to sing as a child, was performed for the film by my daughter who was 9 years old at the time.
Image 1: Still from the film Das Vermächtnis (2012) showing archive footage of the film Warschauer Ghetto (Bundesfilmarchiv/Transit Film GmbH). © 2012. Courtesy of Crinklefilms
12. Excerpt 2 The following sequence shows archive footage that appears and disappears, superimposed over the image of the running water of a small river, showing an old Jewish gentleman in despair and two little starving girls who wonder through the Warsaw Ghetto abandoned and helpless. The song ‘Nun will die Sonn’ so früh aufgehn’ (Now that the Sun is Rising so Early), the first of the ‘Kindertotenlieder’ cycle (Songs for the Death of Children), accompanies the scene and gives it its emotional connotation of loss and mourning. The song is an adaptation by Gustaf Mahler of one of the many poems by the German poet and scholar Friedrich Rückert, written to mourn the death of his two children. The poem describes the 78 Das Vermächtnis ______isolation felt by one who has just experienced the emotional impact of the loss of a loved one in contrast to those for whom it is the start of just another sunny day. As the song laments the loss of a child, an analogy is made that suggests a close personal connection between the viewer and the victims of the Holocaust. It is this reference to lost family bonds the song invokes that is meant to foster emotional connection and thereby facilitate the process of mourning for the victims as the lost children of German society. The sad and dramatic nature of the romantic music written by a Jewish composer before the Holocaust, at the onset of anti-Semitism in Austria and Germany, provides an appropriate emotional setting.
Image 2: Still from the film Das Vermächtnis (2012) showing archive footage of the film Warschauer Ghetto (Bundesfilmarchiv/Transit Film GmbH) with subtitles of the song ‘The Little Crooked Man’ (Das Bucklich Männlein). © 2012. Courtesy of Crinklefilms.
13. Audience Reception While the film is yet to be staged as part of a live music event as intended, I have shown it to three small audience groups in Germany to conduct a survey on its reception. The age groups ranged from late teenagers to audience members in their late eighties. Not every audience member was able to relate to the unusual, non-narrative format of this ‘audio-visual collage’, but the survey showed that audience members among all age groups managed to experience some form of empathy for the victims of the Holocaust during the viewing process. Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach 79 ______‘It (the film) initiated thinking/reflection and awoke in me a feeling of empathy for the victims.’ (Male student, age 10-20). ‘That the honour of the victims has been restored through the film moves me deeply.’ (Female, age 30-40). ‘A collective and at the same time individual/personal legacy. The film is an ‘homage’ to the victims.’ (Female, age 40-50).
Image 3: Still from the film Das Vermächtnis (2012) showing archive footage of the film Transport der Juden zum Krakauer Ghetto (Bundesfilmarchiv/Transit Film GmbH) superimposed over documentary footage. © 2012. Courtesy of Crinklefilms.
14. Conclusion I have in this chapter tried to show that empathy as an active effort to establish an emotional connection can be used as an antidote to the loss of emotional interconnectivity that precedes and facilitates violence. Ervin Staub who looks at the origins and prevention of genocide highlights the important role of the media in combating human rights violations by providing a perspective that fosters empathy with the victims and reinstates their humanity.15 He also sees the promotion of empathy, together with the facilitation to grief and the fostering of an inclusive orientation towards other groups, as a vital ingredient to any kind of memory work that is meant to have a beneficial effect.16
80 Das Vermächtnis ______Notes
1 Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self (New York: Penguin, 2002), 9. 2 Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory (New York: Norton & Company Inc., 2006), 275. 3 Peter Levine, Healing Trauma (Boulder Co: Sounds True Inc., 2005), 4. 4 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2004), 120. 5 Ibid., 106-107. 6 Helen Lewis, 1971, in Thomas J. A. Scheff, ‘Theory of Runaway Nationalism: Love of Country/Hatred of Others’, (unpublished manuscript, 2006), 5. Viewed 8 March 2009, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff. 7 Randall Collins, Violence (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2008), 135, 189. 8 Evelin Gerda Lindner, ‘Healing the Cycles of Humiliation: How to Attend to Emotional Aspects of “Unsolvable Conflicts” and the Use of “Humiliation Entrepreneurship”’, Peace and Conflict, Journal of Peace Psychology, 8.2 (2002): 125. 9 Thomas J. A. Scheff, ‘War and Emotion: Hypermasculine Violence as a Social System’, (unpublished manuscript, 2007), 14. Viewed 8 March 2009, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff. 10 Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander (California: UP Berkeley, 2004), 10-11. 11 Aristotle in Benjamin H. Isaac, ‘Proto-Racism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity’, World Archaeology 38.1 (2006): 40. 12 Isaac, ‘Proto-Racism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity’, 40. 13 Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 209. 14 Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Encinitas CA: Puddle Dancer Press, 2003), 81. 15 Ervin Staub, ‘The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing and Other Collective Violence, Peace and Conflict’, Journal of Peace Psychology 5.4 (1999): 327. 16 Ibid., 322.
Bibliography
Alexander, Jeffrey C. ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma.’ In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, 1-30. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 2004.
Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach 81 ______
Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004.
———. Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008.
Isaac, Benjamin, H. ‘Proto-Racism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity.’ World Archaeology 38.1 (2006): 32-47.
Kandel, Eric. In Search of Memory. New York: Norton & Company Inc., 2006.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Synaptic Self. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 2002.
———. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1996.
Levine, Peter. Healing Trauma. Boulder Co: Sounds True Inc., 2005.
———. ‘Nature’s Lesson in Healing Trauma.’ Viewed 26 January 2013. http://traumahealing.com/somatic-experiencing/reference-healing-trauma-lessons- from-nature.pdf.
Lewis, Helen. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. New York: IUP, 1971.
Lisak, David. ‘The Neurobiology of Trauma.’ Viewed 29 August 2009. http://www.nowldef.org/html/njep/dvd/pdf/neurobiology.pdf.
Rosenberg, Marshall. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas Ca: Puddle Dancer Press, 2003.
Scaer, Robert. ‘The Neurobiology of Dissociation and Chronic Disease.’ Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 26.1 (2009): 73-91.
Scheff, Thomas. ‘Theory of Runaway Nationalism: Love of Country/Hatred of Others.’ FPR-UCLA Interdisciplinary conference: The Seven Dimensions of Emotions, University of California Los Angeles, 30th March – 1st April 2007. Viewed 8 March 2009. http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff.
82 Das Vermächtnis ______
Staub, Ervin. ‘The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing and Other Collective Violence, Peace and Conflict’. Journal of Peace Psychology 5.4 (1999): 327.
Stefanie Maria Margarete Dinkelbach is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Cork, Ireland. She recently completed a practice-based PhD in film that was based on interdisciplinary research and included the production of Das Vermächtnis (The Legacy), a film that pays tribute to the victims of the Holocaust.
Part III
Empathy in Action
Empathy in News Reporting: Framing Sexual Minorities in Sub-Saharan Africa
LJ (Nic) Theo
Abstract This chapter argues that journalists, in developing strategies to counter homophobia in Sub-Saharan Africa, should re-consider representing non-normative sexuality in terms of liberalist discourses. These perpetuate inaccurate essentialist views of identity as being unitary and coherent. Such discourses are only (partially) useful when applied to political claims for access to rights denied to sexual minorities, and are consonant with objectivised representations of people. These representations in turn encourage sympathy in readers, which is likely to fail to shift pre-existing (homophobic) biases. Instead, in order to encourage the cultural aims of shifting pre-existing (homophobic) biases in readers, journalists should engage an approach which encourages empathy, by subjectivising the people reported about. Through using notions of identity as multiple and complex, this is more likely to encourage the bypassing of pre-existing homophobic biases. To this end, the chapter suggests queer theories as a more coherent framing for news stories about sexuality. By better acknowledging journalists, readers and those subjected to homophobia as the three constitutive parties in the journalistic enterprise, deeper thinking can be applied to the narratorial options that lie beyond simplistic discussions around the relative journalistic merits of bias vs opinion.
Key Words: Empathy, news media, sexual orientation, queer, identity politics, gay, lesbian.
*****
1. Unpacking Impartiality in News Reporting The role of impartiality in news reporting is the perennial subject of public debate. In the Guardian online, for example, Riordan asks ‘Does journalism still require impartiality? Is showing emotion the same as taking a stance? And what place does a journalist’s opinion have in the digital space?’1 In the accompanying academic consideration, Riordan compellingly argues that there is indeed a valid hybrid position between impartiality and opinion.2 As with many such discussions, however, this argument centres on the relationship between journalist and reader. It problematically allows little insight into how partiality might affect those reported on, those who are thereby often inadvertently rendered invisible as the third point in a triangulated relationship between journalist, readers and those covered by the news. These people are not merely impassive objects whose circumstances are facts to be recounted from a distance (whether partially or impartially) by putatively 86 Empathy in News Reporting ______authoritative journalists to readers. Instead, they are people whose lives matter, and, as with marginal sexualities in Sub-Saharan Africa, whose lives might be at mortal risk. To prepare a framework for better reflecting such lives, an investigation is necessary of relationships between journalistic impartiality on the one hand, and the narratorial positioning of the people about whom reports are written, on the other. Following McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the message’, such an investigation aligns with Framing, Agenda Setting and Priming media effects theories.3 It phrases questions of journalistic positioning not merely as an abstraction on writing style, but as an interrogation of how journalists’ deeply entrenched professional norms of ‘impartiality’ might unintentionally fail to reflect the voices of real people, and thereby fail to actively counter the marginalisation embedded in political discourses, and especially identity politics.4
2. Countering Homophobia in (South) Africa As opposed to elsewhere in Africa, South African news is subject to oversight by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (television) and the Press Ombudsman (print), which gate-keep hate-speech in terms of the national Press Code and the Constitution, which protects sexual diversity. Published homophobia is therefore perhaps less vitriolic than in places like Uganda.5 Nevertheless, negative attitudes about and reluctance to accept homosexuality prevail.6 Sometimes these opinions find public expression. In 2008, for example, opinionista Jon Qwelane, subsequently the South African High Commissioner to Uganda, likened homosexuality to bestiality, and hoped that ‘some day a bunch of politicians with their heads affixed firmly to their necks will muster the balls to re- write the constitution of this country, to excise those sections which give license to men “marrying” other men, and ditto to women.’7 Fortunately, in their role as the Fourth Estate, the liberal media engages spirited public dialogues on such homophobia, and calls attention to issues like stigma- related inequality in health care provision and classroom bullying.8 But this kind of reporting is not likely to counter pre-existing biases effectively, if account is taken of arguments that the affective dispositions of audiences towards news items are influenced by pre-existing notions of 'deservingness' of the good or bad fortunes of those reported on.9 That readers seem to display ‘consistently greater enjoyment after news revelations of detrimental happenings to action groups toward whom negative affective dispositions were held than to such groups when met with favorable dispositions’ indicates that readers tend to feel that bad events are deserved if they happen to people against whom they have a pre-existing bias, and vice versa.10 By extension, reports on homophobia may only serve to reinforce pre-existing prejudices, notwithstanding anti-discriminatory intentions. For example, reports like Mthethwa’s which indicate that 80% of South Africans are homophobic, are LJ (Nic) Theo 87 ______perhaps likely to be read by that homophobic majority merely as a justification for their prejudicial attitudes.11 Journalistic choices between impartiality and opinion therefore become largely irrelevant unless underlying reader bias is more directly addressed by understanding the news not as a two way (journalist-reader) relationship, but in terms of a triangle of journalist/reader/news-objects. Journalists only have direct influence over two of the three sets of relationships in this communication triangle: the communication between themselves and the readers, and their reflection of the objects of the report. To influence the third element (the relationship between reader and news object qua phobia/philia), journalists must, through their writing styles, manipulate the medium in McLuhanesque ways, thereby explicitly manipulating the socio- political system within which the medium works. This necessarily entails understanding the problematics of this system.
A. The Failings of Liberalist Discourses: Prioritising Individualism Liberalist ideals are central in the modern moral, political, and legal vocabulary internationally.12 They are also entrenched in post-apartheid South African media discourses.13 Sexualities are therefore represented in the liberal press through default neoliberal discursive paradigms, which, understood within an historical materialist reading of South African news media, prioritise a commitment to individual claims over those of the collective.14 They advocate that individual desires must take precedence over collective will and the right to privacy is more important than public morality, based in liberalist assertions that all people have an inalienable right to individual choice, and the right to conduct their lives without negatively affecting others.15 The paradigm prizes diversity more highly than conformity to public morals, insisting that private lives be protected from public interference.16 Such paradigms posit ‘lesbian and gay men [as] a discrete minority community, whose “difference” should not result in prejudice and discrimination.’17 This community is represented as an externally identifiable separate species: homosexuals, defined in terms of a homo/heterosexual binary created through a nineteenth-century ontological ‘word-mapping’ of sexual identity that ‘left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences [sic] of homo- heterosexual definition.’18 Although this may not appear pressingly problematic, it is, since certain discourses are appropriate for certain ends but not for others.
B. Rights Discourses for Legal, not Social Change In attempts to humanise their interviewees, journalists often incorporate their individual life-stories through directly quoted narrative vignettes, photographs and so on.19 But by mediating their narratives through objectivising writing styles 88 Empathy in News Reporting ______intended to reflect impartial professionalism, and thereby relying on the neo-liberal discursive paradigms by representing the news objects as homosexuals, they implicitly base their anti-homophobic arguments in a ‘[r]espect for individual subjects [which] may be considered simply as respect for their rights, as recognizing their capacity to assert claims’, rather than as complex individuals-in- community.20 This is perhaps a useful paradigm for political rights-claims aimed at liberal audiences who appreciate self-fulfilment, choice (even in sex role behaviour) and public exhibitionism. But it often fails to serve as a compelling social/cultural/moral force for social change aimed at conservative or traditionalist audiences who expect restraint and adherence to social rules: those who reject the public refutation of normatively distinct sex roles and the heterosexual family, and the refusal to conform to fundamental religious beliefs which homosexuals implicitly make.21 Neo-liberal modes of reporting which rely on fictions of the objective identifiability of the homosexual, and which thereby present homosexuality as a separately identifiable category, are therefore perhaps appropriate ways to reflect the 'political (rights-seeking) goals' of establishing or entrenching laws.22 But, when applied to discourses such as anti-homophobic news reports intended to drive ‘social change’, liberal discourses only call attention to fictive differences between putatively separate entities: the homosexual vs the heterosexual. Expanding Zillmann and Knobloch’s arguments about how news fails to shift pre-existing biases, this implies that framing news narratives calling to end homophobia that are framed in terms of (liberalist) individual rights serves only to re-inforce the pre- existing conservative biases of homophobic readerships.23 This is not necessarily appropriate for reports aimed to shift social attitudes and to achieve cultural (or social-change) goals, which entail shifting how individuals within a society feel about each other, not merely how they behave towards each other.24 To change perceptions, those subjected to homophobia must be represented in the news in ways different to those demanded by (objective) liberal political paradigms: their individuality and personal feelings should be recognized and reflected through complex (subjective) psycho-social modes of presentation which engage the readership’s humanity and social complexity. Why? Because without representations of individual voices which encourage readers to see others as like them, there is no hope for crossing the deep social divides. The difference between these two paradigms lies at least partly in the ways that objectivist reporting encourages sympathy, while reporting which engages complex notions of subjectivities engages empathy. Whereas sympathy does not disengage pre-existing bias, empathy (depending on how one characterises it) arguably does.
LJ (Nic) Theo 89 ______3. Objectivity and Pathos A. Political Goals = Objectivised Narration = Sympathy = Surface Involvement = Re-Inscripting Pre-Existing Biases The discourses of political (rights-seeking) goals are suitable mechanisms to encourage shifts in politico-legal dynamics at a macro (political) level: to encourage the granting or implementation of rights.25 Such discourses necessarily rely on representations of news objects as identifiable individual political subjects with an essential human nature which is projected both backwards and forwards in time, and which transcends specific local historical and social differences.26 In other words: such discourses necessarily represent political subjects (homosexuals) in objectivising (impartial) ways. Such objectivising representations are likely to engage notions of sympathy, through encouraging a cognitive understanding of a need to care about others: to feel for them while not imaginatively sharing their experience or imagining the world from their perspective.27 Readers are encouraged to think of those who engage in non-normative sexual practices qua homosexual in simplistic essentialist and determinist binaries, and to either feel for them (if they already are not homophobic) or feel against them (if they already are homophobic). This not only polarises those being reported on, but also discursively polarises the readers, and thereby re-inscribes the politico-sexual binaries, encouraging readers to take one side or the other in some cognitive and quasi-political stance. This in turn might engages an ‘altruistic motivation’ whereby readers might, if they are already inclined to do so, feel that they should assist.28 How they can help remains unclear, since assisting, advocating for change etc. are primarily political (not socio-psychological/affective) actions aimed to encourage the granting or application of identifiable rights rather than social change based in how people feel. On the other hand, if not inclined to do so through pre-existing negative bias, for example when a homophobe reads a news article on corrective rape, readers are likely to feel that they should not assist, and perhaps may even feel that a rapist's behaviour is justified in some un-enunciated way. Objectivising reporting thereby engages ‘sympathy’ as a purely cognitive response from readers relying on pre-existing biases. Homophobic biases tend to essentialise and demonise homosexuals, while non-homophobic biases tend to engage a sense of altruistic or paternalistic desire to help or ‘fix’ the problem, neither of which options the journalist can pre-determine, and, as I will discuss later, neither of which engages the voice of the objects of homophobia, nor a sense of connection between him/her and the reader. The likely result is evidenced in Zillmann and Knobloch’s findings that:
Those with negative dispositions toward the recipients of good fortunes found it more difficult than the more positively inclined ones to enjoy the outcome.29 90 Empathy in News Reporting ______By using objectivising narrative tools, journalists re-inforce readers' pre- existing affective dispositions, which broadly reflect their pre-existing biases, and do not challenge the othered position of the people being reported on. This translates into a latent message that the readers should either interfere in their lives in some paternalistic way, or should leave them to be stigmatised (or indeed actively stigmatise them further), the choice of which being left up the readers based on their pre-existing biases. Such framing discourages readers from affectively feeling with the objects of homophobia.
B. Social Change Goals = Subjectivised Voices = Empathy = Deep Involvement = Shifting of Biases In order to encourage the feeling with that is arguably necessary to counter homophobia by means of the recognition of shared experiences, the voices of both readers and news objects should be engaged by the narration, which encourages an understanding of their commonalities rather than their differences. Journalists should therefore represent sexuality as subjectively identifiable and describable, and as a complex interplay between psychosocial, sociocultural and symbolic dimensions, rather than as fixed, unitary or coherent.30 This re-inscribes practices, desires and personhood, and incorporates a sense of the complexity of erotic desire, sexual acts, and personal identity rather than the default essentialist and determinist categories of singular sexual identities. In turn, this encourages readers to understand news objects as real-world subjects: complex creatures like them, not categorically either the same as or different to them. And it engages readers in the complex imaginative process which entails taking up the subjective perspective of the people being reported on, in the ways that empathy allows people to engage with others as similar-and-equal to themselves, and yet at the same time individual-and-different.31 This is akin to notions of empathetic engagement, which Coplan addresses in the context of fiction but is equally apposite to news as non-fiction.32 Such empathetic engagement causes readers to ‘become deeply involved in characters’ experiences without relinquishing their separate identities’, thereby having ‘a wide range of psychological experiences during engagement with a single narrative’, and neither being ‘forced to mirror exactly the characters’ experiences nor forced to observe the characters’ experiences from the outside’.33 In news reporting this equates to presenting the objects of homophobia as having separate identities to the readers, but sharing similar experiences, which in turn enables readers to affectively simulate their experience while at the same time retaining their own thoughts, emotions and desires. Whereas sympathy is biased towards cognition, empathetic engagement involves both cognition and emotion, whereby the reader-subject is allowed a separate sense of self, distinct from that of the people reported on, and is liberated to imaginatively experience the circumstances of such people.34 This engages LJ (Nic) Theo 91 ______different tendencies than in an objectivising (sympathetic) engagement: to connect and respond to the environment via a cognitive element incorporating imagination which enables an affective move from the subjectivity of the self to the subjectivity of the other.
C. Empathy’s Self-Other Differentiation and Bypassing Pre-Existing Bias Although the logic of the self-other differentiation by no means guarantees empathy (or social change), it does at least encourage the bypassing of pre-existing (negative) biases, since it potentially does two things. Firstly, it ‘prevents empathy-induced experiences from motivating the empathizer to act as though she is actually having the target’s experiences.’35 This translates to the homophobic reader not feeling like he/she is being forced into vicariously taking the place of what he/she dislikes: ‘the homosexual’ as singular, morally bankrupt or bad in some other essentialist and determinist way as is lodged in the reader’s pre-existing assumptions and in the discourses of liberalism. It thereby liberates the homophobe from the necessary either-or proposition of having to identify with (and therefore engage an altruistic motivation) or identify against (and therefore stick to pre-existing biases) ‘the homosexual’. Secondly, the differentiation ‘enables the empathizer to have her own separate experiences while simultaneously empathizing’, while it ‘enables the empathizer to observe the boundaries of the other as well as his- or herself, and to respect the singularity of the other’s experience as well as his or her own’.36 This translates to the homophobic reader being allowed to engage with the voices of those affected by homophobia, and identifying with their whole-life experiences.
4. A New Language for Reporting on Social Validation in News Media In order to more effectively contribute to shifts in homophobia, journalists must engage practical mechanisms to bypass readers' pre-existing (homophobic) biases. A starting-point is to engage the political critiques of postmodern or queer theorists, who view the categories of 'gay' and 'lesbian' as restrictive, and the adoption (rather than deconstruction) of these categories as reinforcing (not challenging) the norms that label 'non-heterosexuals' as inferior.37 These theorists critique identity movements ‘for mistaking symbolic or cultural concessions for programmatic change’, and for focusing on ‘narrow minority-based political rights [which] result only in “virtual equality” rather than in transformative cultural change’, by reinforcing rather than challenging dominant cultural norms.38 In building these notions into the architecture of their writing, journalists can shift how they contribute to social change by acknowledging postmodern emphases on ‘fractured identities, multiple subjectivities, performance, and representations as markers for ever-shifting cultural formations and social practices’.39 In so doing they can transcend the existing choices implicitly advocated by Riordan's argument for a hybrid position between impartiality and opinion.40 This 92 Empathy in News Reporting ______argument implies a simplistic choice between non-biased vs opinion-based writing, and thereby fails to actively recognise all three players in a triangle of actors involved in news-writing: the journalist, the reader and those whose life experiences are reported on. Journalists only have control over their own position and how they represent others. In order to engender the necessary sense of empathy which seems necessary to encourage readers to relinquish pre-existing biases, they must manipulate the medium to better reflecting the voices of those prejudiced by homophobia. Such change in narrative strategy must be engaged in ways that ‘destabilize the integrity of gay and lesbian as a distinct category, however expansively constituted’, and remedy ‘what some believe to be the intellectual and political limitations of the identity-based categories “gay” and “lesbian”’.41 This equates to revising common journalistic assumptions about the expected role of the news narrator, and revising how consciousness is currently polarised between objectivised narration as non-bias and subjectivised narration as opinion. To be aware of this positioning is to transmogrify the objects of the gaze back into subjects; or perhaps subject-objects, and thereby to shift biases. To ‘action’ this transmogrification, journalists must look beyond simplistic rules about non-biased writing. In so doing they might find innovative ways to engage other voices more strategically, and to harness the very architecture of the medium of news reporting for socially transformative ends.
Notes
1 Kellie Riordan, ‘Does Journalism Still Require Impartiality? Is Showing Emotion the Same as Taking a Stance? And What Place Does a Journalist’s Opinion Have in the Digital Space?’ The Guardian Online, September 5, 2014, viewed on 5 September 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/05/does- journalism-still-require-impartiality. 2 Kellie Riordan, ‘Accuracy, Independence and Impartiality: How Legacy Media and Digital Natives Approach Standards in the Digital Age’, (Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford, 2014), viewed on 5 September 2014, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/accuracy-independence-and- impartiality. 3 Dietram Scheufele and David Tewksbury, ‘Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models,’ Journal of Communication 57. 1 (2007): 9-20. 4 Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Medium is the Message,’ Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, (New York, Signet, 1964): 23-65. 5 Stephen Fry: Out There, episode 1, dir. Stephen Fry. London: BBC Productions, 2013, viewed on 5 September 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9ytwGW9eO0. LJ (Nic) Theo 93 ______
6 Benjamin Roberts and Vasu Reddy, ‘Pride and Prejudice: Public Attitudes toward Homosexuality,’ HSRC Review, 6.4 (2008): 9-11; Marc Epprecht, Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, (Montreal: McGill- Queen's Press, 2013); Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). 7 Jon Qwelane, ‘Call Me Names, but Gay is NOT OK’, South African Edition of The Sunday Sun, July 20, 2008. 8 For stigma-related inequality in health care provision see Ina Skosana & Thandeka Moyo, ‘Double Stigma Leaves Gay Men with Little Hope’, Mail and Guardian, July 31, 2014, viewed on 1 August 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014- 07-31-double-stigma-leaves-gay-men-with-little-hope; for classroom bullying see Sipho Kings, ‘Sharp Rise in Classroom Homophobia’, Mail and Guardian, August 29, 2014, viewed on 29 August 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-08-29-sharp- rise-in-classroom-homophobia. 9 Dolf Zillmann and Silvia Knobloch, ‘Emotional Reactions to Narratives,’ Poetics 29. 3 (2001): 189-206. 10 Ibid.: 202. 11 For example, Bongani Mthethwa, ‘It's Still Not OK to Be Gay in SA: Survey Shows 80% of Population is Prejudiced against Same-Sex Relationships’, Sunday Times, 23 November, 2008: 24 12 David T. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 13 Richard Peet, ‘Ideology, Discourse and the Geography of Hegemony: From Socialist to Neoliberal Development in Post-Apartheid South Africa’ Antipode 34 (2003):54-84. 14 For an historical materialist reading of South African news media, see Keyan Tomaselli, ‘Ownership and Control in the South African Print Media: Black Empowerment after Apartheid, 1990–1997,’ Ecquid Novi 18, no. 1 (1997): 67-68. In regards neoliberal discursive paradigms see Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, 19. 15 Rhoda Howard, ‘Gay Rights and the Right to a Family: Conflicts between Liberal and Illiberal Belief Systems.’ Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2001): 73-95. 16 Ibid. 17 Suzanne Lenon, ‘Marrying Citizens! Raced Subjects? Re-thinking the Terrain of Equal Marriage Discourse,’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 17. 2 (2005): 405-421: 408, referencing Didi Herman, Rights of Passage: Struggles for Lesbian and Gay Legal Equality, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994):5. 18 This separate species is the Foucaultian reading the homosexuals: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert 94 Empathy in News Reporting ______
Hurley. (New York: Pantheon, 1978); see also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990):2. 19 See for example Ina Skosana & Thandeka Moyo, ‘Double Stigma Leaves Gay Men with Little Hope’; Sipho Kings, ‘Sharp Rise in Classroom Homophobia’. 20 Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, 19. 21 Howard, ‘Gay Rights and the Right to a Family: Conflicts between Liberal and Illiberal Belief Systems.’ 22 Mary Bernstein, ‘Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement,’ Social Science History 26, no. 3 (2002): 531- 581. 23 Zillmann and Knobloch, ‘Emotional Reactions to Narratives.’ 24 Bernstein, ‘Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement.’ 25 Ibid. 26 Goldberg, Racist culture: Philosophy and the politics of meaning, 195. 27 Amy Coplan, ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (2004): 141-152. 28 Nancy Eisenberg, ‘Empathy and Sympathy,’ Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones. (New York: Guilford Press, 2000) 677–691:678. 29 Zillmann and Knobloch, ‘Emotional Reactions to Narratives,’ 200. 30 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Axiomatic’ In Iain Morland and Annabelle Willox, Queer Theory, (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 81-95:81. 31 Coplan, ‘Empathic engagement with narrative fictions’. 32 Ibid., 149. 33 Ibid., 149. 34 Coplan, ‘Empathic engagement with narrative fictions’. 35 Ibid., 144. 36 Ibid. 37 Deborah Britzman, ‘Queer Pedagogy and its Strange Techniques,’ Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action, ed. Janice L. Ristock and Catherine G. Taylor (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998): 49- 71, 85. 38 Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. (New York: Anchor Books, 1995); Bernstein ‘Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement.’ 39 Donna Penn & Janice Irvine, ‘Gay/Lesbian/Queer studies,’ Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews (1995): 328-330. 40 Kellie Riordan, ‘Accuracy, Independence and Impartiality: How legacy media and digital natives approach standards in the digital age’ (2014). Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford. Viewed on 29 August 2014, LJ (Nic) Theo 95 ______https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/accuracy-independence-and- impartiality. 41 Penn and Irvine, ‘Gay/Lesbian/Queer Studies.’
Bibliography
Bernstein, Mary. ‘Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement.’ Social Science History 26.3 (2002): 531-581.
Britzman, Deborah P. ‘Queer Pedagogy and its Strange Techniques.’ Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action, ed. Janice L. Ristock and Catherine G. Taylor, 49-71. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Coplan, Amy. ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62. 2 (2004): 141-152.
Eisenberg, Nancy. ‘Empathy and Sympathy.’ Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, 677–691. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.
Epprecht, Marc. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2013.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Stephen Fry: Out There, Episode 1. Directed by Stephen Fry. London: BBC, 2013 Goldberg, David Theo. Racist culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Herman, Didi. Rights of Passage: Struggles for Lesbian and Gay Legal Equality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Howard, Rhoda E. ‘Gay Rights and the Right to a Family: Conflicts between Liberal and Illiberal Belief Systems.’ Human Rights Quarterly 23.1 (2001): 73-95.
96 Empathy in News Reporting ______
Kings, Sipho. ‘Sharp Rise in Classroom Homophobia.’ Mail and Guardian Online, August 29, 2014. Viewed on 29 August 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-08-29-sharp-rise-in-classroom-homophobia.
Lenon, Suzanne J. ‘Marrying citizens! Raced subjects? Re-thinking the Terrain of Equal Marriage Discourse.’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 17.2 (2005): 405-421.
McLuhan, Marshal ‘The Medium is the Message.’ Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964: 23-65.
Mthethwa, Bongani. ‘It's Still Not OK to Be Gay in SA: Survey Shows 80% of Population is Prejudiced against Same-Sex Relationships.’ Sunday Times, November 23, 2008: 24.
Peet, Richard. ‘Ideology, Discourse and the Geography of Hegemony: From Socialist to Neoliberal Development in Post-Apartheid South Africa’ Antipode 34 (2003):54-84.
Penn, Donna, and Janice Irvine. ‘Gay/Lesbian/Queer Studies.’ Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews (1995): 328-330.
Qwelane, Jon. ‘Call Me Names, but Gay is NOT OK.’ South African Edition of The Sunday Sun, July 20, 2008.
Riordan, Kellie. ‘Does Journalism Still Require Impartiality? Is Showing Emotion the Same as Taking a Stance? And What Place Does a Journalist’s Opinion Have in the Digital Space?’ The Guardian Online, September 5, 2014. Viewed on 5 September 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/05/does- journalism-still-require-impartiality.
Riordan, Kellie. ‘Accuracy, Independence, and Impartiality: How Legacy Media and Digital Natives Approach Standards in the Digital Age.’ Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford, 2014. Viewed on September 5, 2014. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/accuracy-independence-and- impartiality
Roberts, Benjamin and Vasu Reddy. ‘Pride and Prejudice: Public Attitudes Toward Homosexuality.’ HSRC Review 6.4 (2008): 9-11.
LJ (Nic) Theo 97 ______
Scheufele, Dietram A. and David Tewksbury. ‘Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models.’ Journal of communication 57.1 (2007): 9-20.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘Axiomatic.’ Queer Theory, edited by Iain Morland and Annabelle Willox, 81-95. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.
Skosana, Ina and Thandeka Moyo. ‘Double Stigma Leaves Gay Men with Little Hope.’ Mail and Guardian Online, July 31, 2014. Viewed on 1 August 2014. http://mg.co.za/article/2014-07-31-double-stigma-leaves-gay-men-with-little-hope.
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Nic Theo is the Head of the Film Programme at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa, where he teaches screenwriting and communications science. His work is on narrative architectures in visual media, and vocational curriculum design and implementation.
The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff to Prompt Empathy for People with Dementia
Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills
Abstract Internationally, there are increasing numbers of people with dementia. In the UK, concerns about quality of hospital care for people with dementia have highlighted educational needs.1 At a healthcare system in England, a series of films ‘Barbara’s Story: Her Whole Journey’ was developed with a professional theatre company. Previous research indicated the effectiveness of using drama in healthcare education.2 The films show Barbara’s healthcare experience as a story through her eyes, with the aim of engaging staff in her experience. Staff of all disciplines viewed the films, followed by facilitated discussion. An evaluation was conducted using focus groups with staff. This chapter focuses on the staff’s empathic responses. The films engaged staff with Barbara as an individual, reminding them of the patient’s perspective and as someone who could be their own family member. They discussed that any of us could be in a similar situation. Staff remembered Barbara being ‘lost’, ‘confused’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘scared’ and ‘worried’. Barbara’s story prompted many empathetic comments, for example: ‘It did help remind us and reiterate how lonely it is for the patient’. ‘Barbara’s Story’ made a lasting impression, prompting reflection and improvements in practice. Staff reported a raised awareness of dementia throughout the healthcare system and some effect on the culture, enabling staff to feel they could take more time with patients. To conclude, educating staff about dementia in a way that prompts empathy was an effective approach and many staff discussed changes in behaviour as a result.
Key Words: Dementia, healthcare, ethnodrama, empathy.
*****
1. Introduction This chapter explains the development and evaluation of an educational initiative, which aimed to engage healthcare staff in the experience of an older woman with dementia. We first present demographic information about people with dementia and the need to improve education of healthcare workers. Next, we consider the nature of empathy and educational approaches used to increase empathy. We then explain the development of the project, which was based at a large public healthcare system in London, England. The evaluation of the project is then presented and reveals empathic responses from participants.
100 The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff ______2. Dementia and Healthcare Internationally, there are increasing numbers of people with dementia, of whom many are admitted to hospital with other ageing-associated health conditions. One in four general hospital beds in England are occupied by people who have dementia,3 but studies have revealed that their quality of care is unacceptable.4 Problems include dementia-unaware and impersonal environments;5 poor standards of person-centred care, eating and drinking, social interaction, and dignity and respect are other areas of concern.6 In England, the Department of Health’s national strategy for dementia identified enhanced hospital care as a target for improvement.7
3. Educational Needs of Healthcare Workers A recurring theme from research and audit is that hospital staff lack knowledge and skills related to caring for people with dementia, which highlights the need for education.8 An audit revealed that only 32 per cent of staff reported having sufficient education and development in dementia care, including awareness and skills-based training.9 Negative attitudes towards caring for older people have also been revealed.10 It is argued that ageism and stigmatisation of people with dementia are embedded in society and reflected in UK care systems.11 Gladman et al. argued for a cultural shift in attitudes and the recognition of older people with dementia as being core health service users.12 How professionals view people with dementia matters because their views influence the care that they provide.13 From a study based in an acute hospital setting, Cowdell revealed that although staff worked hard and attempted to deliver ‘good care’, they showed little empathy for people who had dementia.14 She argued that rather than employing traditional, didactic forms of teaching, educational methods that engage staff on an emotional level are more likely to successfully prompt staff to ‘re-kindle’ empathy and become more person-centred.
4. The Nature of Empathy There are varied views about the nature of empathy but there seems to be general agreement that empathy entails an understanding of another person’s experience and feelings. One perspective of empathy is of a cognitive aspect (being able to understand another person’s inner experience and feelings and to view the outside world from their perspective) and an affective aspect (the entering into or joining in the emotional experience of the other).15 A review of how empathy was reported in nursing literature identified five conceptualizations of empathy.16 The first view is that of empathy as a human trait, an innate quality that people are born with. The other four conceptualizations all relate to how empathy is used in nursing practice and all portray empathy as being a positive aspect: a professional state (an understanding conveyed through learnt skills), a communication process, caring, and a special relationship. Supporting that empathy is beneficial in practice, older Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills 101 ______people expressed that nurses who communicated with empathy promoted their dignity.17 Of particular interest in healthcare is how staff can be educated to be empathetic and the potential implications for their practice.
5. Teaching Empathy Reports of empathy education in healthcare have mainly focused on nurses and medical staff.18 However, all healthcare staff (clinical and non-clinical) affect patients’ care experiences. Little is known about how best to teach empathy and many study designs have been methodologically weak.19 An ethnodrama communicates human experience to an audience through a drama and could be a way for healthcare professionals to immerse themselves in the lives of people with dementia and their families.20 However, a review of studies of empathy education in nursing included none where ethnodrama was specified; most used experiential learning.21 An evaluation of an ethnodrama developed from qualitative studies of people living with dementia indicated a transformation of healthcare professionals’ understandings, images and intended behaviour towards people who live with dementia and their families.22
6. Context for the Project Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) is a large, integrated healthcare system providing both hospital and community services in London. Prior to the project, staff were proud of the standards of care they provided but were also aware that sometimes small things that mattered to patients were overlooked and that staff did not always put themselves in the ‘shoes of the patient’. There was also an expectation that GSTT must show raised awareness of dementia, in line with national strategy. In April 2012, GSTT set out to train 13,200 staff in a year on the needs of older people and those with dementia. The use of a traditional lecture-style format with a Powerpoint presentation was quickly discounted. Instead, the Trust decided to create a powerful drama that would ‘prick the consciences’ of the workforce.
7. Development of the Initiative: ‘Barbara’s Story’ An ethnodrama using a series of films, ‘Barbara’s Story: Her Whole Journey’, was developed with a professional theatre company. The aim was to engage staff with the experience of an older woman with dementia, ‘Barbara’, who is played by an actor. The films show Barbara’s healthcare experience as a story and through her eyes, as her health deteriorates and as she experiences care in hospital and community settings. Barbara’s story is firmly grounded within clinical practice at GSTT; it is argued that the teaching of empathy should be clinically focused and related to the real situation.23 The project was developed within the context of GSTT’s values: Put patients first, Take pride in what we do, Respect others, Strive to be the best, Act with integrity. Following the first film’s implementation, a
102 The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff ______charity (Burdett Trust for Nursing) funded a further five films, the development of all the films into a training package, and an evaluation of the project.
8. Implementing ‘Barbara’s Story’ The first episode of ‘Barbara’s story’, a 12 minute film, was shown regularly from September 2012 to April 2013 and a total of 11,054 staff attended a session. The Chief Nurse and Safeguarding team led the sessions to ensure consistency of approach. At each session, ‘Barbara’s Story’ was shown, along with group discussion and distribution of supporting resources. Attendance was mandatory for all staff: clinical (medical, nursing, therapists) and non-clinical, which included those with patient contact (e.g. porters, receptionists, housekeeping) and those without patient contact (e.g. maintenance, human resources). ‘Barbara’s Story’ was also embedded into the corporate induction programme for new staff. The subsequent series of films was shown from September 2013-March 2014 as a training package for use within GSTT. The training package is distributed freely internally and externally, nationally and internationally. The package has been endorsed by Health Education England and the Alzheimer’s Society.
9. Evaluation Methods The evaluation used a naturalistic approach and aimed to investigate GSTT staff’s perspectives of the effect of ‘Barbara’s Story’ on themselves, their colleagues and the organisation. To capture initial staff responses, open written comments were gathered at the end of sessions (n=1246) and analysed using a thematic approach. The main method used was focus groups, which are a form of group interview that explicitly use the participants’ group interaction as part of the method in order to generate data.24 The focus groups were conducted in two phases. The Phase 1 focus groups were held approximately one year after the launch of the project, but before the new series of ‘Barbara’s Story’ commenced. In total, 67 staff took part in ten discipline-specific focus groups and one individual interview was conducted. The audio recordings were professionally transcribed and the data were analysed using the framework approach.25 The Phase 2 focus groups were conducted following the showing of the second series of the films. These focus groups involved a total of 80 staff in discipline-specific groups. The next sections will focus on the empathic responses of staff to Barbara’s story, as revealed in the Phase 1 focus groups. Quotations from the focus groups are used throughout to convey the staff responses to Barbara’s story; they are attributed to focus group source (Nurses 1-5; Community; Medical staff; Therapists 1, 2; non-clinical).
Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills 103 ______10. Relating to Barbara In all focus groups, staff talked about Barbara as a person and of her experience visiting the hospital. The film seemed to touch staff emotionally and engage them with her as an individual, reminding them of the patient’s perspective:
From her point of view or from any patient’s point of view hospitals are very scary, but it’s something we deal with every day and brush over our shoulder, and it sort of brought you back to what it’s like to be a patient. (Nurses5)
Staff remembered her being ‘lost’, ‘confused’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘scared’, ‘lonely’ and ‘worried’. They engaged with her as a person who could be a family member: ‘She resembles someone that we know, she’s a grandmother or an aunty or a mother, so that’s what brought it home to me’. (Nurses3). Barbara’s story prompted many other empathic comments from the participants, for example, in response to a scene where hospital staff talked over Barbara without involving her, a nurse responded: ‘It must be a very bleak experience to be ignored and not spoken to’ (Nurses1). The film also highlighted that: ‘What we take for granted every day, doing something – all the simple things – can, for some people be very, very difficult’ (Community staff).
11. ‘Barbara’s Story’ as an Initiative Areas that staff discussed included the emotional impact of the film, the relevance of the film, the effectiveness of the film and its delivery method. There was discussion about emotions prompted by the film and these included staff feeling upset, sad, annoyed or defensive: ‘she was so troubled and stressed and that’s what upset me about it’ (Nurses3). There were a number of comments that the way Barbara’s story was presented portrayed how she was feeling and enabled staff to see her experience through her eyes. The film was described as: ‘thought provoking’, and there were many positive comments about its effectiveness, in contrast with didactic approaches, as ‘to see it through a patient’s eyes was much more effective I think’. (Nurses4)
12. Since ‘Barbara’s Story’ Staff were asked open questions about what had happened since the launch of ‘Barbara’s Story’ and, specifically, any changes in their own practice or that of colleagues, and any changes observed in the Trust in general. Staff discussed changes in interactions and behaviour (their own and others), such as giving more time, and a culture change that supported changed behaviour, which they linked to their increased understanding of patients’ experience: ‘You put that bit of extra effort in because you think, “Yes, I can imagine if that was Barbara”.’ (Community).
104 The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff ______In most focus groups, staff talked about how their own interactions with patients and behaviour had changed since watching Barbara’s story:
I think one of the things that I try and do now, which maybe I didn't do before, is ask a specific question around ‘Is there anything that you want to talk to me about?’ ‘Is there anything that you’re worried about?’ (Therapists2)
The film showed Barbara becoming very anxious while waiting for her appointment and there were some specific comments about keeping patients informed, particularly when they are waiting for appointments, and about explaining what is happening in more detail: ‘Just popping out and saying to them “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you”’ (Nurses4). The film showed Barbara waiting at home for a taxi to take her to hospital and becoming distressed, worrying about whether it was the right day. Some participants referred to having changed their approach now that they understood what an ordeal it is for some patients to have to attend hospital. For example:
I’ve definitely changed my approach to getting patients back in as outpatients or arranging the follow-up appointments, having seen [Barbara’s story] and having more of an understanding of the kind of stress that it might put on somebody until they actually get into that room. (Therapists2)
The scene where Barbara was trying to find the toilet in the hospital corridors seemed to make a strong impression and there were many comments about staff helping people in similar situations: ‘Now, I do make more of an effort to chat to them, to make sure that they know where to go and when they need to be there’. (Community). A manager in a focus group that comprised non-clinical staff said that, as a result of Barbara’s story, they ‘do now give time’ to patients, in contrast to their previous rushed approach. Clinical staff supported this view, as there were many comments about this staff group’s behaviour having changed towards patients; for example, porters taking more care when pushing patients and housekeeping staff being more engaging with patients and explaining what they are doing. Some participants perceived that as a result of ‘Barbara’s Story,’ there had been a culture change that enabled staff to put patients first as they perceived senior staff would support them. Some staff also commented that they felt more empowered to challenge colleagues about their behaviour due to the high profile of Barbara’s story within the Trust.
Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills 105 ______13. Conclusions There is a well-recognised need to improve the experience of healthcare for people with dementia. This chapter has explained how one healthcare system adopted a whole-system approach to education and used an ethnodrama, presented as a series of films, to engage staff with patient experience. The goal to educate a whole workforce in a way that prompted empathy was ambitious but ‘Barbara’s Story’ made a lasting impression on staff, raising their understanding of patient experience, specifically that of older people with dementia. In focus groups, both clinical and non-clinical staff expressed cognitive and/or affective empathic responses relating to Barbara, the character in the film. As a result of the understanding and emotional engagement with Barbara, staff reported improvements in their own practice and/or that they had observed improvements in other people’s practice. The evaluation of Phase 2 is nearly complete, but two years on from the launch of Barbara’s story, staff continue to recount their memorable experiences of watching the film.
Acknowledgement
Project team members: Deborah Parker, Nicola Thomas, Mala Karasu and Nicola Crichton. The Burdett Trust for Nursing for funding the second series of ‘Barbara’s Story’ films and the evaluation. The GSTT Safeguarding Adults team, the focus group participants and London South Bank University academic staff for support with the data collection and analysis.
Notes
1 Royal College of Psychiatrists, Report of the National Audit of Dementia Care in General Hospitals, ed. J Young et al. (London: Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership, 2011). 2 Christine Jonas-Simpson et al., ‘Phenomenological Shifts for Healthcare Professionals after Experiencing a Research-Based Drama on Living with Dementia’, Journal of Advanced Nursing 68.9 (2012): 1944–1955. 3 Alzheimer’s Society, Counting the Cost: Caring for People with Dementia on Acute Hospital Wards (London: Alzheimer’s Society, 2009). 4 Elizabeth L Sampson et al., ‘Dementia in the Acute Hospital: Prospective Cohort Study of Prevalence and Mortality’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 195 (2009): 61-66; Fiona Cowdell, ‘Care of Older People with Dementia in an Acute Hospital Setting’, Nursing Standard 24(23) (2010): 42-48.; John Gladman et al., Better Mental Health: Care for Older People with Cognitive Impairment in General Hospitals (Final Report. NIHR Service Delivery and Organisation Programme, 2012, Accessed on 28 January 2015,
106 The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff ______http://www.nets.nihr.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/85072/FR-08-1809- 227.pdf. 5 Royal College of Psychiatrists, Report of the National Audit of Dementia Care in General Hospitals. 6 Alzheimer’s Society, Counting the Cost: Caring for People with Dementia on Acute Hospital Wards. 7 Department of Health, Living Well with Dementia – A National Dementia Strategy. (London: DH, 2009). 8 Sampson, ‘Dementia in the Acute Hospital: Prospective Cohort Study of Prevalence and Mortality’; Cowdell, ‘Care of Older People with Dementia in an Acute Hospital Setting’; Mike W Calnan et al., ‘“I often worry about the older person being in that system”: ‘Exploring the Key Influences on the Provision of Dignified Care for Older People in Acute Hospitals’, Ageing and Society (2012): 1- 21. 9 Royal College of Psychiatrists, Report of the National Audit of Dementia Care in General Hospitals. 10 Calnan, ‘“I often worry about the older person being in that system”’. 11 Pamela A Chan and Tom Chan, ‘The Impact of Discrimination against Older People with Dementia and Its Impact on Student Nurses’ Professional Socialisation’, Nurse Education in Practice 9 (2009): 221–227. 12 Gladman, Better Mental Health: Care for Older People with Cognitive Impairment in General Hospitals. 13 Jonas-Simpson, ‘Phenomenological Shifts for Healthcare Professionals’. 14 Cowdell, ‘Care of Older People with Dementia in an Acute Hospital Setting’. 15 Mohammedreza Hojat et al., ‘Physician Empathy: Definition, Components, Measurement, and Relationship to Gender and Specialty’, American Journal of Psychiatry 159.9 (2002): 1563-1569. 16 Diane Kunyk and Joanne K Olson, ‘Clarification of Conceptualizations of Empathy’, Journal of Advanced Nursing 35.3 (2001): 317-325. 17 Carole Webster and Karen Bryan, ‘Older People’s Views of Dignity and How It Might Be Promoted in a Hospital Environment’. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 18 (2009): 1784-1792. 18 Scott Brunero, Scott Lamont and Melissa Coates, ‘A Review of Empathy Education in Nursing’, Nursing Inquiry 17 (2010): 64–73; Julia Williams and Theodore Stickley, ‘Empathy and Nurse Education’, Nurse Education Today 30 (2010): 752–755; Reidar Pederson, ‘Empathy Development in Medical Education – A Critical Review’, Medical Teacher 32 (2010): 593–60. 19 William J Reynolds, Brian Scott and Wendy C Jessiman 1999. ‘Empathy Has Not Been Measured in Clients' Terms or Effectively Taught: A Review of the Literature’, Journal of Advanced Nursing 30.5 (1999): 1177-1185. Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills 107 ______
20 Pia C Kontos and Gary Naglie, ‘Expressions of Personhood in Alzheimer’s: Moving from Ethnographic Text to Performing Ethnography’, Qualitative Research 6 (2006): 301–317. 21 Brunero, ‘A Review of Empathy Education in Nursing’. 22 Jonas-Simpson, ‘Phenomenological Shifts for Healthcare Professionals after Experiencing a Research-based Drama on Living with Dementia’. 23 Reynolds, ‘Empathy Has Not Been Measured in Clients' Terms or Effectively Taught: A Review of the Literature’. 24 Jenny Kitzinger, ‘Qualitative Research: Introducing Focus Groups’, British Medical Journal 311 (1995): 299–302. 25 Jane Ritchie and Liz Spencer, ‘Qualitative Data Analysis for Applied Policy Research’, in: Analyzing Qualitative Data, ed. Alan Bryman and Robert G Burgess. (London: Routledge, 1994), 173-194.
Bibliography
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Calnan, Mike, Win Tadd, Sian Calnan, Alex Hillman, Simon Read, Anthony Bayer. ‘“I often worry about the older person being in that system”: ‘Exploring the Key Influences on the Provision of Dignified Care for Older People in Acute Hospitals’. Ageing and Society (2012): 1-21.
Chan, Pamela A and Tom Chan. ‘The Impact of Discrimination against Older People with Dementia and Its Impact on Student Nurses’ Professional Socialisation’. Nurse Education in Practice 9 (2009): 221–227
Cowdell, Fiona. ‘Care of Older People with Dementia in an Acute Hospital Setting’. Nursing Standard 24.23 (2010): 42-48.
Department of Health. Living Well with Dementia – A National Dementia Strategy. London: DH, 2009.
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108 The Use of an Ethnodrama with Healthcare Staff ______
Jonas-Simpson, Christine, Gail J. Mitchell, Jennifer Carson, Colleen Whyte, Sherry Dupuis, Jennifer Gillies. ‘Phenomenological Shifts for Healthcare Professionals after Experiencing a Research-Based Drama on Living with Dementia’. Journal of Advanced Nursing 68.9 (2012): 1944–1955.
Hojat, Mohammedreza, Joseph S, Gonnella, Thomas J. Nasca, Salvatore Mangione, Michael Vergare, Michael Magee. ‘Physician Empathy: Definition, Components, Measurement, and Relationship to Gender and Specialty’. American Journal of Psychiatry 159.9 (2002): 1563-1569.
Kitzinger, Jenny. ‘Qualitative Research: Introducing Focus Groups’. British Medical Journal 311 (1995): 299–302.
Kontos Pia C and Gary Naglie. ‘Expressions of Personhood in Alzheimer’s: Moving from Ethnographic Text to Performing Ethnography’. Qualitative Research 6 (2006): 301–317.
Kunyk, Diane and Joanne K. Olson. ‘Clarification of Conceptualizations of Empathy’. Journal of Advanced Nursing 35.3 (2001): 317-325.
Pederson, Reidar. ‘Empathy Development in Medical Education – A Critical Review’. Medical Teacher 32 (2010): 593–60.
Reynolds, William J, Brian Scott and Wendy C. Jessiman. ‘Empathy has not been Measured in Clients' Terms or Effectively Taught: a Review of the Literature’, Journal of Advanced Nursing 30(5) (1999): 1177-1185.
Ritchie, Jane and Liz Spencer. ‘Qualitative Data Analysis for Applied Policy Research’. In: Analyzing qualitative data, edited by Alan Bryman and Robert G. Burgess, 173-194. London: Routledge, 1994.
Royal College of Psychiatrists. Report of the National Audit of Dementia Care in General Hospitals, edited by John Young, Chloë Hood, Rosemary Woolley, Aarti Gandesha and Renata Souza. London: Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership, 2011.
Sampson, Elizabeth L., Martin R. Blanchard, Louise Jones, Adrian Tookman, Michael King. ‘Dementia in the Acute Hospital: Prospective Cohort Study of Prevalence and Mortality’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 195 (2009): 61-66.
Lesley Baillie and Eileen Sills 109 ______
Webster, Carole and Karen Bryan. ‘Older People’s Views of Dignity and How it Might be Promoted in a Hospital Environment’. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 18 (2009): 1784-1792.
Williams, Julia and Theodore Stickley, ‘Empathy and Nurse Education’, Nurse Education Today 30 (2010): 752–755.
Lesley Baillie is Florence Nightingale Foundation Chair of Clinical Nursing Practice, a joint post between London South Bank University, University College London Hospitals (UCLH) and the Florence Nightingale Foundation.
Eileen Sills is Chief Nurse, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. .
Empathy with the Enemy: Can the Intellectually Gifted Experience Empathy with the Intellectually Impaired?
Veronica Wain
Abstract Identification and self-identification are intrinsic to navigating one’s way through life in terms of choosing a life partner, a career, which foods to eat and where to live, to name but a few of the basic decisions ascribed to an average, normal life in modern western society. Some born with intellectual disability are unable to access the mechanisms to make some of the most basic of life’s choices. Others require significant support and advocacy to articulate their choices, whilst many will be able to communicate quite clearly their version of what constitutes a good life, with various levels and modes of supported communication. If we are to view the world of academia, the echelon of the great minds and thinkers of our day, and look to the research and the findings of their scholarly endeavour as the way in which to navigate our collective future, an interesting contradiction arises when we enter the world of intellectual disability. Is it possible for the greatest minds and intellects to truly empathise with their subjects born with intellectual disability and produce meaningful, empathetic findings that will inform the way in which the subjects of their enquiry might aspire to live meaningful lives? This chapter begins to explore some of the seemingly inherent contradictions that arise when those charged with researching and investigating the state and situation of those in the population identified as intellectually impaired formulate and articulate quality of life measures and markers on behalf of their subjects. With a view to inspiring further scholarly debate regarding agenda setting, policy making and advocacy for those rendered vulnerable by way of intellectual deficit, this chapter poses questions regarding what might constitute a quality life, who decides the measure of quality and how those quality measures might be implemented on behalf of another.
Key Words: Intellectual disability, identification, empathy, education, policy, advocacy, narrative, ethics
*****
1. Introduction As mother to a young woman born with an intellectual impairment, an academic and a filmmaker, I have particular interest in the capacity of my colleagues to feel and experience empathy with my daughter and our family, given my hopes for my daughter’s future well-being rests in the hands of others when I am no longer able to advocate and support her. The quest to find others who embody empathy and compassion is however more than personal in the sense that 112 Empathy with the Enemy ______it may be seen to align with Eva Feder Kittay’s view that the ‘personal is philosophical is political’.1 This chapter endeavours to inspire discussion about the capacity of those whose intellectual capacity has enabled their entry into positions of authority and power with regard to policy making, political imperative and agenda setting for possible pathways to what may constitute a ‘good life’ for people with intellectual disability, to experience empathy with those subject to the consequences of academic enquiry and research. Is it possible for our intellectual giants to facilitate creative pathways for people with intellectual disability when they may not have the capacity to enter into or empathise with their subjects’ unique worlds? Can empathy be learned? If empathy can be learned, how might this learning be facilitated and achieved? Is empathy necessary in the formation of appropriate policy making or are there alternative frameworks that may be created to safeguard the well-being and quality of life that parents may desire for their children, who lack the capacity to advocate for themselves?
2. The Possibility and Promise of Empathy within the World of Intellectual Disability One’s capacity to experience empathy, that quality enabling one human being to be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another, may be described as a desirable trait, empathy having garnered attention across a number of disciplines, particularly medicine and education where the training and education of professionals has evolved to embracing the need for this quality within their ranks. The development of teaching and learning resources within these disciplines, however, appears to have lacked adequate exploration in terms of understanding how a person with intellectual disability may view their own life. Interest in disability studies has grown since the first disability activists and scholars gave voice to the dehumanisation and devaluing of people with congenital and acquired disability2 and demanded appropriate societal recognition. Issues ranging from the creation of accessible physical space and the dismantling of institutionalised care have seen those of us living with disability begin to realise changes in the world around us. There is evidence of these shifts in everyday life within the West from the most basic and obvious provision of disability parking spaces and accessible toilets to the inclusion of children with disability in mainstream classrooms. However, life beyond these spaces and places, beyond parking bays and schools, where structure and routine can be harnessed, people with intellectual disability and the way in which they experience, enjoy and engage in life, remains somewhat of a mystery. What sort of work might they find meaningful, what are the social activities they might enjoy, how might they meet prospective spouses and where might they live? These are still relatively new and unanswered questions for our school leavers, young adults and older citizens, as we collectively attempt Veronica Wain 113 ______to navigate, create and support people, who in years past were confined to institutions. It may be argued that the vacuum of opportunity for people with intellectual disability to self-actualise and navigate their own versions of a ‘good life’ in adulthood may be, in part, attributed to a lack of empathy for the world as they experience it, from those charged with the representation of their needs in public agenda setting, policy making and academic enquiry. Inherent contradictions within the realm of academic enquiry with reference to intellectual impairment have, for instance, become more evident in recent years as parents with children with intellectual disability have entered into the world of academe and given voice to their specific situations in a bid to counter the devaluing and dehumanising of not only their own children, but as representatives of the greater disability community. Whilst academics such as Peter Singer and Jeff MacMahan could be viewed as ‘easy’ targets to focus upon to highlight what may be seen as a deficit in empathy towards people with disability, their exchange with fellow academic and parent of a person with profound intellectual disability, Eva Feder Kittay, is worthy of discussion. The three entered into a spirited public discussion at a conference at the Stony Brook University in 2008. The ensuing conversation illustrated both Singer and MacMahan’s diminished valuing of people with intellectual disability as well as a lack of respect for the capacity of Kittay to engage in a robust, academic discussion outside her role as mother. Kittay’s views were relegated by the scholars to those of a parent whose role as advocate was a barrier to her grasp and understanding of their learned points of view3. It could be argued that a parent, acting as advocate, may in many instances be the person most able to experience and articulate, or empathise with, their son or daughter’s way of being in the world and what may constitute their versions of a ‘good life’. It seems somewhat counterproductive to reduce a learned scholar’s opinion, such as Kittay’s, based on both lived experience and informed research, to an emotional, parental reaction that has no bearing on the valuing and devaluing of his or her child’s status and aspirations for a ‘good life.’ Given the historical grounding of disability within a medicalised model that still persists, much of the interrogation surrounding empathy and disability has emerged from the medical field. In recent years, with education coming into the picture, the drive to create inclusive educational settings and models for equipping new teachers with tools to embrace all abilities in the classroom has emerged. Developing modules addressing the need for empathy within these professional fields, and the seeking of new ways of understanding and engaging with people of diverse abilities, has revealed a deficit within the traditional education and medical fields, and by inference, a lack of understanding of how to engage with those individuals. 114 Empathy with the Enemy ______People with intellectual disability are diverse and cannot be characterised easily. Nor can commonalities within this group be easily identified, making broad-stroke approaches to enhancing empathic engagement complex. In their work, Albrecht and Devlieger explore what ‘a good life’ might look like framed within disability. They identify critical differences in how people with disability perceive their own quality of life in comparison to the way their service providers do, and suggest various influences contributing to a disability paradox4. Those living with disability view their lives, in general, far more positively than those who support and care for them. Couser, in his interrogation of these differences in perception between health care providers and their recipients with disability, reflects similar disparities:
One of the major obstacles to the delivery of health care to disabled people is the well-established disparity between the quality of life of disabled people as they report it and the estimates of their quality of life by medical professionals. In survey after survey, disabled people rate their quality of life almost as highly as nondisabled people rate theirs. But nondisabled health care professionals render significantly lower estimates of the quality of life of disabled people-- even lower estimates than those rendered by the general nondisabled population.5
These differences in perception may offer windows through which to view possible barriers to the ability of support staff and professionals to experience empathy with those they endeavour to offer care and advocacy support. If there is an inherent misrepresentation and devaluing of individuals living with disability and how they live their lives, could it be that the values and frameworks that inform the supports and decisions surrounding the intellectually impaired need to be reflected upon and challenged? If there is a distinct mismatch between the views of the supervising medical practitioner and their patient, the service provider and the service user, the teacher and the student, the researcher and the subject, how can appropriate and meaningful outcomes be achieved? The situation would render empathy, a guiding principle in such relationships, unattainable.
3. Determining Quality of Life for People with Intellectual Disability Sunderland, Catalano and Kendall6 have begun to make valuable inroads in challenging the dominant negative views associated with living with intellectual disability. They assert that positive and empowered lives are possible and that changes are needed in the way policy-makers view people with disability and how they experience their lives, as well as the ways in which they need to be supported. Veronica Wain 115 ______An examination of what quality of life, QOL, might encompass has been the subject of ongoing debate and discussion. Frameworks for conceptualising and measuring QOL and juxtaposing these with various social systems have been created and include nine core domains coupled with the social system within which an individual may live. This work emanates from the following definition of intellectual disability:
Intellectual disability is a condition that in practice affects people’s ability to make self-determined choices. Living a life that is judged as one of quality frequently requires support beyond that typically needed by others at a similar age and stage of life.7
This definition is significant due to the reference to self-determined choice making and the level of support required by others to ascertain those choices. The core domains: emotional well-being, interpersonal relationships, material well- being, personal development, physical well-being, self-determination, social inclusion and rights have been established. The expert knowledge and experience informing the study, it may be argued, differ significantly from the lived experience and knowledge of the subjects of the study. The social systems comprise people, programs, community and nation-hoods. In some cases it would be difficult to ascertain the level of importance that the core domains and social systems might hold for people with intellectual disability. It is here that the question of empathy arises in terms of assessing what may or may not be deemed as necessary or important in determining QOL for this particular group. With the barriers to communication that affect people with intellectual disability, confirmation of what they deem as necessary is often difficult and may be viewed as a contributing barrier when considering the notion of empathy with an individual’s particular situation. The study’s findings emphasise the necessity of informed agenda setting and policy-making, and the work presents as sound and informative. At a personal level, the challenge presented to me, alongside many other parents, is accessing what my daughter may view as markers of a quality or good life for her. I am challenged to continually revisit my own frameworks, assumptions and values as I endeavour to imagine her version of a good life; one that exists outside my aspirations and version of a good life.
4. Remedies to the Situation at Hand The risks to those most vulnerable in the absence of empathy, particularly those whose physical and emotional well-being is dependent upon accessing appropriate personal care, advocacy and communication support, are great. Cases of institutionalised abuse continue in the West with devastating consequences. In my 116 Empathy with the Enemy ______own country, Australia, new allegations of abuse of people with intellectual disability have again been uncovered as one of the largest providers, Yooralla, has been investigated.8 The recent abuse at Winterbourne View too has raised questions once again of quality of care, duty of care, isolation, the normalising of abuse and the absence of empathy amongst staff within the sector. Are people who lack positive empathy and have tendencies towards abusive behaviour drawn to these institutions? Is institutionalised living a melting pot for the darker side of human nature to emerge, and what greater questions about our shared humanity, our empathetic responses to those more vulnerable, may be asked and answered to ensure we are vigilant in preventing these gross injustices? Questions too arise concerning the negligence of administrators and supervisory staff and the lack of appropriate policy and quality assurance processes that pave the way for extended periods of abuse to continue unchecked. Steps have been taken to introduce innovation in training and education for medical and education professionals in a bid to encourage and inspire the development of empathy for those working with people with disability. The practice of simulating the experience of physical disability, particularly within educational contexts, has gained popularity and inspired investigation with seemingly positive results in spite of scholars such as Couser9 for example, who challenge the value of the practice. Whilst these practices are designed to inspire, facilitate and develop students’ awareness so that they may develop empathy towards their future students, patients and clients, Couser argues that this approach is flawed by way of focusing participants’ attention upon the simulated disability and succeeds in embedding a skewed experience of disability rather than a holistic view. This approach may prove to be counterproductive. Accessing and simulating the intellectually impaired experience is significantly more problematic and it is unclear how this might be achieved and what benefit could be derived from such an exercise. It may be that the way forward is a little slower and not quite as theatrical nor interactive as current simulation practices. As experience and engagement with people with intellectual disability indicates, greater time needs to be taken in facilitating communication between the intellectually gifted and the intellectually impaired, to enable the sharing of the stories of their life, their whole life so that research and findings can be based on the needs and desires of those subject to the decisions that emanate from said findings. A shift in focus, away from the disability and towards the person and their story, in a bid to uncover possible areas of commonality and intersection, may be a significant step towards providing arenas for greater levels of empathy to flourish.
Veronica Wain 117 ______5. Towards an Empathic Future Available narratives addressing life with disability continue to support the view that disability is a condition to be overcome, the ultimate goal being the attainment or approximation of normalcy and the achievement of a heroic outcome10. Are we endeavouring to effect change in areas that are futile with flawed tools of engagement? In the absence of being able to access a version of an individual’s vision of a good life, how do we ascertain what quality of life means to those whose minds and needs lay beyond our understanding at this point in time? Constraints in terms of available, sustainable resources and opportunities to engage with people with intellectual disability mean that students and scholars lack opportunity to engage and develop enhanced levels of empathy. Couser suggests that:
medical education needs to address the gap head on. Pun intended: closing the gap may be less a matter of changing attitudes than a matter of changing minds. That is, the process may require a cognitive shift, rather than an emotional one. And perhaps it is respect for disabled people, more than empathy, that medical education needs to inculcate. The study of narrative can be invaluable in that project.11
There continues to be tension in the area of medical intervention – what needs to be cured in the interest of enhancing health outcomes and of what value is so called independence in the absence of the validation of inter-dependence? On what evidence is the continued drive towards an imaginary independence based upon when the outcomes may well result in isolation rather than connection? Continued promotion and distribution of alternate narratives celebrating diverse ways of being in the world is an important component in challenging hearts and minds, inspiring shifts in perceptions, and making incremental shifts toward an empathetic impulse. The alignment of disability studies with those concerned with power relations, race, gender and queer studies, in terms of redressing and affirming alternate states of being in the world as valuable, valid and not requiring remedy, may also be useful in furthering necessary dialogue. The growth of the autobiography in literature and film provides greater access to diverse narratives of people with disability that can be shared with the wider community, offering time and space to explore a more holistic, authentic version of life lived with disability. From a personal perspective, these first nineteen years of my daughter’s life have been an unfolding, an undoing and an unknowing of all that I thought I knew about being human and about what it is to be happy. It has taken time; it has been in many respects an extended meditation of sorts, as I have discovered who I am since she arrived and in her becoming. 118 Empathy with the Enemy ______There are commonalities and intersections, but there exists, still, an unknown between me and her and her peers, who experience life in parallel with us – occupying the same space and more often than not, seeing in different ways and being in different states.
Notes
1 Eva Feder Kittay, ‘The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political,’ in Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Metaphilosophy LLC, 2010). 2 Michael Oliver, ‘The Politics of Disablement,’ The Disability Archive UK. University of Leeds, 1990. viewed on 10 September 2014, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability- studies/archiveuk/Oliver/p%20of%20d%20oliver4.pdf. 3 Kittay, ‘The Personal is Philosophical’. 4 Gary L Albrecht and Patrick J. Devlieger, ‘The Disability Paradox: High Quality of Life Against All Odds,’ Social Science and Medicine 48.9 (1999): 977-988. 5 G. Thomas Couser, ‘Narrating Disability Inside and Outside the Clinic: Or, Beyond Empathy,’viewed on 10 June 2014. https://www.academia.edu/4427582/Narrating_Disability_Inside_and_Outside_the _Clinic_Or_Beyond_Empathy. 6 Naomi Sunderland, Tara, Catalano and Elizabeth Kendall, ‘Missing Discourses: Concepts of Joy and Happiness in Disability,’ In Disability and Society 24.6 (2009): 703-714. 7 Robert L Schalock, Ivan Brown, Roy Brown, Robert A. Cummins, David Felce, Leena Matikka, Kenneth D. Keith, and Trevor Parmenter. ‘Conceptualization, Measurement, and Application of Quality of Life for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities: Report of an International Panel of Experts,’ In Mental Retardation 40.6 (2002): 457-470. 8 Karen Michelmore, Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, Calls for Inquiry into Victoria's Disability Sector amid Allegations Care Provider Yooralla Failed to Act On Assault Warnings. Four Corners, viewed on 24 November 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-24/inquiry-push-into-disability-sector-after- yooralla-abuse-claims/5912010. 9 Couser, ‘Narrating Disability’. 10 Couser, ‘Narrating Disability’. 11 Couser, ‘Narrating Disability’.
Veronica Wain 119 ______
Bibliography
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Albrecht, Gary L. and Patrick J. Devlieger.‘The Disability Paradox: High Quality of Life Against All Odds.’ Social Science and Medicine 48.9 (1999): 997-988.
Campbell, Jennifer, Gilmore, Linda and Monica Cuskelly. ‘Changing Student Teachers’ Attitudes towards Disability and Inclusion.’ In Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability 28.4 (2003): 369-379.
Couser, G. Thomas. ‘Quality-of-Life Writing: Illness, Disability, and Representation.’ In Teaching Life Writing Texts. Edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes, 350-58. New York: MLA, 2008.
Couser, G. Thomas. ‘Narrating Disability Inside and Outside the Clinic: Or, Beyond Empathy’, 2014. Viewed 10 June 2014, https://www.academia.edu/4427582/Narrating_Disability_Inside_and_Outside_the _Clinic_Or_Beyond_Empathy.
Dunst, Carl J., Effects of Puppetry on Elementary Students’ Knowledge of and Attitudes toward Individuals with Disabilities.’ International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 4.3 (2012): 451-457.
Kittay, Eva Feder. ‘The Personal is Philosophical is Political.’ In Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, Edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Metaphilosophy LLC., 2010.
Michelmore, Karen, Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker. Calls For Inquiry Into Victoria's Disability Sector Amid Allegations Care Provider Yooralla Failed to Act On Assault Warnings. Four Corners. Viewed on 24 November 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-24/inquiry-push-into-disability-sector-after- yooralla-abuse-claims/5912010.
120 Empathy with the Enemy ______
Rillota, Fiona and Ted Nettleback. ‘Effects of an Awareness Program On Attitudes of Students without an Intellectual Disability towards Persons with an Intellectual Disability.’ Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability 32.1 (2007): 19- 27.
Schalock, Robert L., Verdugo, Miguel A. and C Jenaro, Wang, M., Wehmeyer, M., Jiancheng, X., Lachappelle, Yves. ‘Cross-Cultural Study of Quality of Life Indicators.’ American Journal of Mental Retardation 110.4 (2005): 298-311.
Schalock, Robert L., Ivan Brown, Roy Brown, Robert A. Cummins, David Felce, Leena Matikka, Kenneth D. Keith, and Trevor Parmenter. ‘Conceptualization, Measurement, and Application of Quality of Life for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities: Report of an International Panel of Experts.’ Mental Retardation 40.6 (2002): 457-470.
Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. London: Routledge, 2013.
Stewart L. Einfeld, MD; Andrea M. Piccinin, PhD; Andrew Mackinnon, PhD; Scott M. Hofer, PhD; John Taffe, PhD; Kylie M. Gray, PhD; Daniel E. Bontempo, MA; Lesa R. Hoffman, PhD; Trevor Parmenter, PhD; Bruce J. Tonge, MD. ‘Psychopathology in Young People with Intellectual Disability.’ In The Journal American Medical Association 296.6 (2006):1981-1989.
Sunderland, Naomi, Tara, Catalano and Elizabeth Kendall. ‘Missing Discourses: Concepts of Joy and Happiness in Disability.’ In Disability and Society 24.6 (2009): 703-714.
Yazbeck, Marie, Keith McVilly, Trevor R. Parmenter. ‘Attitudes toward People with Intellectual Disabilities - An Australian Perspective.’ Journal of Disability Policy Studies 15 (2004): 97-111.
Veronica Wain is an independent filmmaker and academic, currently coordinating a new and innovative respite program for families living with Rett syndrome with Disability Service Organisation, Equity Works Assoc. Ltd on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She is mother to her nineteen year old daughter who was born with a rare genetic condition located on the 18th chromosome, resulting in physical and intellectual disability. Her interests are diverse ranging from writing and production in the performing arts and film to exploring questions of ethics within the disability sector. Part IV
Online Encounters: Empathy in the Digital Age
Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye: Social Media, Disembodied Interaction and the Erosion of Empathy
Garry Robson
Abstract The field of serious, scholarly analysis of the social, philosophical and personal ramifications of ubiquitous computing is maturing, and the debate between technology producers/technophiles and those less sanguine about the digitalisation of our lives is intensifying. Some unintended, negative consequences of immersive gadget-mediated experience are coming into clearer focus. Among them is the emergence, particularly among the young, of a plethora of ‘iDisorders’ of personality and mood. More specifically, an increase in narcissistic personality traits has been widely discussed, and since narcissism correlates negatively with empathy it is necessary to examine the connections between immersion in social media - or, put differently, the popularity of remote and disembodied forms of communication and social interaction - , the increasing prevalence of narcissistic personality traits and an apparent decline in dispositional empathy. The central issue here is the extent to which the formation and maintenance of the capacity for empathy requires the co-presence of embodied persons in social interaction. A long tradition of philosophical, social-psychological and sociological thinking in this area attests that it does. More recently, neuroscientific research on the Mirror Neuron System has been offering support for these older arguments about embodied intersubjectivity and the importance of face-to-face encounters in the development of the self and social relations. It is argued here, given this, that the new global, digital infrastructure and the widespread dependence on the gadgets that provide access to it are contributing to the erosion of dispositional empathy among the young and, further, that many users are being harmed by a convergence of their own behaviours and interests and the requirements of the new media corporations, which program narcissistic patterns of behaviour into the screen interface and frame the subject positions of young users while financially exploiting their online activity surreptitiously.
Key Words: embodiment, intersubjectivity, social media, narcissism, empathy, neuroscience
*****
Socrates, as Plato so famously tells us, was alarmed by the appearance of writing, a technology he feared would undermine the oral and mnemonic culture upon which his teaching, and indeed communication in general in the Greek world, had hitherto been rooted.1 A conclusion drawn from this episode by many in our current moment of ubiquitous computing and gadget mania is that all seminal 124 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______advances in technologies of communication are initially unsettling of prevailing systems, but that this anxiety fades over time as the new technology and the habits to which it gives rise become naturalised. Jeremiads against the unsettling effects of the digital life are, the argument goes, but the latest manifestation of the kinds of responses that accompanied the emergence of television, say, or the telephone – we have nothing to fear but our fear of change. While there is clearly something to be said for this overall argument, the contemporary use of the example of Socrates misses an important point: the culture – the world – he feared would crumble under the onslaught of writing was one of intensely personal, face-to-face interaction, of what we would now call intersubjectivity. The oral culture of Greece had been premised upon the co- presence of embodied others and the forms of communicative interaction that this made possible. Socrates’ teaching depended upon the establishment of communicative rapport between teacher and pupil, or questioner and answerer – upon empathetic engagements with the intellects, emotions and personalities of others. This, until recently, was obvious. But the capacity to form and maintain such relationships is precisely what is now being endangered, especially perhaps among the young, by the recent shift towards remote and reductive kinds of online self-presentation and interaction that either support or, increasingly, replace or merge with face-to-face experience. Simplified, reductive and distorted forms of self-representation and the culture of look at me, like me may, this chapter will argue, be undermining the ability of many so-called ‘digital natives’ (see below) to acquire, develop and maintain the interpersonal skills and habits upon which empathetic connection with others rests. In the following we will place the question of empathy – and narcissism as its negative correlate – in the context of the ever-expanding character of social media use in general, and in particular the burgeoning literature and research dedicated to revealing some of its negative consequences in the age of the smartphone and tablet. Recent years have seen the emergence of a new and troubling strain of research and literature which calls into question the near-utopian enthusiasm of the 1980s and 1990s for the possibilities of digitally mediated social relations and the benefits of open ended technological innovation. One of the anchor points of this enthusiasm for the transformation of life in the Web 2.0 world as we entered the 21st century was Marc Prensky’s contention that a generation of ‘Digital Natives’ would lead the way in generating new and liberating forms of networked communication and relations.2 This generation would, in short, do some things very differently than they had been done before; their experience would represent a watershed in the relationship between humans and technology, being creatively empowered by their deep, formative immersion in the new technological landscape. Recent developments in patterns of young people’s actual use of social media have, for a growing number of commentators and researchers, done much to Garry Robson 125 ______temper this enthusiasm. Serious questions have been asked about the assertions of Prensky and other technophiles who support, and in fact market, the idea of the Digital Native - or terminological variations thereof 3 -, which turns out in any case to be an overly generalized and empirically questionable concept.4 These doubts revolve not so much around the educational benefits or disbenefits of digital nativism in the educational sphere as on more fundamental matters concerning online emotional disinhibition, narcissism, addiction, depression, distraction and affective disconnection from the face-to-face world of embodied others in general. There are plenty of examples5 of this more recent and less sanguine view of mediated social relations in the computer-in-the-pocket era, with the list growing monthly. Prominent titles, for example, include Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains , the extensive sales of which would seem to indicate a growing public concern with the emerging downsides of life online; Andrew Keen’s Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (2012), which, as its title suggests, covers similar terrain; Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, in which the early prophet of virtual reality bemoans the culturally corrosive effects of Web 2.0 (2011); or Larry Rosen’s iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (2013). Even Ethan Zuckerman - a proselytiser of the potential benefits to globalized humankind of the digitalization of social organization and connectivity - is forced to concede in his Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013) that under current conditions homophily and small-world thinking prevail on the far from cosmopolitan Facebook and that the potential of social media to open up and transform the planet for the good of all still seems some way from being realized. But the most striking example of this shift in tone is to be found in the work of Sherry Turkle. Her journey from prophet of the potentially liberated and digitally enhanced self (The Second Self, 1984) to writer of one of the most powerful jeremiads on the unintended and arguably catastrophic consequences of dissociative, asocial Internet addiction (Alone Together, 2011) traces a trajectory in which the broader critical shift can be discerned. Many of the writers now asking questions about what has ‘gone wrong’ with the promise of digitalization and computers-for-all can be located, given their tone and preoccupations, in an older strain of techno-sceptic analysis which examines the consequences to selves and communities of man, as Henry David Thoreau had it, becoming the ‘tool of his tools’6. In this connection we might cite Lewis Mumford’s account of the ways in which commercialized ‘megatechnics,’ with its open ended expansion, built in obsolescences and manipulation of consumers’ desires, works against the interests of human comfort and satisfaction;7 Jacques Ellul’s comprehensive theory of technological modernity’s tendency to sacralise innovation and products, the forced adaptation of humans to successive waves of technological improvement and the downgrading of the humanities in technocratic systems8 (an argument later taken up in the work of Neil Postman9); or Martin 126 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______Heidegger’s work on the human cost, the cost to being,10 of us becoming all but unavoidably ‘enframed’ as subjects and exploited - by being rendered increasingly thing-like ourselves - in totalising technological systems. The sceptical attitude towards the social media saturation and enframing of the young is being further validated by the burgeoning research in the fields of psychology and social-psychology. In an authoritative 2013 study of Facebook use and the emerging concept of ‘iDisorders’, Rosen et al. discuss the extensive and mounting evidence for a connection between intensive social media use and a variety of mood and personality disorders.11 Of these, the authors note that evidence for a relationship between social media use and an increase in narcissism (and histrionic disorder) is becoming increasingly robust – and that this relationship is garnering increasing attention in popular media discussion as well as in the scientific literature. Support for this is provided by Konrath et al.’s longitudinal meta-research, which suggests that an increase in narcissistic personality traits correlates negatively with, for example, changes in dispositional empathy among American college students since 1979.12 The study is a cross- temporal meta-analysis of 72 samples of college students who, between 1979 and 2009, participated in studies requiring them to engage with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). The index has four subscales: Empathetic Concern, Perspective Taking, Fantasy and Personal Distress. While there had been no changes over the period under review in the last two subscales, significant decreases were found for Empathetic Concern - agreement with statements such as ‘I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me’ (EC) and Perspective Taking - ‘I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective’ (PT)13. The authors note that while previous research showed a relative stability of other-focused traits over time, the decline in empathy that they identify has largely occurred since 2000. Other studies conducted since then support this finding. An American NIH sponsored study of 2008 into the lifetime prevalence of narcissistic personality traits, conducted by Stinson et al.,14 found that 9.4% of the 20 to 29 year olds in their study had experienced at some time in their lives symptoms sufficient for a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.15 Only 3.2% of over-65s fell into the same category. Perhaps the best known of these studies is that of Twenge and Campbell, who coined the phrase Narcissism Epidemic,16 which covers the same ground and comes to the same conclusions regarding what Twenge has elsewhere called ‘Generation Me’.17 As these few examples indicate, there is now a raft of studies which argue that they have identified, on the basis of robust research, a rising prevalence of narcissistic traits among American college students since the 1980s, and particularly since the turn of the millennium. Of course complex and long term social processes, and not merely the rise of social media, underlie this trend, among them the rise of hyper-individualism and ‘cultural entitlement, materialism, vanity, Garry Robson 127 ______and antisocial behaviours’ connected to factors such as ‘changing familial roles and practices and a shift in American values privileging self-expression and self- admiration’,18 developments which can also be traced through education19 and popular culture.20 And now, since the advent of the iPhone/tablet revolution, more and more people are walking around with a powerful computer in their hand (children’s use of digital media in the US has doubled in the last two years)21; it is likely that the relationship between social media saturation, a rise in narcissism, and a decline in empathy are becoming ever more intimately connected. In fact the evidence for this connection is becoming increasingly persuasive. In a world in which the average person, according to Nokia, looks at their phone 150 times a day,22 multitasking American teenagers, by using more than one device simultaneously, are (or were in 2010) packing in 10 hours and 45 minutes of screen-mediated experience a day,23 and 45% of British adults confess to feeling anxious when they cannot access their social network sites,24 it would be surprising if evidence were not mounting of social media’s corrosive effects on empathy and genuine other- directed behaviour. To take a few more recent examples of discussions which advance this argument: Douglas Rushkoff sees social networking sites as ‘fertile grounds for narcissists to self-regulate’,25 Elias Aboujadi takes a particularly bleak view of the ‘e-personality’ – his clinical experience convinces him that immersion in the online world is, among other things, turbo-powering the development of narcissistic traits and leading increasing numbers of people to identify with reduced, flat and aggressively self-centred ‘avatar’ versions of themselves; and Christian Olavarria, like Rushkoff, develops the analysis by arguing that narcissistic engagement with the screen is not merely facilitated by sites like Facebook, but actually programmed-in by their business models.26 Where is the good news in all of this? Perhaps in one of the most interesting studies so far conducted into the corrosive effects on young people of so much life being lived through screens: Yalda et al.’s ‘Five days at outdoor education camp without screens improves preteen skills with nonverbal emotion cues’. 27 Beginning from the premise that children’s face-to-face communication skills may be negatively affected by the technological mediation of experience, researchers conducted a field experiment in which a control group living their regular in-school, screen-mediated lives were compared to one spending five days at a nature camp at which television, computers and mobile phones were not allowed. After five days of exclusively face-to-face interaction, ‘the children’s recognition of nonverbal emotion cues improved significantly more than the control group for both facial expressions and videotaped scenes. Implications are that the short term effects of increased opportunities for social interaction, combined with time away from screen-based media and digital communication tools, improves a preteens’ understanding of nonverbal emotional cues’.28 128 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______This is an important finding which demonstrates clearly that, despite the arguments of vested commercial interests that want us all to believe that one form of communication is as good as another, face-to-face interaction is absolutely necessary for full-spectrum, genuinely empathetic communication with others, and that interventions can work. Recent and emerging research in this field is showing us that the range and significance of the non-verbal dimensions of communication are far greater than most of us understand. And this at a time when the majority of young people’s online communication with others is taking place via texting and instant messaging29 – the methods furthest removed from an engagement with the face, or the phenomenologically real human presence of their interlocutor. Removed, in short, from an experience of multi-dimensional empathetic connection. The development of neuroscience is of course also doing much to enhance our understanding of the mechanics of face-to-face interaction and empathetic communication. Though it has come late to the party, and its claims about what it can reveal about consciousness and personhood are routinely inflated30, it is offering support for some much older philosophical, social-psychological and sociological accounts of the connection between embodiment, co-presence and intersubjective connection – indeed, the very development and maintenance of our social selves.31 Though Theodor Lipps, the first modern philosopher to give a developed account of empathy, suggested as long ago as 190332 that it is grounded in an innate human capacity for the motor mimicry of another’s expressions of affect, it is only relatively recently that the quality and range of mimicry and imitation have been rigorously scrutinised – largely as a consequence of the emergence of ‘mirror neuron’ studies, that famously ‘accidental’ outcome of neuroscientific research.33 Work on the MNS is producing fascinating descriptions of processes of empathetic interaction. For current purposes two aspects of this work are particularly important: first, the embodied, full-spectrum communication of affect is astonishingly complex and subtle; second, the role played within this by simulation and imitation is crucial. These forms of interactive neurological/affective mirroring are most powerfully experienced when people interact face-to-face. Jiang et al. contend that ‘face-to-face communication, particularly dialog, has special neural features that other types of communication do not have and that the neural synchronization between partners may underlie successful face-to-face communication’.34 Profound interpersonal connection requires, then, not only the co-presence of actual people but close and active face- to-face communication between them; words or images remotely conveyed and received from behind the controlled safety and reduced selfhood of the screen are not enough. The mounting evidence for interpersonal ‘neural synchronisation’ is such that some researchers have recently been going so far as to suggest that it is time to Garry Robson 129 ______move towards neuroscientific studies which go beyond the individual-scanned-in- isolation norm so as to better understand the situated and embodied nature of human cognition and interaction. Hari and Kujala, for example, argue that it is now necessary to begin the ‘monitoring of brain and bodily functions within a socially relevant environment. Because single-person studies alone cannot unravel the dynamic aspects of interpersonal interactions, it seems both beneficial and necessary to move towards ‘two-person neuroscience’.35 Hasson et al. concur in their paper on ‘brain-to-brain coupling’, noting that most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. But with ‘so many cognitive faculties emerging from interpersonal space, a complete understanding of the cognitive processes within a single individual’s brain cannot be achieved without examining and understanding the interactions among individuals.’36 Understanding the role played by empathy in such interactions is absolutely central in all of this. ‘Two brains are better than one’; no one among us is an island; and the Mirror Neuron System may constitute, as Gallese has it, the ‘shared manifold of intersubjectivity.’37 Perhaps it is time to return to Socrates. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy tells us that he
[...] was usually to be found in the marketplace and other public areas, conversing with a variety of different people—young and old, male and female, slave and free, rich and poor—that is, with virtually anyone he could persuade to join with him in his question-and-answer mode of probing serious matters. Socrates’s lifework consisted in the examination of people’s lives, his own and others’, because “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being,” as he says at his trial. Socrates pursued this task single-mindedly, questioning people about what matters most, e.g., courage, love, reverence, moderation, and the state of their souls generally38.
Dealing face-to-face with embodied people, alive to the full spectrum of human communication in the context of the lifeworld, was Socrates’ method of knowing. He was deeply suspicious of the move toward treating people as abstract, depersonalized ‘knowledge’ outcomes. Socrates’ reservations are worthy of reconsideration. Not because the technology of writing is bad, which would be an absurd proposition, but because treating the current communications revolution and all that it makes possible, for better and worse, as if it were simply the latest equivalent of television or the telephone is to underestimate the step-change it probably represents in human history, and in psychology and social development. Steve Jobs, that widely revered wise man of our own era, who of course did as much as anyone to make possible the development of a profit-driven sphere of 130 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______narcissistic, disembodied interaction masquerading as ‘friendship’ and ‘connection’, knew more than he let on: not for his own children, it seems, the ten and three-quarter hours a day at the gadget interface.39 This is something that every adult with a responsibility for the well-being of children and young people should be aware of and reflect upon.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to express his gratitude to the Polish National Science Centre in Krakow, a grant from which made the research for this work possible.
Notes
1 Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For broader discussions of the transition from oral to textual in the Greek world see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982) and Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963). 2 Marc Prenksy, ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,’ On the Horizon 9.5 (2001): 1-6. For a more recent elaboration of Prensky’s thinking see From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom: Hopeful Essays for 21st Century Learning (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012). 3 Significant examples include John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008); George Siemens, ‘Connectivism: Learning Theory for the Digital Age,’ International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 2.1, (2005); Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); and Vim Veen and Ben Vrakking, Homo Zappiens: Growing Up in a Digital Age, (London and New York: Continuum, 2006). 4 Neil Selwyn, ‘Digital Natives: Myth or Reality?,’ presentation to CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), (London seminar series, London: 2009), viewed 15 February 2011, http://pl.scribd.com/doc/9775892/Digital-Native. 5 See, as given here and among many others, Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2011); Andrew Keen, Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (London: Macmillan, 2012); Larry. D Rosen, iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age (New York: OR Books, 2010); Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers Garry Robson 131 ______and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) and Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); and Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (New York: W.W. Norton. 2013). 6 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1854]): ‘But Lo! Men Have Become the Tools of their Tools.’ 7 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine Vol. II: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). 8 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964). 9 Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrendering of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992). 10 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York & London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977 [1954]). See also Jan Harris and Peter Taylor, Digital Matters: The Culture and Theory of the Matrix, (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) for an admirably clear and useful presentation of Heidegger’s work on technology and a discussion of connections between his thinking and that of Ellul. 11 Rosen, Larry D., Kelly Whaling, Saira Rab, L Mark Carrier, Nancy A. Cheever, ‘Is Facebook Creating ‘‘iDisorders’’? The Link Between Clinical Symptoms of Psychiatric Disorders and Technology Use, Attitudes and Anxiety’, Computers in Human Behavior, 29 (2013): 1243–1254. 12 Sara Konrath, Edward O’Brien and Courtney Hsing, ‘Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: a Meta-Analysis’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15:2 (2011): 180-198 13 Konrath et al., ‘Changes in Dispositional Empathy,’ 187. 14 F.S. Stinson, D.A. Dawson, R.B. Goldstein, S.P. Chou, B. Huang, S. Smith and B.F. Grabt, ‘Prevalence, Correlates, Disability and Comorbidity of DSM-IV Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Results from the Wave 2 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions,’ NIH Public Access Author Manuscript (2009), viewed 5 July 2014. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles. 15 The definition of NPD has been subject to a good deal of discussion and controversy in recent decades. For a full account see Elizabeth K. Reynolds and Carl W. Lejuez, ‘Narcissism in the DSM’, in Keith Campbell and Joshua D. Miller, (eds.), Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Findings, and Treatments (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2011). Five varieties are given in Theodore Millon, Disorders of Personality: DSM-IV-TM and Beyond (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 393. For current purposes I am using a concise definition of NPD as ‘a personality disorder characterized especially by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, persistent 132 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______need for admiration, lack of empathy for others, excessive pride in achievements, and snobbish, disdainful, or patronizing attitudes’, viewed 10 August, 2014, http://www.merriamwebster.com/medical/narcissistic%20personality%20disorder. 16 Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009). 17 Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled and More Miserable than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 2007). 18 Kenneth N. Levy, William D. Ellison and Joseph S. Reynoso, ‘A Historical Review of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality,’ eds. W. Keith Campbell and Joshua D. Miller, The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), 3-13. 19 For critical discussions of the separation of reward from achievement in education, and the problem with conferring ‘self-esteem’ upon pupils rather than supporting them in building it through hard work and trial and error for themselves, see Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (London: Routledge, 2008); Frank Furedi, Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), and Melanie Phillips, All Must Have Prizes (London: Sphere, 1998). 20 See Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young, The Celebrity Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America (New York: Harper, 2009), and Nathan DeWall, Richard S. Pond, Keith Campbell, and Jean Twenge, ‘Tuning in to Psychological Change: Linguistic Markers of Psychological Traits and Emotions Over Time in Popular U.S. Song Lyrics,’ ‘Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5:3 (2011): 200-207, viewed 19 July 2014, http://dx.doi.org. 21 Common Sense Media, ‘Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America’ (2013), viewed 3 August 2014, http://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/zero- to-eight-childrens-media-use-inamerica-2013. 22 Tomo Ahonen, ‘Main Trends in the Telecommunications Market’, Presentation at MoMo Mobile Conference, Kiev, Ukraine (2011), viewed 15 May 2013, http://www.citia.co.uk. 23 Kaiser Family Foundation, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds. Study of Media and Health, Washington DC (2010), viewed 8 August 2014, www.kff.org/entmedia. 24 Anxiety UK ‘Anxiety UK Study Finds Technology Can Increase Anxiety’ (2012), viewed 19 August 2014, http://www.anxietyuk.org.uk. 25 Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age (New York: OR Books, 2010). 26 See Christian M Olavarria, ‘Mindful Rejection of Digital Technology at the User Level: Cognitive Determinants and Social Consequences,’ eds Garry Robson and Malgorzata Zachara, Digital Diversities: Social Media and Intercultural Garry Robson 133 ______
Experience (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014) for a discussion of the convergence of the needs of social media users and the new media corporations. The compulsion of the young and vulnerable to be always online, always clicking, converges with the business models of Facebook, Google and the rest, which invariably promote among users the habit of always being online and always clicking. For this is ‘free labour’ to be harvested. See also David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 27 Yalda T. Uhls, Minas Michikyan, Jordan Morris, Debra Garcia, Gary W. Small, Eleni Zgourou, and Patricia M. Greenfield, ‘Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotion Cues,’ Computers in Human Behaviour 39 (2014): 387-392. 28 Ibid. 29 See Maeve Duggan and Aaron Smith, ‘Cell Internet Use 2013,’ Pew Internet Project (2013), viewed 19 August, 2014. http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_CellInternetUse2013.pdf; Karen Bindley, ‘When Children Text all Day, What Happens to Their Social Skills?’ Huffingtonpost.com. (2011), viewed 29 March 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com. 30 For a close philosophical engagement with the claim that non-‘neurological’ accounts of mind, consciousness and the person are the products of mere ‘folk psychology,’ waiting to be disproven by the onward march of neuroscience in, most famously, Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) see Roger Scruton, ‘My Brain and I,’ The New Atlantis (Spring 2014), viewed 5 August 2014, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/my-brain-and- i. For more extended discussions of the limitations of neuroscience in this sphere and its ill-considered adoption by a variety of practitioners in disparate disciplines see Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (London: Routledge, 2012) and Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2013); and for a witty and incisive tirade against the simplifications of the neurocult in the popular media - publishing in particular - see Steven Poole,’Your Brain on Pseudoscience: The Rise of Popular Neurobollocks’, New Statesman (September 6, 2012), viewed 2 February 2013, www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain-pseudoscience. 31 For comprehensive treatments of these issues see Hans Herbert Kogler, ‘Empathy, Dialogical Self, and Reflexive Interpretation: The Symbolic Source of Simulation,’ eds. Hans Herbert Kogler and Karsten S. Stueber, Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Social Sciences (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000) and Nick Crossley, Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). 134 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______
32 Theodor Lipps, ‘Empathy, Inner Imitation and Sense-Feelings’ in A Modern Book of Esthetics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979 [1903]), 374-382. 33 See Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature (Social Brain Press, 2011) for clear and classic accounts of the MNS field, its findings and its claims. 34 J. Jiang, B. Dayi, D. Peng, C. Zhu, L. Liu, and C., ‘Neural Synchronization During Face-to-Face Communication’, Journal of Neuroscience 32:45 (2012): 16064-16069. 35 Riitta Hari and Miiamaaria V. Kujala, ‘Brain Basis of Human Social Interaction: From Concepts to Brain Imaging’, Physiological Reviews, 89, (2009): 453–479. 36 Uri Hasson, Asif A. Ghazanfar, Bruno Galantucci, Simon Garrod, and Christian Keysers, ‘Brain-to-Brain Coupling: A Mechanism for Creating and Sharing a Social World’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16:2 (2012): 114–121. 37 Vittorio Gallese, ‘The “Shared Manifold” Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (2001): 33-50. 38 Debra Nails, ‘Socrates,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), viewed 5 July 2014, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/socrates. 39 Nick Bilton, ‘Steve Jobs Was a Low-tech Parent,’ nytimes.com (2014), viewed 11 November 2014, http://www.nytimes.com.
Bibliography
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Garry Robson 135 ______
DeWall, C. Nathan, Richard S. Pond Jr., W. Keith Campbell and Jean M. Twenge. ‘Tuning in to Psychological Change: Linguistic Markers of Psychological Traits and Emotions Over Time in Popular U.S. Song Lyrics.’ Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5:3 (2011): 200-207.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. On The Internet. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Duggan, Maeve and Aron Smith. ‘Cell Internet Use 2013.’ Pew Internet Project, 2013. Viewed 19 August 2014. http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_CellInternetUse2013.pdf.
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Harris, Jan and Paul Taylor. Digital Matters: The Culture and Theory of the Matrix. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. New York & London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977.
Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Keen, Andrew. Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. London: Macmillan, 2012.
Keysers, Christian. The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature. Social Brain Press, 2011.
Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.
136 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______
Kogler, Hans Herbert. ‘Empathy, Dialogical Self, and Reflexive Interpretation: The Symbolic Source of Simulation’ Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Social Sciences, edited by Hans Herbert Kogler and Karsten S. Stueber. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2000.
Konrath, Sara, Edna O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing. ‘Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 15:2 (2011): 180-198.
Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget. New York: Penguin, 2011.
Levy, Kenneth N., William D. Ellison, and Joseph S. Reynoso, ‘A Historical Review of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality’. Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, edited by W. Keith Campbell and Joshua D. Miller. New York: Wiley and Sons, 2011.
Lipps, Theodore. ‘Empathy, Inner Imitation and Sense-Feelings.’ A Modern Book of Esthetics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979 [1903].
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Robson, Garry and Zachara Malgorzata, eds. Digital Diversities: Social Media and Intercultural Experience. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
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138 Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye ______
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Garry Robson is Professor of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research interests and publications encompass sport, masculinity and the body; gentrification and urban cultures; the sociology of contemporary Britain; and the social consequences of ubiquitous computing. His most recent publication is the edited collection ‘Digital Diversities: Social Media and Intercultural Experience’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
The Empathic Gamer
Poppy Wilde
Abstract In theatre empathy could be considered as occurring between two sets of people. There is an empathic relationship between the actor and the character and also between the audience and the characters. The actor must empathise with the character in order to deliver their experiences and emotions in the most believable way possible. This corresponds to the meaning of empathy as ‘entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. […] It means temporarily living in his/her life’1 and this is precisely the job of the actor who ‘passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life’.2 For the audience empathising with the character involves experiencing ‘vicariously what the characters in the action seem to be feeling’,3 deriving pleasure from the spectacle before them. Therefore the main differential between the empathy of the actor and the empathy of the audience would appear to be the embodiment and enactment of the role through the actor’s performance. In many ways, gaming can be considered similar to theatre. Steve Dixon discusses the correspondences between the two, including aspects of time, narrative, characters and emotional responses.4 In this chapter I explore these emotional responses further, and consider the shared quality of the empathic connection with character. For the gamer the divide between audience and actor is conflated; they are at once the spectator and the spectacle. I will therefore seek to explore the empathic connection between gamer and character in relation to the actor/character and audience/characters in theatre, and discuss the ways in which this manifests itself in the lived experience of MMORPG gaming. I will consider responses to narrative in gameplay as well as embodied, affective responses to the experience of the avatar.
Key Words: Empathy, gaming, MMORPG, theatre, acting, embodiment, affect, lived experience.
*****
1. Introduction In this chapter I explore the empathic connection between gamer and character in massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) in relation to the actor/character and audience/characters in theatre, and discuss the ways this manifests itself in the lived experience of MMORPG gaming. I draw on autoethnographic data from my PhD research project to consider how empathy is facilitated through a combination of fictional engagement with the narrative in 140 The Empathic Gamer ______gameplay as well as embodied affective responses to the experience of the avatar body in the game World of Warcraft.
2. Empathy in the Theatre
When applied to the human world, empathy is generally understood as ‘entering another’s world’ or ‘stepping into their shoes’.5
Empathy is a concept which has come to explain how we as human beings relate to each other in the world. Empathy allows us to understand other’s thoughts and emotions:
It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever, that he/she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in his/her life, […] in order to enter another’s world.6
This definition is illuminating for the concept of empathy in and of itself, but empathy is also an essential tool in acting. In fact the whole quote could be just as at home in a book of acting technique. Stanislavsky stated:
To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent, to think, strive, feel and act in unison with your role. If you take all these internal processes, and adapt them to the spiritual and physical life of the person you are representing, we call that living the part. […] The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form.7
Stanislavsky highlights how an actor must come to know the character she is portraying intimately, moving beyond relaying words in the script to understand the motivating factors behind their character’s words, actions and overall aim. Stanislavsky believed that it was the actor who emotionally identified with the experiences on stage who was fully creative.8 This actor prepared by ‘consciously creating the character’s circumstances that are suggested by the playwright and director by learning and imagining all the details about the character’s inner and external conditions; […] unconsciously placing himself in the character’s world, feeling his real feelings, […] embodying the physical and emotional character’.9 Poppy Wilde 141 ______This shows that in both empathy and acting there is a dual importance of affective and situational understanding and depth of feeling, which I return to as the interdependent notions of embodied and narrative empathy. The actor in theatre uses empathy in the literal embodiment of another: the actor comes to understand and experience life as that other through performance. However, empathy can also be described in relation to the audience of the theatre. The audience should empathise with the characters and their situation in order to be carried into a willing suspension of disbelief: they should ‘experience vicariously what the characters in the action seem to be feeling’.10 This form of empathy is just as important as the audience can still experience an affective response to the situation the characters find themselves in through the understanding and recognition of the characters’ circumstances and emotional states.
3. Empathy in Gaming The videogamer of today sits somewhere between ‘actor’ and ‘audience’, and this is particularly true of the MMORPG gamer – where the majority of the other inhabitants of the gameworld are other real life gamers, all capable of both watching and being watched. So perhaps empathy for the videogame player is a potentially more complex matter than for theatre patrons and actors. The player develops a ‘virtual persona that is something “other” than him/her represented onscreen’.11 For Whitlock, character creation in MMORPGs involves making choices and investing time, similar to that of the spect-actor of Forum theatre. In Forum theatre the audience become active parts in the performance, taking the place of actors and thus becoming spect-actors: a ‘meld of audience and actor, […] an active participant in drama, influencing the narrative and altering it’.12 Gamer empathy could therefore be understood both in terms of how the gamer views the action and how they perform the actions. Martin explains that ‘the human form means the avatar retains the capacity to arouse pathos, admiration and identification’13, meaning we are able to empathise with the avatar as a character involved in a particular situation. The gamer’s own body is then implicated in the action as ‘[e]mpathy caused by the response of mirror neurons to the game’s audio-visual information activates the player’s motor systems, recreating the conditions of the virtual world in the body’.14
4. Examples from Gameplay So how exactly does this empathy manifest itself in the gamer? As previously noted above, empathy is experienced both in relation to the situations characters (real or fictional) find themselves in, and also in relation to said characters’ felt emotional responses. Tronstad uses a continuum of empathic experiences derived from Margrethe Bruun Vaage to encompass these feelings of involvement.15 In this model true empathy occurs between emotional contagion and perspective taking 142 The Empathic Gamer ______with aspects of both, and can be considered both in terms of embodied empathy and narrative empathy.16 Taking these mutually supporting notions as a point of departure I now consider some examples of my own experiences in the MMORPG game World of Warcraft, which illustrate the subjective experience of being empathically caught up in the game. Data has been gathered over a series of gameplay sessions that track my on- going foray into World of Warcraft. This autoethnography has been conducted in order to explore the lived experience of MMORPG gaming, with particular focus how this experience embodies the ‘posthuman’ that challenges us to think differently about subjectivity. As such, the priorities which have been used to guide the production of relevant field notes have been descriptions of the lived experience of gaming, including: particular moments of affect or empathy, performative aspects of gaming, the relationship between gamer and avatar (embodiment, subjectivity etc.), the permeability of self and screen, and the relationship of human with machine.
A. Embodied Empathy
When gaming I ran into a fire and therefore got set on fire which transmits damage. In a panic I ran into the water. What weird application of logic is this?! I can’t tell who is at fault, me or the game. The game decides the logic that if you walk into a fire you get set on fire and if you get set on fire it hurts. It doesn’t recognise the logic of water+fire though, and instead the pain is programmed to last a certain period – a matter of seconds as shown in the top right of the screen. I wrote pain. What I mean is damage. No one is in pain. I must keep telling myself that.17
This section highlights a moment when the action surprises me and acts, to quote Whitlock, to jolt me ‘out of the passivity of the spectator’.18 These feelings of being ‘freaked out’ and ‘panicking’ show my loss of control over the situation and the concern which I felt towards the damage which was being inflicted. The first sentence describes the events in objective unconcerned tones, but the feeling was truly of confusion, concern, and - as the fire continued - panic. The language reflects this in the switch to the description of ‘suffering’ (echoed in the following sentences with ‘hurt’ and ‘pain’). This is not objective but subjective and whilst I felt no pain the panic was a visceral feeling. This moment signifies the blurring of the boundaries between myself and avatar and the gameworld. As I panic, viscerally, for the well-being of my avatar I apply ‘Real Life’ logic to this virtual world and try to save myself, or her(?) through submerging my/her body in water. When this doesn’t work I am frustrated and confused. Poppy Wilde 143 ______We could make an interesting comparison between the confusion over the reality of the ‘pain’ and the logic of the solution. It is as if the visceral nature of the panic has accentuated a belief in the danger which is presented by the fire. In the affective reality of this moment there is an instinctual desire to apply ingrained logical solutions of water to douse the flames. This could be compared to Stanislavski when he writes: ‘[t]he actor must first of all believe in everything that takes place on the stage, and most of all he must believe in what he himself is doing’.19 This example shows the extent to which gaming experience becomes both a cognitive and bodily activity of immersion in the game. Farrow and Iacovides assert that ‘we never experience the physical pain of a wounded avatar; only a representation of it’.20 In doing so, they critique Crick’s comments that gaming ‘is a fully embodied, sensuous, carnal activity’21 by stating that gaming is ‘not [experienced] as subjective experience’.22 I agree that of course we necessarily experience the avatar differently to our own physical body; however, I contest the idea that we do not experience it subjectively. This is one such example of the involuntary physical and visceral reaction to the experience of the avatar:
Etyme falls from a great height and I gasp. It is completely involuntary, I am in that moment, her, falling, perhaps to her/my death. It is a ridiculous concept because even if Etyme were to die I would be fine, and it would take just moments to run my spirit through the graveyard to find her body and resurrect. Note the my/her complications. The boundaries are blurred. She is not me but she is not not-me. Just as Daboo notes as actors create characters who they ‘both are-and-are-not’. ‘It is both me-and- 23 24 not-me at the same time’ &
Smith’s description of sympathy, which is now understood as fitting the definition of low-level empathy (as suggested by Coplan and Goldie25) states that ‘we place ourselves in his situation, […] we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something’26 (my emphasis). This description echoes the situational and embodied response which was experienced above. I believe for many players they absolutely do experience phenomena in gameplay as a felt, subjective experience. But where others have suggested that ‘the virtual minds and bodies become the player’s surrogate mind and body’,27 I would argue that what we experience here is an extension of embodied awareness, which merges human and machine to produce different ways of feeling and experiencing.
144 The Empathic Gamer ______B. Narrative Empathy It appears common sense to assume narrative empathy would be the most easily achieved, as the interactive medium of games require that any story or situation given to the avatar must be enacted by the gamer. This constitutes an interesting shift in agency as the player’s capacity to act is channelled through the avatar and for the avatar to progress with the in-game quests the gamer must allow the avatar’s motivations to be projected onto the player themselves. As James Paul Gee argues: ‘[i]n many video games, players inhabit the goals of a virtual character in a virtual world. […] In these video games, the real-world player gains a surrogate, that is, the virtual character the player is playing […]. By inhabit I mean that you, the player, act in the game as if the goals of your surrogate are your goals’.28 In this way there is a sense of empathic connection as the gamer melds their own desires with that of the objectives given to the avatar. However this is not necessarily through an emotional engagement with the narrative storyline. In my own gameplay I have been surprised by how easily the narrative can be neglected. For example, when given a quest by an NPC (non-playing character) in World of Warcraft the gamer is presented with a pop-up box of the NPC’s speech about that quest. The brief includes a summary of the details of the task (e.g. ‘NPC wants you to kill 10 spiders’) and under that are the buttons to accept or decline. In dungeons, which usually involve five players working together towards a specific goal, it becomes immediately apparent that players are accepting the quests as quickly as possible in order to get on and complete them; no one is actually stopping to read the whys and wherefores or getting involved in the narrative. Therefore, whilst engagement with narrative is a highly immersive activity in some forms of gaming I would suggest that – for some gamers – it is more of an optional quality and their focus is on progression and achievement rather than story. It may be that this is more prevalent in MMORPGs due to the open world structure – where single player games usually follow one narrative, the possibilities for exploration are wider in MMORPGs, which can lead to non-linear storylines. In my own gameplay I have felt most engaged with the narrative through optional involvement when various locations in world have been ‘under attack’ from players of the opposite faction (in World of Warcraft there are two opposing factions of the Alliance and the Horde, and when you create a character you can choose which ‘side’ you are on. This war contributes much of the backstory to the narrative in the game). You are alerted when a location nearby is under attack by the statement appearing in the chat box on the ‘Local Defence Channel’ whenever a member of the opposing faction enters a territory which is not theirs and begins attacking the NPCs there.
I receive notification that a territory near me is under attack and quickly make the decision to go to its defence. After flying furiously and silently urging my mount on faster (an action Poppy Wilde 145 ______which is only perceptible by my finger pressing the “forwards” key harder on the keyboard) when I finally arrive at the place I am suddenly cautious and somewhat tentative. I notice the invading players ahead. Instead of the number indicating their level, a small skull with glowing red eyes appears in its place, which strengthens the feeling of foreboding within me. Unsurprisingly, I'm killed pretty instantly. When I resurrect I swiftly summon my flying mount and launch myself into the air away from the enemy players. Initially I expect pursuit but when it isn't immediately forthcoming I edge closer - though still a safe distance away. They are standing in a loose circle and I can only presume are in deep discussion. I am ignored, or unseen, and eventually skulk off, a little abashed for having attempted something obviously beyond my ability. There has been a depth of feeling in this quest which has been absent from the PVE (player versus environment) quests from NPCs and I wonder at the way in which the human involvement has changed that. I wonder also whether it is to do with the difficulty level, and the potential to fail. Most of the PVE quests are easily achievable; it is not hard to outwit the machine. This in turn means that the achievement itself feels hollow. There needs to be some sense of a challenge in order to make the quest resonate as a REAL quest, a REAL victory. Other RL players provide this touchstone with reality which seems to facilitate a deeper sense of affect. I think it links back to the notion of there being a sense of consequence.29
Farrow and Iacovides suggest that ‘[a] more immersive or convincing sense of embodiment within digital worlds may also depend on experiencing a convincing, meaningful world within which the player has a sense of choice and responsibility’.30 Interestingly these definitions can again bring us back to theatre by way of Aristotle’s Poetics, where he states that imitated actions should be ‘an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude’.31 Laurel explains that ‘[s]uccessful orchestration of the variables of frequency, range, and significance can help to create this feeling [of interactivity], but it can also arise from other sources—for instance, sensory immersion and the tight coupling of kinaesthetic input and visual response’.32 Whitlock presents another view; that the ‘reality’ of playing with others facilitates adrenaline: ‘[c]hallenging and outwitting another human as opposed to the artificial intelligence of the computer increased the sense of ‘winning’ adding to player satisfaction’.33
146 The Empathic Gamer ______5. Conclusion These examples show that empathic responses to the avatar body and the narrative occur in gamers, but also that they are memorable and affective experiences which are appreciated by the gamer as moments to be enjoyed, facilitating deeper involvement and immersion in the game. Although media hype holds that gaming is an isolating and alienating endeavour, I believe that the potential is there to create games which provide thought-provoking engagements with other lives and experiences. Whilst the examples discussed here may not epitomise the social, political and economic possibilities of such engagement, it is hoped that the discussion of the power of the subjective lived experience has demonstrated the great potential for creating affective experience that these gameworlds hold.
Notes
1 Carl R. Rogers, ‘Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being’, The Counseling Psychologist 5(2) (1975): 4. 2 Constantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (London: Methuen Drama, 1980), 466. 3 Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (London: Addison-Wesley, 2013), 145. 4 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance (London: MIT Press, 2007), 601-602. 5 Linda Finlay, ‘Dancing between Embodied Empathy and Phenomenological Reflection’, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 6(Special Edn.) (2006): 4, viewed on 25 February 2014, http://www.ipjp.org/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=318&view=finis h&cid=6&catid=6&m=0. 6 Rogers, ‘Empathic’, 4. 7 Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937), 14. 8 Mel Gordon, The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1987), 53. 9 Ibid., 53-54. 10 Laurel, Computers as Theatre, 145. 11 Katie Whitlock, ‘Beyond Linear Narrative: Augusto Boal Enters Norrath’, Digital Gameplay, ed. Nate Garrelts (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2005), 199. 12 Ibid., 194. 13 Paul Martin, ‘Embodiment in Skateboarding Videogames’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9.2 (2013): 319. 14 Ibid., 317-318. 15 Ragnhild Tronstad, ‘Character Identification in World of Warcraft: The Relationship Between Capacity and Appearance’, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, ed. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (London: MIT Press, 2011), 251. Poppy Wilde 147 ______
16 Ibid. 17 Poppy Wilde, Autoethnographic field note, 2014. 18 Whitlock, ‘Beyond Linear Narrative’, 199. 19 Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 465-466. 20 Robert Farrow and Ioanna Iacovides, ‘‘In the game’? Embodied Subjectivity in Gaming Environments’, (paper presented at ‘6th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games: the Nature of Player Experience’, Madrid, Spain, January 29 - 31, 2012), 4, viewed on 7 March 2014, http://oro.open.ac.uk/33357/1/82-Farrow-Iacovides_FINAL.pdf. 21 Timothy Crick, ‘The Game Body: Toward a Phenomenology of Contemporary Video Gaming’, Games and Culture 6.3 (2011): 267. 22 Farrow and Iacovides, ‘In the Game’, 5. 23 Jerri Daboo, ‘Michael Chekhov and the Embodied Imagination: Higher Self and Non-Self’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 27.3 (2007): 264 and 271. 24 Wilde, Autoethnographic Field Note, 2014. 25 Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Introduction to Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xi. 26 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Uplifting Publications, 2011), Kindle edition. 27 Farrow and Iacovides, ‘In the Game’, 3. 28 James P. Gee, ‘Video Games and Embodiment’, Games and Culture 3.3-4 (2008): 258. 29 Wilde, Autoethnographic field note, 2014. 30 Farrow and Iacovides, ‘In the Game’, 9. 31 Aristotle, ‘Critical Contexts: from The Poetics’, trans. Gerald Else, The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, ed. William B. Worthen, (London: Cengage Learning 2004), 99. 32 Laurel, Computers as Theatre, 29. 33 Katie Whitlock, ‘Theatre and the Video Game: Beauty and the Beast’ (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2004) 124.
Bibliography
Aristotle, ‘Critical Contexts: from The Poetics’. Translated by Gerald Else. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, edited by William B. Worthen, 97-105. London: Cengage Learning, 2004.
Coplan, Amy and Peter Goldie. Introduction to Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, ix-xlvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 148 The Empathic Gamer ______
Crick, Timothy. ‘The Game Body: Toward a Phenomenology of Contemporary Video Gaming’. Games and Culture 6.3 (2011): 259-269.
Daboo, Jerri. ‘Michael Chekhov and the Embodied Imagination: Higher Self and Non-Self’. Studies in Theatre and Performance 27.3 (2007): 261-273.
Dixon, Steve. Digital Performance. London: MIT Press, 2007.
Farrow, Robert. and Ioanna Iacovides. ‘‘In the game’? Embodied Subjectivity in Gaming Environments’. Paper presented at ‘6th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games: the Nature of Player Experience’, Madrid, Spain, January 29-31, 2012. Viewed on 7 March 2014. http://oro.open.ac.uk/33357/1/82- Farrow-Iacovides_FINAL.pdf.
Finlay, Linda. ‘Dancing Between Embodied Empathy and Phenomenological Reflection’. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 6(Special Edn.) (2006): 1-11. Viewed on 25 February 2014. http://www.ipjp.org/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=318&view=finis h&cid=6&catid=6&m=0.
Gee, James P. ‘Video Games and Embodiment’. Games and Culture 3.3-4 (2008): 253-263.
Gordon, Mel. The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1987.
Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. 2nd edition. London: Addison-Wesley, 2013.
Martin, Paul. ‘Embodiment in Skateboarding Videogames’. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9.2 (2013): 315–327.
Rogers, Carl R. ‘Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being’. The Counseling Psychologist 5.2 (1975): 2-10.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Uplifting Publications, 2011. Kindle Edition.
Stanislavski, Constantin. My Life in Art. London: Methuen Drama, 1980.
Stanislavsky, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937. Poppy Wilde 149 ______
Tronstad, Ragnhild. ‘Character Identification in World of Warcraft: The Relationship between Capacity and Appearance’. Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, 249-263. London: MIT Press, 2011.
Whitlock, Katie. ‘Theatre and the Video Game: Beauty and the Beast’. PhD Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2004.
Whitlock, Katie. ‘Beyond Linear Narrative: Augusto Boal Enters Norrath’. Digital Gameplay, edited by Nate Garrelts, 189-207. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2005.
Poppy Wilde is a PhD student in the Department of Media at Coventry University and is co-organiser of the MeCCSA PGN Conference 2015. Her background is in performance studies and drama and her PhD project explores the lived experience of MMORPG gaming with particular focus on the gamer as one embodiment of posthuman subjectivity.
‘Gays are the New Jews’: Homophobic Representations in African Media versus Twitterverse Empathy
Charles King
Abstract In 2006 columnist Danny Miller stated in The Huffington Post that gays are the new Jews, and questioned whether it was his imagination or our ability to accept people who are different from ourselves that was plummeting to dangerous levels.1 ‘With all the misery that's going on in this world, I cannot understand why some people are so fixated on preventing loving people from committing to each other and receiving the legal protections that heterosexual couples enjoy.’2 The world since then has altered substantially, for better and worse. Meanwhile, studies on empathy in journalism maintain that although, historically, emotion has been generally considered inferior to reason, a single concept – empathy – serves as the principle for emotional development and decision making.3 Some philosophers employ empathy’s synonym, ‘sympathy’, instead, and assert that ‘through learning to empathize with other sentient creatures, human beings develop morally.’4 In this chapter I explore the relationship between homophobic representations in African mainstream news media and the resultant and unfettered Twitter representations of empathy directly in response to these acts of active homophobia. By examining the ways in which African mainstream media and Twitter users relate to this definition of empathy – compassionate modes of relating with others – I shed light on the role the Twitter[uni]verse plays in providing a voice to the marginalised, while simultaneously nurturing the development of emotion, thus empathy, in the Twitterverse’s constituents. My chapter suggests that Twitter – contrasted with examples of state-controlled African media – provides a platform for some of its users to make an ethical decision to retaliate against state-sanctioned homophobia and hatred, thus fulfilling the liberal pluralism media theory that the free exchange of ideas is crucial to a democracy’s health.5
Key Words: Empathy, African media, Twitter, homophobia, liberal pluralism, sympathy, gay, emotivism, ethics, compassion, the other, African journalism students.
*****
1. Defining Empathy In terms of defining empathy, I draw upon - out of respect for and fascination with the host country, and city, of the first Global Conference on Empathy - its most recognised writer, Milan Kundera, who set his best known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in Prague. This is how he defines empathy’s synonym, 'compassion', in the novel: 152 ‘Gays are the New Jews’ ______All languages that derive from Latin form the word 'compassion' by combining the prefix meaning 'with' (com-) and the root meaning 'suffering' (Late Latin, passio). In other languages - Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means 'feeling' [...]. In languages that derive from Latin, ‘compassion’ means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathise with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, 'pity' […], connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. ‘To take pity on a woman’ means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.6
Kundera continues:
That is why the word 'compassion' generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co- feeling) means not only to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, pain. This kind of compassion […] therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.7
Let us take it a step further, and link 'empathy' with 'ethical decision making', which I believe should set the tone for much that is still to unfold in this chapter.
2. Ethics and Empathy Studies on empathy in journalism, such as Sandra Davidson Scott in her ‘Beyond Reason: A Feminist Theory of Ethics for Journalists’, suggest that in ethical decision making, emotion can be superior to reason, although historically emotion has been generally considered inferior to reason. According to Scott a single concept serves the principle for emotional development and decision making – empathy. Some philosophers employ its synonym, ‘sympathy’, and assert that through learning to empathize with other sentient creatures, human beings develop morally.8 Charles King 153 ______Scott writes that ‘ethical questions can arise, for instance, from investigating news stories, deciding what stories should run, how they should be played, or what kind of pictures should accompany them’.9 Similarly, and more specifically, Lincoln Theo, in “Empathy in News Reporting”, points to the ethical decisions involved in reporting marginalised groups such as gays who are ‘the objects of stories subjected to homophobia’, which makes their representation and forms of acknowledgment as the objects of the stories an ethical question.10 Scott insists that ‘reporters and editors working under time pressure are in need of ethical guidance which abstract philosophical theory simply cannot provide’:
One theory of ethics that is more workable is emotivism. This theory stresses empathy, and it emphasises the importance of the emotional or emotive content of ethical decisions. Because of its acceptance of emotions, this theory runs counter to most traditional, male philosophy.11
I want to sit across from Sandra Scott for a while more, because she makes a heck of a lot of sense to me:
Historically, a failure to appreciate the value of emotions for ethical conduct has pretty much accompanied a failure to hear women and to appreciate the value of women. The following ‘logic’ has held far too much sway: Reason is superior to emotions, Men are rational, women are emotional. Therefore, men are superior to women. Stated in negative terms: Emotion is inferior to reason. Women are emotional, men are rational. Therefore, women are inferior to men. This perverted logic has harmed women, but it has also damaged ethical theory. The value of emotion as an ethical force has been denigrated […] Can an ethics of using moral imagination to empathise with others and to progress in moral depth also be an ethics through which reasonable people can reach agreement on what constitutes correct conduct? Yes, and more easily than going through the perambulations and rationalisations of reason.12
‘We must not deplete our ethical arsenal of the power of emotion. Too much faith in reason is unreasonable,’13 she insists.
3. Ethics and Empathy There are two objectives that I seek to achieve with the remainder of this chapter. The first is that I am seeking to explore the relationship between homophobic representations in African mainstream news media and the resultant 154 ‘Gays are the New Jews’ ______and unfettered twitter representations of empathy directly in response to these acts of active homophobia. The second comes at the end of the chapter in the manner of a spindly signpost pointing 'where-to-next', a place, perhaps a rabbit-hole, where I intend spiriting myself away, and about which I will have much more to tell you at the Empathy 2 conference in 2015? Back to my first aim: By examining the ways in which African mainstream media and Twitter users relate to definition of empathy as compassionate modes of relating with others, I expect to shed some light on the role the Twitterverse plays in providing a voice to the marginalised and voiceless, while simultaneously nurturing the development of emotion, thus empathy, in its constituents. From the start I am suggesting that Twitter – contrasted with the various levels of state-controlled media in 38 African countries (more about them shortly) – provides a platform for some of its users to make an ethical decision to retaliate against state-sanctioned homophobia and hatred, thus fulfilling the liberal pluralism media theory that the free exchange of ideas is crucial to a democracy’s health.14 In other words, when an ‘inversion’ has taken place (and I use the word ‘inversion’ purposefully), and The Media (I will not go into definitions of ‘the media’ here) does not fulfil its ‘ideal role within a healthy democracy’, in other words when unreasonable people reach an agreement on what constitutes so-called ‘correct conduct’ – such as in the case of the recent Ugandan tabloid The Red Pepper's front pager expose` of the country's ‘200 Top Gays’15 – the Twitterverse is able to step in, so-to-speak, and both fill/fulfil that space, hence the inversion. The Twitter Universe – with its myriad of complications and perambulations, especially as this platform is still far from being understood, or even properly misunderstood, or for that matter, fully appreciated (looking at the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and in 2013, developments in Turkey) – then fulfils ‘the ideal role of the media in a healthy democracy’.16 It is here that ‘reasonable people’17 have the opportunity to use moral imagination to empathise with others. The potential to use moral imagination to empathise with others exists in the Twitterverse because the Twitterverse also contains the kernel of opportunity for The Others’ plight to be made known, for their story to be told and heard, while simultaneously providing a platform for the other to be the teller of their own story. Unlike the state-sanctioned news media, Twitter is also a resource of assistance and support, as well as a source of information and knowledge, so that the other may retaliate publicly, especially as they are banished from the national media, the national agenda, except to be vilified. Thus, I believe, Twitter has an enormous potential to become a breeding ground of empathy. And that is because it contains all of the ingredients for a progression in ‘moral depth’18 to occur, as all of the seeds are there, which is ‘also an ethics through which reasonable people can reach agreement on what Charles King 155 ______constitutes correct conduct’,19 especially if 38 governments are getting the definition of ‘correct conduct’20 so wrong. On that note, briefly, regarding the national, or mass hysteria that sees the public 'burning of witches' at the stake, again, it intrigued me to hear the term ‘national empathy’ used at this the First International Conference on Empathy, because – as in the case of the 38 homophobic African countries that I'll touch upon shortly – this is a situation where nations publicly flaunt their ‘national antipathy’ or any of the antonyms for empathy: hostility, antagonism, animosity, aversion, distaste, hatred, abhorrence, loathing, repugnance, odium, or all of the above. Let us also never forget that what is so sanitised here in academic speak in an extremely comfortable conference in a safe venue, safe city, safe country, is a matter of life or death for many terrified people a mere few thousand kilometres south of where we are sitting. I am not excited about the fact that in 30 years’ time, at another conference in another city, we might be reflecting upon whether our children should or should not be visiting memorials to the hundreds of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and intersex (LGBTI) Africans who have died because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.
4. Context and Status Quo Amnesty International maintains that ‘the continued criminalization of consensual same-sex conduct in 38 African countries is a serious cause for concern … [and] violates a raft of international and regional human rights norms, and serves to marginalize one group of Africans based on their sexual orientation and gender identity alone’:21
The last decade has witnessed efforts in some sub-Saharan African countries to further criminalize LGBTI individuals by ostensibly targeting their behaviour, or to impose steeper penalties and broaden the scope of existing laws. Uganda has seen repeated attempts since 2009 to introduce the Anti- Homosexuality Bill – a bill which would seek to impose the death penalty for ‘aggravated’ homosexuality, [yes, you heard correctly, aggravated homosexuality] and which would criminalize anyone in Uganda who does not report violations of the bill’s wide-ranging provisions within 24 hours to authorities.22
South Sudan and Burundi are not far behind, while in 2011 and 2012, Nigeria and Liberia respectively introduced bills to toughen penalties for same-sex conduct. And Mauritania, northern regions of Nigeria, the southern region of Somalia and Sudan, retain the death penalty for the same.23 156 ‘Gays are the New Jews’ ______Back to the word ‘inversion’; in fact, to an entire litany of inversions. The term ‘inversion’, ‘implying a change in the position, order, or relationship of things so that they are the opposite of what they had been’24, is derived from Mr. Sigmund Freud, who ‘frequently called homosexuality an ‘inversion’, something which in his view was distinct from the necessarily pathological perversions, and suggested that several distinct kinds might exist’.25 However, the biggest inversion of all is that of the role of the media in so-called democracies. The role of the mainstream media in the likes of these countries, specifically Uganda, is inverted and thus fulfils the exact opposite role of what a healthy and vibrant media should be in a healthy democracy. Despite what Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe says, he has repeatedly claimed that Europe is trying to force gay rights on Africa: “What is natural is made unnatural. And what is unnatural they want to say it is natural […] Let Europe keep their homosexual nonsense there and not cross over with it here,’ he said, ‘Gays and lesbians are worse than pigs and dogs’.26 It’s not the homosexuals that are sick, but the so-called ‘democracies’ of these countries, and their mainstream news media. Some shock therapy is urgently required to rectify these steep class, sexuality and gender inequalities that engender state-sanctioned homophobia on the continent.27 Very briefly, these are some of the areas that the Twitterverse gets it right and the mainstream media of these nations do not, hence Twitter is not only an incubator for empathy, but it comes with its own pack of ‘empathy seeds’. That is already two goals scored for the Twitterverse, zero scored for the state-sanctioned African news media, which I term the ‘dominant’ media. In any democracy ‘it is arguable that comprehensive coverage of topics in public debate is an important ideal to uphold, as well as to uphold the principle of unlimited public debate, by which I mean that the diverse voices and positions of all strata of society, during debates, should be given unfettered space’.28 (Score update: Twitter 3 - Dominant Media 0). While the media is expected to represent diverse voices and positions in debates, it has been argued that sometimes - and in this case often - it is the voices of the elites and the issues of the elites that are represented.29 (Score update: Twitter 4 - Dominant Media 0). The mainstream media does not reflect these varied voices, but are used to reflect the agendas of the elite, of the ruling class. (Score update: Twitter 5 – Dominant Media 0). In other words, this is the ‘unreasonable people’30 reaching consensus, which is a consensus to be antipathetic. In other words, it is also political opportunism that contravenes human rights, as well as suppresses empathy for 'the other': For example, as Alexis Okeowo has pointed out, ‘[t]here is little question that Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, who is facing public disapproval over charges of inefficiency, corruption, and a badly fought war against Boko Haram Islamists waging a terror campaign in the north, seized the legislation as a popular, unifying distraction.’ Not to mention ‘the Charles King 157 ______[significant] influence of American right-wing Christians on the drafting of anti- gay bills on the continent’.31 Indeed, in a healthy and ‘dominant media’ there should be ‘vigorous debate and dispute over many issues,’32 as Herman and Chomsky readily acknowledge. They contend, however, that debate within the dominant media is limited to ‘responsible’ opinions acceptable to some segment of the elite. ‘On issues where the elite are in general consensus, the media will always toe the line. No dissent will then be countenanced, let alone acknowledged, except, when necessary for ridicule or derision.’33 There is no toeing the line in the Twitterverse, instead there are attempts at pulling, literally, the plug, as happened recently in Turkey (March 2014)34. Crucially, it is not that a national mind-set of antipathy will be changed by the vilifying and inverted mainstream media, but rather that the power to change opinion lies in the democratic Twitterverse, which, although also simultaneously contains homophobic and other instances of hatred, is at least balanced (unlike the mainstream state-sanctioned media) with a wide and disparate variety of opinions and debate.
5. Conclusion It is no coincidence that the current backlash against LBGT groups comes at a time when advances in rights for gay people – most prominently, the right to marry – are progressing apace in other parts of the world. To quote Charles Dickens in a different context, this is ‘the best of times and the worst of times’.35 But what breeds a homophobic climate is not just repressive religious interpretation and conservative politics. Homosexuality goes straight to the heart of gender and patriarchy36: ‘We are dealing with a crisis of patriarchy which didn’t arrive with colonialism.’37 Essential to the maintenance of patriarchy is the need to control bodies.38 It is clear that patriarchy, religion, nationalism and notions of ‘traditional’ African culture can combine into mutually-reinforcing systems of control which are toxic for African queer communities.39 All of these are the antithesis of empathy. So since I am one human being, what can I do? More than anything, by looking at my world, at my country and continent, through the lens of empathy, there are two things I feel compelled to do: humbly, as an African, going forward, I believe, firstly, that while it is appropriate under the circumstances to express ‘my disgust at the rising tide of homophobia sweeping the African continent’,40 on platforms like these, that I validate my need to grapple with teaching the concept of empathy to my students, the future African journalists. That while I undoubtedly need to teach my journalism students how to use Twitter (incidentally I believe it the most important journalistic tool to emerge in 158 ‘Gays are the New Jews’ ______decades) in 'Journalism 101', I also need to lead them into empathy, to teach them the concept of putting themselves in the shoes of the other. In fact, I discovered that I had been teaching empathy without realising it. In all of my classes, I have taught that for a journalist, or for any human being for that matter, to reach a space of compassion (read empathy), especially in the context of journalism, one needs to enter a space of self-consciousness. This is largely about loving yourself before being able to love others, which in turn entails acknowledging and questioning one's own prejudices, in fact interrogating them so as to understand their origins. Only then is it possible to move beyond them and into a liberated space of putting yourself into the shoes of others, consciously. This entails moving from internal prejudice to a listening and then questioning mode, so that one might competently tell the story of the other compassionately, and with empathy, thus, I believe, going about changing the world into a better place one empathetic mind-set at a time.
Notes
1 Danny Miller, ‘The Blog,’ HuffingtonPost.com (May 25, 2011), viewed on 17 December 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-miller/gays-are-the-new- jews_b_18378.html. Blog. 2 Miller, ‘The Blog.’ 3 Sandra Davidson Scott, ‘Beyond Reason: A Feminist Theory of Ethics for Journalists,’ Feminist Issues 13 (1993), 23. 4 Scott, ‘Beyond Reason,’ 24. 5 Tony Bennett, ‘Theories of the Media, Theories of Society,’ Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch (London: Methuen, 1982), 40. 6 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Croydon, UK: Faber and Faber, 1984), 18-19. 7 Ibid. 8 Scott, ‘Beyond Reason,’ 24. 9 Ibid. 10 Lincoln Theo, ‘Empathy in News Reporting: Framing Sexual Minorities in Sub- Saharan Africa,’ presented at the Inter-Disciplinary.net, First Global Conference on Empathy, Prague, Czech Republic, 7-9 November 2014. 11 Scott, ‘Beyond Reason,’ 23. 12 Ibid., 23-24. 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Tony Bennett, ‘Theories of the Media, Theories of Society,’ Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch (London: Methuen, 1982), 27. 15 Associated Press in Kampala, ‘Ugandan Tabloid Prints List of “Top 200 Homosexuals” in World News: Uganda’ in theguardian.com (25 February 2014), Charles King 159 ______http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/25/ugandan-tabloid-prints-list-top- 200-homosexuals. 16 Charles King, ‘Between Science, Politics and Human Rights: Media Coverage of the Blood Controversies’ (MA diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2012). 17 Scott, ‘Beyond Reason,’ 24. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Amnesty International, Making Love a Crime: Criminalization of Same-Sex Conduct in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: Amnesty International, 2013), 7, viewed 2 February 2015. https://doc.es.amnesty.org/cgi-bin/ai/BRSCGI/AFR0100113- 25161?CMD=VEROBJ&MLKOB=32469132929. 22 Amnesty, ‘Making Love a Crime,’ 7. 23 Ibid. 24 Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ‘Definition of Inversion,’ viewed 2 February 2015, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inversion. 25 Michael Peragine, ‘Reimagining History: The Turn of the Screw as a Dream, Henry James as the Dreamer, and Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism as a Means to Uncover Repressed Thoughts,’ Michael Peragine: Academic Essays and Short Fiction (30 June, 2014), viewed on 18 December 2014, http://michaelperagine.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/reimagining-history-the-turn-of- the-screw-as-a-dream-henry-james-as-the-dreamer-and-freudian-psychoanalytic- criticism-as-a-means-to-uncover-repressed-thoughts/. 26 ‘Mugabe Slams Europe's “Homosexual Nonsense,”' Mail and Guardian, 19 April 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-04-19-mugabe-slams-europes-homosexual- nonsense. 27 Charles King, ‘My 1000th Post Is Dedicated to Anti-Totalitarianism: Viva Ann Frank and the Velvet Revolution!’ Beautiful Mind (17 November 2014), viewed on 18 December 2014, http://btflmind.blogspot.com/2014/11/my-1000th-post-is- dedicated-to-anti.html. Blog. 28 King, ‘Between Science, Politics and Human Rights,’ 12. 29 Ibid. 30 Scott, ‘Beyond Reason,’ 24. 31 Alexis Okeowo, ‘Binyavanga Wainaina Comes Out,’ New Yorker (29 January 2014), viewed on 18 December 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page- turner/binyavanga-wainaina-comes-out. 32 King, ‘Between Science, Politics and Human Rights,’ 12. 33 Robert W. McChesney, ‘The Political Economy of the Mass Media’, Monthly Review (January, 1989), viewed on 18 December 2014. http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/198901--.htm. 160 ‘Gays are the New Jews’ ______
34 Kevin Rawlinson, ‘Turkey Blocks Use of Twitter after Prime Minister Attacks Social Media Site,’ The Guardian (21 March 2014), viewed on 18 December, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/21/turkey-blocks-twitter-prime- minister. 35 Rebecca Davis, ‘Queer in Africa: Confronting the Crisis,’ Daily Maverick (3 June, 2014), viewed on 18 December, 2014, http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-06-02-queer-in-africa-confronting- the-crisis/#.VJLXDtKUe-0. 36 Davis, ‘Queer in Africa’. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.
Bibliography
Amnesty International. ‘Making Love a Crime: Criminalization of Same-Sex Conduct in Sub-Saharan Africa.’ London: Amnesty International, 2013. Viewed on 17 December 2014. https://doc.es.amnesty.org/cgi-bin/ai/BRSCGI/AFR0100113- 25161?CMD=VEROBJ&MLKOB=32469132929.
Associated Press in Kampala. ‘Ugandan tabloid prints list of “top 200 homosexuals”’. World News: Uganda Section of theguardian.com (25 February 2014). Viewed on 17 December 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/25/ugandan-tabloid-prints-list-top- 200-homosexuals.
Bennett, Tony. ‘Theories of the Media, Theories of Society.’ Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch. London: Methuen, 1982.
Davis, Rebecca. ‘Queer in Africa: Confronting the crisis,’ (3 June, 2014). Viewed on 18 December, 2014. http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-06-02-queer-in-africa-confronting- the-crisis/#.VJLXDtKUe-0.
King, Charles. ‘Between Science, Politics and Human Rights: Media Coverage of the Blood Controversies’. MA Dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 2012.
Charles King 161 ______
King, Charles. ‘My 1000th Post is Dedicated to Anti-Totalitarianism: Viva Ann Frank and the Velvet Revolution!’ Beautiful Mind (17 November 2014). Viewed on 18 December 2014. http://btflmind.blogspot.com/2014/11/my-1000th-post-is-dedicated-to-anti.html. Blog.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Croydon, UK: Faber and Faber, 1984.
McChesney, Robert W. ‘The Political Economy of the Mass Media,’ Monthly Review (January, 1989). Viewed on 18 December 2014. http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/198901--.htm.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. ‘Definition of Inversion’. Viewed on 17 December 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inversion
Miller, Danny. ‘The Blog,’ HuffingtonPost.com (May 25, 2011). Viewed on 17 December 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-miller/gays-are-the-new- jews_b_18378.html. Blog.
Okeowo, Alexis. ‘Binyavanga Wainaina Comes Out,’ www.newyorker.com (29 January 2014). Viewed on 18 December 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/binyavanga-wainaina-comes-out.
Peragine, Michael. ‘Reimagining History: the Turn of the Screw as a Dream, Henry James as the Dreamer, and Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism as a Means to Uncover Repressed Thoughts.’ Michael Peragine: Academic Essays and Short Fiction (June 30, 2014). Viewed on 18 December 2014. http://michaelperagine.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/reimagining-history-the-turn-of- the-screw-as-a-dream-henry-james-as-the-dreamer-and-freudian-psychoanalytic- criticism-as-a-means-to-uncover-repressed-thoughts/. Blog.
Rawlinson, Kevin. ‘Turkey Blocks Use of Twitter after Prime Minister Attacks Social Media site,’ (21 March, 2014). Viewed on 18 December, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/21/turkey-blocks-twitter-prime- minister.
Scott, Sandra Davidson. ‘Beyond Reason: A Feminist Theory of Ethics for Journalists.’ Feminist Issues 13 (1993): 23-24.
162 ‘Gays are the New Jews’ ______
Charles King practiced as a freelance journalist for twenty two years. 2013 saw him make a foray into teaching journalism and media studies. At Cape Town’s Cape Peninsula University of Technology, he teaches advanced and specialised reporting, including how to report homophobia and climate change. Part V
Evidence-Based Empathy: Research Directions
The Horizons of Empathic Experience
Rebeccah Nelems
Abstract School-based empathy training programs have exploded across North America in the past decade. They emerge amidst the popularization of the view that empathy is an invaluable human asset that can be both taught and learned. They also appear amidst a spate of studies tracking a dramatic decline in empathy amongst North American youth, such as a recent study, which found that 75% of US college students are less empathetic than 30 years ago. In this context, empathy training has come to be viewed as an antidote to a range of societal ills, including violence and bullying. While growing in number, however, the effectiveness of the programs is largely unknown. Evaluations have been sparse and uneven, symptomatic of a vagueness within the education sector about what empathy is, and hence how to measure it. Where assessments have occurred, they have not been comparative in nature, and have failed to provide insights into the strengths, limitations and outcomes of distinct pedagogical approaches. This chapter critically explores two different stories about empathy in the classroom. The divergent outcomes of these tales suggest that not all empathy training – or empathy – is equal. In particular, the chapter examines how certain worldviews, when taken for granted in pedagogical frameworks, may serve to decontextualize moral issues, and lead to ‘passive empathy’ or empathy based on fear for the ‘Self’ rather than care for the ‘Other’. Integrating sociological and phenomenological lenses of analyses, this chapter explores whether the contexts and pedagogical approaches within which empathy is taught can establish epistemic boundaries that can frame both students’ affective experiences and cognitive understanding of empathy. The chapter then argues that popular, critical reflection and debate about empathy is not only essential to the design of effective empathy programs, it could be vital to the future of humanity and the planet.
Key Words: Empathy education, pedagogy, evaluation, phenomenology, sociology, experiential hegemony.
*****
1. Setting the Stage Let me tell you two stories. The first is set in California, where Canadian educator Megan Boler is delivering empathy training to college students using MAUS, a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about his father’s survival of the Holocaust. While semi-autobiographical, the characters are depicted as animals – the Nazis are cats and the Jewish people are mice. 166 The Horizons of Empathic Experience ______The students enjoyed and felt enlightened by the class. They came to feel that they truly felt what it is like to stand in the shoes of the Holocaust survivor. They further noted that MAUS:
…addresses the horrors that occurred without making the reader feel as though she or he has been bombarded by feelings of rage or guilt…the reader does not feel that blame and pity is being forced onto himself or herself....1
Part of the participants’ enjoyment was thus their ability to stay in their comfort zone and in control over what they felt. Boler deems the exercise an abysmal failure. She believes that students felt ‘exonerated and redeemed’ by the experience and she takes issue with their easy identification, stating their reading did not:
engage them in an encounter with strangeness, with the uncanny; did not throw into question what they felt they knew. The readers experienced an untroubled identification that did not create estrangement or unfamiliarity…[their experience] allowed them familiarity, ‘insight’, and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences…and…a cathartic, innocent, and…voyeuristic sense of closure.2
The second story takes place in 2009 in New Orleans, where I evaluated a school-based psychosocial program for some of the most vulnerable youth in New Orleans. Most participants were perpetrators or victims of daily violence in their schools, communities or homes. Even four years after Hurricane Katrina, the natural disaster's devastation on their lives and communities was still palpable, indicating a lack of resources, care, and supports for young people. The outcomes of the program were astounding. Despite the program’s short length, almost all of the participants shifted from self-oriented behaviour to engaging in other-oriented or pro-social behaviour – though nothing else in their lives and contexts had changed. Caregivers, teachers and other community members noted changes in the classroom, at home and on the streets. Gang leaders became peace-builders that were actively intervening to ensure and support the wellbeing of other youth around them. When asked what about the program made the difference for them, youth identified it was experiencing care and connection from and for an ‘Other’ for the first time. They explained this as feeling care for the other participants beyond care for themselves. One student commented on having realized the effect that their actions had on others around them. Most of them spoke of having a newfound respect for ‘Others’ – recognizing that you never know what others are going Rebeccah Nelems 167 ______through, and that once you get to know them, ‘Others’ are not the stereotypes you thought they were. They described feeling ‘connected’ and what they described was a community of care, which they then went out and helped create in the other spaces of their lives – their homes, their schools, their neighbourhoods. What happened in these two stories? How can we understand and explain the difference in these two stories? This chapter critically examines these two stories by posing the following three questions:
• How do we make sense of the divergent outcomes of these two stories? • What are the implications for educators? • Why are these stories relevant to society?
2. Making Sense of Different Educational Outcomes In analysing what happened in her California classroom, Boler proposes an empathy typology that is useful to this analysis: ‘passive’ and ‘transformative’ empathy. She claims that what her students experienced was ‘passive empathy’, which she describes as the belief that one can truly experience what it is like to stand in someone else’s shoes all without ever leaving one’s own comfortable armchair. It is a low-risk engagement enacted through the choice of the Self to imagine what it might be like to be in an Other’s situation. As such, it relies on the projection of the Self, its fears, worldviews and accompanying assumptions onto the Other – a version of Aristotle’s notion of pity in which one imagines what it would feel like if they experienced or went through the same thing. It is thus defined by a lack of self-reflection which puts at stake ‘not only the ability to empathize with the very distant other, but to recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront.’3 The effect of passive empathy is that the Other effectively disappears – consumed and absorbed into the Self:
Empathetic identification requires the other’s difference in order to consume it as sameness. The irony of identification is that the built-in consumption annihilates the other who is simultaneously required for our very existence.4
In contrast, the goal of ‘transformative empathy’ is not to stand in an Other’s shoes, but rather to recognize that the Other will always retain a degree of impenetrability and incomprehensibility. Transformative empathy is not projecting one’s own worldview and assumptions onto another through identification, but necessitates an openness and willingness to be self-reflective and critically examine one’s own assumptions, worldviews and beliefs so that one might encounter an ‘Other’ with their own distinct worldviews and beliefs. It is risky and 168 The Horizons of Empathic Experience ______potentially destabilizing in so far as the experience may reveal ways in which one (or the beliefs or institutions in which they participate) are ‘implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront’.5 It is dangerous to the Self in so far as it may be transformation in unanticipated ways and invites action.
Table 1: ‘Passive’ vs. ‘Transformative’ Empathy
Passive Empathy Transformative Empathy • Belief that one can stand in an • Belief that the one can never stand Other’s shoes and that this is in an Other’s shoes. morally good. • Requires self-reflection and critical • Invokes Aristotelian notion of pity awareness of one’s own and fear for the Self (‘that could assumptions, worldviews and happen to me’). beliefs. • Empathizer projects their own • Entails risk and unfamiliarity experiences and assumptions onto • Focus on listening to and hearing the Other’s experience. the Other in their own terms. • The Self stays in control and • Opens up the possibility of decides with whom and when to empathizing with the very distant empathize. Other. • Does not entail self-reflection. • Invites action and transformation • Produces no action towards justice. of the Self. • Enables a sense of closure. • Refuses closure.
In short, while passive empathy is based on the unexamined assumption that I can stand in an Other’s shoes, transformative empathy is rooted in the belief that one can never truly imagine or know what it is like to be an Other. In this way, the capacity for critical thinking is central to this notion of transformative empathy, and central to what Boler identifies as her goal as a teacher of empathy:
As an educator I understand my role to be not merely to teach critical thinking, but to teach a critical thinking that seeks to transform consciousness in such a way that a Holocaust could never happen again.6
So if students in the California classroom experienced passive empathy, did the New Orleans students experience transformative empathy? I think so. In this program, students started with an identification and exploration of the emotions they were feeling and experiencing. However, they did not leave it there. They then spent a great deal of time exploring how these emotions related to their contexts, beliefs, assumptions and experiences – all of which they shared with one another Rebeccah Nelems 169 ______through testimony, role play and other interactive games. In this process, they encountered one another as Others who were never subsumed into their own frameworks. If anything, they commented on having stopped projecting onto one another assumptions and beliefs about who the Other was. The Other became increasingly humanized as they became more complex. Finally, the shift from gang leader to peace-builder also speaks to a significant transformation of the participants.
3. Implications for Educators What are the implications of these stories for educators? While Boler’s typology is a helpful way to interpret potential outcomes of empathy training, it does not adequately explain why these outcomes were divergent or what this means for educators. First, it becomes clear that it is not enough to ‘teach empathy’. There is a need for much greater specificity about what is meant by empathy and how to measure it. Empathy education has been on the rise in Canada, with four out of ten provinces and the Assembly of First Nations endorsing empathy fostering programs within the formal education system.7 Its growing prominence in school curricula emerges as a spate of studies show positive correlations between empathy and other socially desirable traits, such as leadership8 and conflict resolution skills.9 It also emerges amidst alarming statistics about declining empathy amongst North American youth, such as a recent study, which found that 75% of US college students are less empathetic than 30 years ago, with the most dramatic decline in the last 10 years.10 These statistics are accompanied by persistently high rates of violence and bullying within schools, which are commonly viewed as indicators of a lack of empathy. Canada, for example, holds the sixth highest ranking in the world for the bullying of boys.11 In light of the thinking that empathy can be both taught and learned, it is not surprising that empathy education has become a ‘go-to’ to address a wide range of ills in Canada – including high bullying rates. However, while there is widespread consensus that teaching empathy is a social good, what is meant by empathy in the education sector remains vague, undefined and assumed. The numerous empathy- fostering programs in Canada reference empathy as if it is a shared, already- understood concept, without elaborating or explaining its moral basis or how it works. A review of program evaluations shows that empathy is, by default, defined in terms of the specific goals of these programs. In so far as teaching, empathy is seen as unquestionably good; it has become an unquestioned good. A second related issue is that at the end of the day, however one defines empathy, it is clear that empathy education often implicitly aims to foster transformative empathy amongst students – care for Others and the world that is not premised on care for the Self – such as what happened in the New Orleans 170 The Horizons of Empathic Experience ______story. My interest in Boler’s story is that it tells a tale in which the failure to question or become aware of one’s worldviews or phenomenological horizons – along with the immersion in an individualist, consumerist worldview – decontextualized moral issues and impeded the possibility of transformative empathy. While Boler laid blame for this on the pedagogical mode or content – literature vs. testimony – from a phenomenological and sociological perspective, it is not the pedagogical content that shapes the empathic experience. Rather, it is the sociological worldview or phenomenological horizon within which student and teacher are immersed that establishes the parameters of their empathic experience. For Berger and Luckmann, worldviews or horizons are the canopies of norms and meaning under and within which people organize their lives and make sense of their experiences.12 These canopies are naturalized in society, experienced as ‘how things are’ and their principles hegemonically reconstitute the self through establishing the ‘cognitive grounds and experiential terrains’ upon which the individual understands herself.13 Vahabzadeh refers to the individual’s experience of these canopies as ‘experiential hegemony’ in so far as it is not only commonsensical and taken for granted, but is consented to14. However, in so far as our unquestioned acceptance of a naturalized worldview conceals its social constructedness, it places epistemic boundaries that not only frame our affective experiences but which also frame our cognitive understanding of those experiences. The belief that through feeling and/or thinking, one can truly experience what it is like to stand in another’s shoes, and assume that this is unquestionably desirable and good –– reflects an immersion in and total unquestioning of an individualist and consumerist horizon. In this horizon, the individual is paramount and free, and remains the ‘ultimate referent’15 (albeit an unacknowledged one) for assessing the Other’s experience. Further, the concept of ‘transformative empathy’ is remarkably parallel to the radical phenomenological concept of ‘stepping back’, which is the act of reflecting on the artifice of the naturalized worldview or horizon, and the assumptions, values, roles and patterns of behaviour that this horizon institutionalizes. The concept of ‘transformative empathy’ refuses closure and any claims to full knowledge that are characteristic of a phenomenological attitude. This invites us to consider empathy as the performative act of phenomenologically stepping back from ourselves in order to both become aware of our own naturalized horizons as well as to try and catch a glimpse of the Other and their distinctive horizon. Moreover, it might be that the epistemic boundaries of an individualist and consumerist worldview – if not reflected upon – invite an experience of ‘passive empathy’, dehumanization and an inability to empathize in a transformative way. Berger and Luckmann argue that we always typify the Other at least to some small degree (even if it is slight as saying my friend is British). However, there is a continuum, and the other’s identity becomes reified when one is apprehended ‘as Rebeccah Nelems 171 ______nothing but that type.’16 Once fully typified, there is no part of the other that can exist outside of the Self; the Other has been fully subsumed into the horizon of the Self. In this moment, the Other is dehumanized. This is why the Other disappears in Boler’s classroom. This is why the Other became fully humanized for the New Orleans students. If the educator strives to teach ‘transformative empathy’ as Boler describes, empathy education must start with supporting students to examine the contours of one’s own horizon – their assumptions, beliefs and values – and that of the dominant society or culture around them – before they approach the Other. In other words, empathy is the process of examining one’s own shoes and where they are located in relation to an Other’s, in order to try to hear, see and understand the Other in their own terms. Empathy education with the goal of transformative empathy must thus strive to go beyond imagination, perspective-taking and identification. Understanding empathy to be ‘a primary condition of human intersubjectivity,’ Shertz states that empathic pedagogy ‘requires an environment that supports dialogically-based inductive interactions and peer-mediated, intersubjective gestalts.’17 Kennedy writes that through dialogue, ‘we enter into the experience of lived difference—we no longer operate from the position of the boundaried, thematizing subject…[and] there is a decentring of the transcendental ego.’18
4. Conclusion and Broader Implications Without setting out to explicitly do so, the New Orleans program achieved what I think every empathy education program hopes to achieve. But without clarifying what this is, and the moral horizon in which it is situated, the risk is that something quite different might be achieved. In Sources of the Self, Canadian theorist Charles Taylor observes a reticence in modern society to identify and articulate the moral frameworks and horizons of the social goods it promotes. Unearthing potentially incompatible moral frameworks could threaten the narrative of a peaceful multicultural society founded in recognition and tolerance. It is in the context of this problematic that I approach the study of empathy as an increasingly popular social ‘good’ in North American and Canadian society. The contemporary preoccupation with empathy at this particular juncture of time in North America could indicate an increase in empathy or care for the Other generally at a civilizational level, as Jeremy Rifkin contends. But it could also indicate the persistence or rise of a Self-oriented worldview or horizon. At a time when environmental, social, political, and economic crises show us how inextricably intertwined we all are, concern about the world and Others around us can also be consistent with a horizon in which concern and protection for the Self is paramount. There is also the question of what all the ‘buzz’ about empathy deflect us away from. As Boler herself asks, does the Other even want our empathy? Might they not want justice instead?19 172 The Horizons of Empathic Experience ______As the speakers on the first panel put forward, it is possible for us to develop greater understanding of Others, without this being accompanied by care towards them. And if this is the case, I think we are in serious trouble. For while people may be able to act civilly towards others relatively easily during times of abundance and peace, without having to genuinely care, this will likely not be possible during times of scarcity and crisis, such as occurred in New Orleans. In the latter scenario, tolerance and recognition of ourselves or the Other will never be enough. As Boler writes:
As we hear about and witness horrors, what calls for recognition is not ‘me’ and the possibility of my misfortune, but a recognition of power relations that defines the interaction between reader and text and the conflicts represented within a text.20
Transformative empathy and care for the Other that is not based on fear for the Self requires us to try to engage with, understand, and feel for an Other precisely by stepping away from, and critically looking back at, ourselves and the many systems, institutions and social relations within which both the Self and Other are located. Current popular conceptualizations of empathy do not necessarily encourage or foster this approach. In the face of an unprecedented number of challenges facing us in the coming decades, I believe it is critical that conceptions of empathy be cracked open – and then cracked open again – for ongoing public reflection and debate, which is why conferences such as this are so timely and vital.
Notes
1 Megan Boler, Feeling Power (London: Routledge, 1999), 260. 2 Ibid., 169. 3 Ibid., 159. 4 Ibid., 160. 5 Ibid., 159. 6 Ibid., 157. 7 Mary Gordon, Roots of Empathy (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2005). 8 E. I. Mostovicz, N. K. Kakabadse and A. P. Kakabadse, ‘A Dynamic Theory of Leadership Development’, Leadership & Organization Development Journal 30:6 (2009), 563–576; N. L. P. Stedman and A. C. Andenoro, ‘Identification of Relationships between Emotional Intelligence Skill & Critical Thinking Disposition in Undergraduate Leadership Students’, Journal of Leadership Education 6:1 (2007), 192-220.
Rebeccah Nelems 173 ______
9 L. S. Greenberg, et al., ‘Empathy’, Psychotherapy 38.4 (2001), 380-384. 10 S. H. Konrath, E. H. O'Brien, and C. Hsing, ‘Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 15.2 (2011): 180-198. 11 W. M. Craig, et al., ‘Are Bullying and Victimization on the Rise in Canada?’ (Kingston: Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Canadian Public Health Association Conference, June 2012). 12 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). 13 Peyman Vahabzadeh, Articulated Experiences: Toward A Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 65. 14 Ibid., 97. 15 Peyman Vahabzadeh. ‘Ultimate Referentiality: Radical Phenomenology and the New Interpretive Sociology’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 35.4 (2009): 447-65. 16 Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 91. 17 Matthew Schertz, ‘Avoiding “Passive Empathy” with Philosophy for Children’, Journal of Moral Education 36.2 (2007), 191. 18 D. Kennedy, ‘Philosophy for Children and the Reconstruction of Philosophy’, Metaphilosophy 30.4 (1999), 340. 19 Boler, Feeling Power, 157. 20 Ibid., 262.
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Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: Penguin Group, 2009.
Schertz, Matthew. ‘Avoiding “Passive Empathy” with Philosophy for Children’. Journal of Moral Education 36.2 (2007): 185-198.
Spiegelman, Art. MAUS. New York: Random House, 1973.
Stedman, N. L. P., and A. C. Andenoro. ‘Identification of Relationships between Emotional Intelligence Skill & Critical Thinking Disposition in Undergraduate Leadership Students’. Journal of Leadership Education 6.1 (2007): 192-220.
Vahabzadeh, Peyman. ‘Ultimate Referentiality: Radical Phenomenology and the New Interpretive Sociology’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 35.4 (2009): 447-65.
Vahabzadeh, Peyman. Articulated Experiences: Toward A Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Weir, E. ‘Preventing Violence in Youth’. Canadian Medical Association Journal 172:10 (2005): 1291-1292.
Rebeccah Nelems 175 ______
Rebeccah Nelems is an Associate with the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD), a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow and a Doctoral student in Sociology and Cultural, Social & Political Thought (CSPT) at the University of Victoria (UVic), Canada. Her work draws on her interdisciplinary academic background and 15+ years’ professional experience managing, evaluating and building the capacity of non-governmental, research, government and UN agencies working in the human and children’s rights, international and community development sectors.
Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking
Camilla Pagani
Abstract Psychological science has not yet sufficiently examined the association between empathy and complex thinking among young people. Such a thorough examination would contribute not only to enriching the various conceptualizations both of empathy and complex thinking, but also to providing educators with new scientific tools enabling them to perform their educational role with greater competence. It is self-evident that the conceptualizations of empathy include most of the components of the conceptualizations of complex thinking (e.g., multiple perspective-taking, creativity, self-awareness, the acceptance of uncertainty and incompleteness, the ceaseless involvement in a constructive relationship with diversity). The relation between complex thinking and empathy, especially emotional empathy, is here examined within the context of youth’s relationship with cultural diversity and through the analysis of some extracts from anonymous open-ended essays written at school by 79 pupils (41 F and 38 M) aged 14-18, where they expressed their attitudes towards multiculturalism in present Italian society. In particular, this study should contribute to helping educators understand the importance of fostering the development of high levels of youth’s complex thinking so as to strengthen their capability of building a non-prejudiced, more autonomous, and complex outlook on their relationship with cultural diversity and diversity tout court.
Key Words: Empathy, complex thinking, emotions, cultural diversity, education.
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1. Introduction
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read and things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.1
The complexity of human mind, which Italo Calvino so vividly represents, probably reaches one of its most refined expressions in the empathic experience. By definition empathy is a complex process. It is a fact that in this process: a) cognitive empathy and empathic emotions in various ways interact;2 b) the empathic observer experiences a sort of identification with the other, while at the 178 Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking ______same time maintaining her/his identity, and, consequently, the self-other differentiation.3 By complex thinking I mean a combination of cognitive and emotional processes through which individuals try to understand themselves, the others, the world and in general all the aspects of reality they may be interested in.4 Among the most significant cognitive and emotional processes involved in complex thinking are: awareness of the complexity of one’s emotions and thoughts, multiple perspective-taking, creativity, continuous and endless openness to new dimensions and realities, the acceptance of uncertainty, of incompleteness and even of contradiction, the ceaseless involvement in a constructive relationship with diversity, and the coexistence of the sense of unity and multiplicity in a constant effort towards integration.5 By empathy I mean a situation-specific affective and cognitive state in which an individual understands, feels and is moved by another person’s inner experience.6 Finally, when we say that in the empathic experience cognitive empathy and empathic emotions in various ways interact, we mean that in the interaction between intellectual empathy and empathic emotions the degree and the role of these two components can vary depending on the characteristics of the situation as a whole. I will examine the issue which is the object of this chapter in the context of my research studies on youth’s relationship with cultural diversity. My considerations will be developed through the analysis of some extracts from anonymous open- ended essays recently written by Italian adolescents attending secondary school, where they expressed their attitudes towards multiculturalism in present Italian society.
2. Emotional Complexity By emotional complexity I mean not only the quantity of emotions that pertain to a person’s conceptual system, but also the individual and intra-individual variations in the experience, and thus in the conceptualization of a specific emotion.7 To put it in other words, we can also define emotional complexity, as suggested by Kang and Shaver, as having emotional experiences that are ‘broad in range and well differentiated’.8 Lindquist and Barrett especially focus on two aspects of emotional complexity, namely dialecticism and granularity. Dialecticism is related to the experience of positive and negative emotional states (e.g., pleasantness and unpleasantness) ‘in a coincidental or temporarily related fashion’.9 This means that, in our case, we can evaluate the level of dialecticism in participants’ simultaneous or almost simultaneous experiences of positive and negative emotions as they are described in their essays. However, I would move further on with respect to Lindquist and Barrett’s indications and suggest that Camilla Pagani 179 ______dialecticism should also presuppose participants', at least partial, awareness of their antithetical emotions. By emotion granularity we mean the precision and accuracy with which individuals represent and report their emotional experiences.10 Some individuals can clearly distinguish different emotional experiences and can use precise emotion adjectives to describe them, whilst others represent their emotions in more general and broader terms.
3. Methodology The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between complex thinking and empathic attitude especially through the analysis of the implicit meaning of texts written by secondary school pupils. 11 The implicit meaning of a text, which is the real meaning, is the result of many components (including its factual content), a number of which are more related to the formal characteristics of the structure of the text itself ,12 while others are more related to the characteristics of its content. We identified some of these characteristics and we evaluated the level of their presence in the texts. In particular, we considered coherence, honesty, concreteness,13 multiple perspective- taking, and creativity. By coherence we mean the extent to which the concepts and the experiences presented in a text are sufficiently integrated. Honesty refers to participants’ disposition and motivation to express their views and feelings openly and truly.14 Concreteness indicates if and how much, participants support their argumentations by referring to precise direct or indirect experiences. Multiple perspective-taking is related to the awareness of the complexity of the issue at stake and of the impossibility of not considering other perspectives beyond one’s own. Finally, creativity is a quality that characterizes a novel and original content, as well as a style that unites linguistic correctness and originality. We analysed 79 open-ended essays anonymously written in 4 classes by 79 secondary school pupils (41 F and 38 M) aged 14-18, who were invited to express their attitudes towards multiculturalism in Italian society.
4. Results Here, some extracts from participants’ essays will be analysed. These are the first lines of a text, written by a 16-year-old-boy:15
Well, unfortunately this is a very difficult topic. I would start by saying that I think that accepting all these people in a country like Italy is unfair. This is because by accepting so many people in our country, we are losing our identity as Italians. 16
180 Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking ______In their considerations on complexity in social organizations, referring to George Soros,17 Tsoukas and Hatch relate the ability to generate ‘more inequivalent descriptions of a situation’ to complexity.18 Undoubtedly, the concept of inequivalence is reminiscent of creativity, one of the constituents of complex thinking mentioned above and one of the categories we used in the analysis of participants’ texts. More specifically, in this study the ‘situation’ is constituted by pupils’ attitudes to and views on multiculturalism, and ‘inequivalent’ can be paraphrased as ‘unexpected’, ‘novel’, ‘original’, ‘resulting from a personal and rich elaboration, so as to be distinguishable from other descriptions of the same “situation”’. In the 16-year-old boy’s short paragraph it appears that only the first sentence can be in part somewhat labelled as ‘inequivalent’ or ‘unexpected’. The boy uses a dialogical style (‘Well, [...]’), as if he were talking to the researchers, and expresses a seemingly sincere concern. However, it is not sufficiently clear whether he is concerned about the ‘difficulty’ of the issue per se – multiculturalism -, which he identifies with immigration tout court, or about the difficulty of the assignment or both. So, even in this first line (‘Well, unfortunately this is a very difficult topic.’), where his style is more direct and his attitude apparently more honest, the boy has not been able to express his view and his emotions unequivocally. Another element that does not give much evidence of originality is the fact that from the first sentence of the essay, apparently in an almost automatic fashion, and in the wake of the opinions frequently expressed by the media and the Establishment, the boy identifies the issue of multiculturalism with the problems of immigration. Besides, he implicitly and explicitly represents this phenomenon as an ‘invasion’. No other perspective or possibility is even theoretically taken into consideration. The second sentence of the paragraph (‘I would start by saying that I think that accepting all these people in a country like Italy is unfair.’) introduces us more deeply into the boy’s emotional experience with respect to multiculturalism. If for him multiculturalism is nothing but immigration and immigration is regarded as an invasion, it follows that the first fundamental emotion that he experiences is fear. Fear is produced by a perception of threat. In the first two sentences the threat is ‘numerical’ (‘all these people’ and ‘so many people’). Here, we are concretely put in touch with a frequent prejudice, the idea that in the very near future or even in the present time in Italy there will be or there are more immigrants than Italians. This is a kind of unjustified fear,19 as it is not grounded in real, concrete and verifiable circumstances. In the third sentence the boy’s fear becomes more circumstantiated: it is the fear of losing his identity, given the purported ‘invasion’ of ‘hordes’ of immigrants. In a previous study we identified ‘fear of losing their identity’, together with ‘fear of losing their own safety and welfare’ and ‘fear of losing other people’s affection’20 as youth’s three fundamental fears related to their relationship with culturally diverse people. Camilla Pagani 181 ______It is interesting to point out that in the course of his ethnographic fieldwork with neo-Nazi and Klan leaders and followers, Ezekiel repeatedly sensed that these youth were ‘fearful at the core’.21 It is clear that this boy’s fear is also based on a simplistic and distorted conceptualization of identity, which coincides with the idea of belonging to a nation. In the same way, in the neo-Nazi and Klan youths studied by Ezekiel, identity coincided with belonging to a presumed race, considered as a real entity, as a ‘biological category with absolute boundaries’.22 The boy’s simplistic and partly distorted conceptualization of identity and, above all, his scarce awareness of the constituents of his experience of fear, fuel an angry resentment against immigrants and produce a transformation in his mental representation of them. This transformation can be clearly tracked in the sentences below:
Then the most important question is: what do all these immigrants want? Do they want a job? Do they want money? Do they want to live in peace? Or rather, they want our jobs? They want our money? And steal our peace earned throughout centuries of wars and of our ancestors’ efforts? 23
From apparently honest people who arrive in a country because they are needy and want to work, immigrants become malignant people, who come here on purpose to steal Italians’ jobs, money, and presumed peace. Empathy is obscured and thwarted by distorted cognitive simplifications and by an inefficient and limited control and management of emotional experiences. Morin referred to the result of this process as a mutilation of thought and underlined the role of complex thinking as a force capable of countervailing it:
Complexity is situated at a point of departure for a richer, less mutilating action. I strongly believe that the less a thought is mutilating, the less it will mutilate human beings. We must remember the ravages that simplifying visions have caused, not only in the intellectual world, but in life. Much of the suffering of millions of beings results from the effects of fragmented and one-dimensional thought.24
Interestingly, also Ezekiel describes the world of neo-Nazi and Klan leaders and followers as ‘impoverished of half the range of human feeling and thought – like the army, like prison’,25 characterized as it is by ‘spiritual poverty’.26 Instead, no rage nor fear are expressed in an essay written by a 14-year-old boy where he concretely, sharply, and tightly focuses on a dialectic representation of the change of his emotions in the course of time regarding multiculturalism. 182 Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking ______Emotional complexity and emotional granularity characterize his views. He also focuses on his ‘complex’ definition of ‘stranger’ and, consequentially, on a ‘complex’ concept of identity. Presently the boy is living in Rome:
As I came from a little town, I was scared and intrigued by a multi-ethnic city. I was scared by the rumours on immigrants and intrigued by the many cultures I was coming across. As I started living here I found out that the rumours were all wrong, instead the opposite was true. […] As I was born in a big city and then moved to a little town, the people there saw me as a stranger27 but then, as I came here people coming from other states became the strangers, I can say that the definition of stranger depends on the perspective from which someone sees the situation so I cannot express a real opinion on this subject. 28
It appears that this participant has autonomously developed his views and attitudes regarding multiculturalism. The style he uses is direct, concrete, and personal. He is observing himself and the changes that have taken place in his perspectives. The term ‘rumours’ is obviously connected with stereotypes and prejudices, which he discarded in the end through a direct contact with a multicultural reality. This reality is considered in its complexity and no simplistic and Manichaean language representing multiculturalism in a dichotomous way (e.g., good/bad, honest/criminal, referring either to immigrants or to Italians) is used.29 He accepts uncertainty and the possibility of new future developments in social contexts and in people’s attitudes towards them. We can see here how complex thinking is closely connected with a mature and constructive relationship with cultural diversity and a positive and interested attitude towards immigrants.
5. Discussion: Complex Thinking, Emotional Complexity, and Empathic Concern The extract from the 14-year-old boy’s essay indicates a positive connection between complex thinking and a deep interest in culturally diverse people. And deep interest, which usually implies the presence of complex emotions, can certainly be considered to be an important step towards empathy. Indeed, also research findings30 demonstrate that individuals with high emotional complexity are more aware of their feelings and thoughts, are more open to experience, are more cognitively complex, are more empathically involved in others’ feelings, show a higher level of ego development, and are better at interpersonal interactions. Hence, it appears that emotional complexity, complex thinking, and empathic concern are interrelated. Camilla Pagani 183 ______All this brings us back to Morin’s considerations on the complexity of a human being. In a style that re-echoes Calvino’s quotation at the beginning of this chapter, Morin appeals to literature, in this case to the novel, as a source of complexity:
The novel shows us that the most ordinary of lives is, in fact, a life in which everyone plays several social roles, depending on whether she or he is at home, at work, with friends, or with strangers. We see that each being has a multiplicity of identities, a multiplicity of personalities in the self, a world of fantasies and dreams accompanying life. For example, the theme of the internal monologue, so powerful in Faulkner’s writing, is itself a part of this complexity. This inner speech, this constant talk, is revealed by literature, by the novel, which at the same time also reveals to us how little one knows oneself […]. We know ourselves only as an appearance of self. We are mistaken about our selves. 31
One of the most frequent examples in our data of insufficient knowledge of oneself is provided by those youth who are not aware of their contradictory views regarding cultural diversity. For instance, some participants clearly expressed two contradictory views about immigrants in the same essay: one view is deeply hostile when immigrants in general are considered, the other is benign, positive, often empathetic when it has to do with specific immigrants whom participants know well.
6. Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Research Work As a matter of fact, we could envisage other forms of empathic communication beyond those that are usually considered. Indeed, youth’s empathic abilities can be further enhanced also through interaction with other forms of diversity. Suffice it here to mention the ever-increasing tendency to deeply and affectionately interact with animals and, in many cases, with nature in general as well.32 For instance, a deep and affectionate interaction with ‘animality’ has an enormous potential to broaden the borders, and thus the ‘complexity’ of the conceptualizations regarding the so-called ‘human nature’, in particular human thinking and human empathy. In this context, ‘animality’ should not be considered as a primitive dimension, as the point of arrival of a retrocession and of a regression, but as a dimension at the side of ‘humanity’, on the same level, equally important, and enriching.33 These considerations bring us back to Calvino, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who beautifully clarifies this perspective in a true literary style:
[…] perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work 184 Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking ______conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…..
Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself with that nature common to each and everything?34
The object of this aim certainly represents the highest, most complex, and most ethical condition of a human being. This preliminary study on the connections between empathy and complex thinking among young people could help educators understand the importance of fostering the development of high levels of youth’s complex thinking. This way, young people would be more capable of building a more mature, complex, and autonomous relationship with cultural diversity and with diversity tout court.
Notes
1 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Penguin, 2009), 124. 2 See for example, Changming Duan, and Clara E. Hill, ‘The Current State of Empathy Research,’ Journal of Counseling Psychology 43 (1996): 261-274. 3 See, for instance, Maria Miceli, Alessandro Mancini, and Palma Menna, ‘The Art of Comforting,’ New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009): 343-361. 4 See Flavia Cangià, and Camilla Pagani, ‘Youths, Cultural Diversity, and Complex Thinking,’ The Open Psychology Journal 7 (2014): 20-28. 5 See, for example, Flavia Cangià, and Camilla Pagani, ‘Youths, Cultural Diversity, and Complex Thinking,’ The Open Psychology Journal 7 (2014): 20-28; Sun-Mee Kang, and Phillip R. Shaver, ‘Individual Differences in Emotional Complexity: Their Psychological Implications,’ Journal of Personality 72 (2004): 687-726; Kristen A. Lindquist, and Lisa F. Barrett, ‘Emotional Complexity,’ Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa F. Barrett (New York: The Guildford Press, 2008), 513-530; Edgar Morin, On Complexity (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2008). 6 For example, Changming Duan, and Clara E. Hill, ‘The Current State of Empathy Research,’ Journal of Counselling Psychology 43 (1996): 261-274; Maria Miceli, Alessandro Mancini, and Palma Menna, ‘The Art of Comforting,’ New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009): 343-361; Gert-Jan Vreeke, and Ingrid L. van der Mark, ‘Empathy, an Integrative Model,’ New Ideas in Psychology 21 (2003): 177-207. Camilla Pagani 185 ______
7 See, for instance, Lisa F. Barrett, ‘Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion,’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 10: 20-46, 2006; Kristen A. Lindquist, and Lisa F. Barrett, ‘Emotional Complexity’. 8 Sun-Mee Kang, and Phillip R. Shaver, ‘Individual Differences in Emotional Complexity: Their Psychological Implications,’ 687. 9 Kristen A. Lindquist, and Lisa F. Barrett, ‘Emotional Complexity,’ 515. 10 See Barrett, ‘Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion,’ 2006. 11 This is one of the studies we conducted within the ‘Progetto Migrazioni’ - Department of Social Sciences and Humanities - Cultural Heritage, National Research Council. We would like to thank the school boards and the pupils for their collaboration. 12 See Cecilia Wainryb, Beverly A. Brehl, and Sonia Matwin, ‘Being Hurt and Hurting Others: Children’s Narrative Accounts and Moral Judgments of Their Own Interpersonal Conflicts,’ Monographs of the society for research in child development 3 (2005): 1-114. 13 See Camilla Pagani, and Francesco Robustelli, ‘Young People, Multiculturalism, and Educational Interventions for the Development of Empathy,’ International Social Science Journal 200-201 (2010): 247-261. 14 See Shoshana Steinberg, and Dan Bar-On, ‘An Analysis of the Group Process in Encounters between Jews and Palestinians Using a Typology for Discourse Classification,’ International journal of intercultural relations 26 (2002): 199–214. 15 In the quotations from participants’ essays we did not eliminate spelling, grammatical, syntactic, and lexical mistakes or any other ‘idiosyncratic’ element in the form and in the content of the texts. 16 Extract from an anonymous essay written by a boy of 16. 17 George Soros. The Alchemy of Finance (New York: Wiley, 1994). 18 Haridimos Tsoukas, and Mary Jo Hatch. ‘Complex Thinking, Complex Practice: The Case for a Narrative Approach to Organizational Complexity,’ Human Relations 54 (2001): 979-1013, 1001. 19 See Camilla Pagani, and Francesco Robustelli, ‘Young People, Multiculturalism, and Educational Interventions for the Development of Empathy,’ 2010; Camilla Pagani, Francesco Robustelli, and Cristina Martinelli. ‘School, Cultural Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Contact,’ Intercultural Education 22 (2011): 337-349. 20 In particular, teachers’ affection. 21 Raphael S. Ezekiel, ‘An Ethnographer Looks at Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups: The Racist Mind Revisited,’ American Behavioral Scientist 46 (2002): 51-71, 62. 22 Ezekiel, ‘An Ethnographer Looks at Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups: The Racist Mind Revisited,’ 53. 23 This is another extract from the same anonymous essay written by the boy of 16. 24 Morin, ‘On Complexity,’ 57. 186 Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking ______
25 Ezekiel, ‘An Ethnographer Looks at Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups: The Racist Mind Revisited,’ 57. 26 Ibid. 62, in italics in the original text. 27 The Italian word ‘straniero’, which the boy uses here, actually includes various interconnected meanings, namely: foreigner, immigrant, and stranger. In this text we decided to translate ‘straniero’ with ‘stranger’, as it seemed that the boy used this word with a slight connotation of ‘extraneousness’. 28 Extract from an anonymous open-ended essay written by a boy of 14. 29 See Flavia Cangià, and Camilla Pagani, ‘Youths, Cultural Diversity, and Complex Thinking’; Mariapia Veladiano, ‘Così Si E’ Ristretto il Vocabolario,’ Repubblica, March 29, 2013. 30 See for example Sun-Mee Kang, and Phillip R. Shaver, ‘Individual Differences in Emotional Complexity: Their Psychological Implications’. 31 Morin, ‘On Complexity’, 38. 32 See Camilla Pagani, Francesco Robustelli, and Frank R. Ascione, ‘Italian Youths’ Attitudes toward, and Concern for, Animals,’ Anthrozoös 20 (2007): 275- 293; Camilla Pagani, Francesco Robustelli, and Frank R. Ascione, ‘Investigating Animal Abuse: some Theoretical and Methodological Issues,’ Anthrozoös 23 (2010): 259-278; Kim-Pong Tam, ‘Dispositional Empathy with Nature,’ Journal of Environmental Psychology 35 (2013): 92-104. 33 See Camilla Pagani, ‘Children and Adolescents Who are Kind to Animals,’ The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond: A Handbook for Clinicians and Researchers, ed. Cristopher Blazina, Güler Boyraz, and David Shen-Miller (New York: Springer, 2011), 289-305. 34 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 124.
Bibliography
Barrett, Lisa F. ‘Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion.’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (2006): 20-46.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. London: Penguin, 2009.
Cangià, Flavia, and Camilla Pagani. ‘Youths, Cultural Diversity, and Complex Thinking.’ The Open Psychology Journal 7 (2014): 20-28.
Duan, Changming, and Clara E. Hill. ‘The Current State of Empathy Research.’ Journal of Counseling Psychology 43 (1996): 261-274.
Ezekiel, Raphael S. ‘An Ethnographer Looks at Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups: The Racist Mind Revisited.’ American Behavioral Scientist 46 (2002): 51-71. Camilla Pagani 187 ______
Kang, Sun-Mee, and Phillip R. Shaver. ‘Individual Differences in Emotional Complexity: Their Psychological Implications.’ Journal of Personality 72 (2004): 687-726.
Lindquist, Kristen A., and Lisa F. Barrett. ‘Emotional Complexity.’ Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa F. Barrett, 513-530. New York: The Guildford Press, 2008.
Miceli, Maria, Alessandro Mancini and Palma Menna. ‘The Art of Comforting.’ New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009): 343-361.
Morin, Edgar. On Complexity. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2008.
Pagani, Camilla. ‘The Cross-cultural Significance of Empathy as an Instrument to Prevent Aggression.’ Cross-cultural Approaches to Aggression and Reconciliation, edited by J. Martin Ramirez, and Deborah S. Richardson, 191-201. Huntington, N.Y.: NovaScience, 2001.
Pagani, Camilla. ‘Children and Adolescents Who are Kind to Animals.’ The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond: A Handbook for Clinicians and Researchers, edited by Cristopher Blazina, Güler Boyraz, and David Shen-Miller, 289-305. New York: Springer, 2011.
Pagani, Camilla, and Francesco Robustelli. ‘Young People, Multiculturalism, and Educational Interventions for the Development of Empathy.’ International Social Science Journal 200-201 (2010): 247-261.
Pagani, Camilla, and Francesco Robustelli. ‘Youth’s Attitudes toward Racism: a Psycho-Socio-Cultural Perspective.’ Conflicts in a Society in Transition, edited by Borisz Szegál, and István András, 79-95. Dunaújváros: Dunaújváros College Press, 2011.
Pagani, Camilla, Francesco Robustelli and Frank R. Ascione. ‘Italian Youths’ Attitudes toward, and Concern for, Animals.’ Anthrozoös 20 (2007): 275-293.
Pagani, Camilla, Francesco Robustelli, and Frank R. Ascione. ‘Investigating Animal Abuse: Some Theoretical and Methodological Issues.’ Anthrozoös 23 (2010): 259-278.
188 Youth’s Empathy and Complex Thinking ______
Pagani, Camilla, Francesco Robustelli and Cristina Martinelli. ‘School, Cultural Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Contact.’ Intercultural Education 22 (2011): 337- 349.
Soros, George. The Alchemy of Finance. New York: Wiley, 1994.
Steinberg, Shoshana, and Dan Bar-On. ‘An Analysis of the Group Process in Encounters between Jews and Palestinians Using a Typology for Discourse Classification.’ International journal of intercultural relations 26 (2002): 199–214.
Tam, Kim-Pong. ‘Dispositional Empathy with Nature.’ Journal of Environmental Psychology 35 (2013): 92-104.
Tsoukas, Haridimos, and Mary Jo Hatch. ‘Complex Thinking, Complex Practice: The case for a Narrative Approach to Organizational Complexity.’ Human Relations 54 (2001): 979-1013.
Veladiano, Mariapia. ‘Così Si E’ Ristretto il Vocabolario.’ Repubblica, 29 March 2013.
Vreeke, Gert-Jan, and Ingrid L. van der Mark. ‘Empathy, an Integrative Model.’ New Ideas in Psychology 21 (2003): 177-207.
Wainryb, Cecilia, Beverly A. Brehl and Sonia Matwin. ‘Being Hurt and Hurting Others: Children’s Narrative Accounts and Moral Judgments of Their Own Interpersonal Conflicts.’ Monographs of the society for research in child development 3 (2005): 1-114.
Camilla Pagani is a psychologist and an associate researcher. She is mostly involved in the study of humans’ relationship with diversity in various contexts within a theoretical framework where principles from socio-cognitive psychology and complexity theory are especially considered.
Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts in Intimate Relationships of Young People
Zuzana Hradileková and Ivona Kunertová
Abstract This chapter deals with conflict resolution styles and reasons for conflicts in intimate relationships of young people. The research focuses on comparison of two groups: young adult men and women. The main reasons for conflict and different approaches to conflict are discussed. The theoretical section consists of conflict resolution styles taxonomy. The empirical part provides information about our research. The goal of the research was to find out gender differences in the reasons for conflict and the most frequently used conflict resolution styles of young adults. Research was conducted on a sample of 91 respondents who were divided into two groups. The length of intimate relationship was at least one year. Significant gender differences were identified both in the reasons for conflicts and conflict resolution styles.
Key Words: Conflict, gender differences, conflict in intimate relationship, reasons for conflicts, conflict resolution styles.
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1. Introduction The aim of this research is to identify gender differences in young people's attitudes towards conflicts in intimate relationship. We also focus on the specific reasons for conflicts as well as the most commonly used conflict resolution styles in intimate relationship. Intimate relationship differs from other interpersonal relationships particularly in its involvement of deeper emotions. It is an area where partners are experiencing mutual affection, physical attraction and love. They are often faced with situations of varying intensity which usually change into conflict. It is necessary that partners learn to deal with conflict situations in a way that is enriching to the relationship but also satisfying the needs of both partners. They should accept conflict as a healthy part of successful relationship instead of considering it as a sign of failure.
2. Conflict Resolution Style Conflict resolution style reflects behavioural patterns and responses of partners which are repeatedly used in conflict resolution.1 Van De Vliert defines conflict resolution style as either intentional or unintentional behavioural responses of various intensity within a conflict situation.2 A conflict resolution style generally reflects an individual approach to conflict. 190 Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts ______There are many theories that describe the strategies and conflict resolution styles in intimate relationships.3 These theories try to explain how partners clarify and resolve conflict situations. They also try to describe how individuals choose particular strategies to deal with conflicts.
3. Theory of Conflict Resolution Styles according to Zacchilli, Hendrick and Hendrick Zacchilli, Hendrick and Hendrick’s study focused on everyday disagreements and quarrels resolved between partners in intimate relationships.4 They extended the number of conflict resolution styles to six: Compromise, Domination, Separation, Submission, Avoidance and Interactional reactivity style. Authors consider Compromise conflict resolution style as constructive, where partners try to achieve compliance or conformity in a way that both partners’ needs are being met. The Domination conflict resolution style is considered destructive because this strategy highlights the competition and power struggle between partners. Separation is neither a destructive nor a constructive resolution strategy. It is characterized by time interval and time-out which is used by partners to calm and steady emotions of conflict. Real solution of the conflict occurs after this time interval. Submissive conflict resolution style creates tendency to make concessions without satisfaction of partners’ needs. Submission style is also not characterized as uniquely destructive or constructive by researchers and theorists. Partners using Avoidance style tend to avoid conflict situations and disagreements. This strategy is also not characterized as either destructive or constructive by professionals. Interactional reactivity style, the last of the six conflict resolution strategies, is considered destructive and has been associated with verbal aggression and lack of trust between partners.5
4. Reasons for Conflict Situations Gottman et al. point to five specific circuits or environments which, according to them, represent potential situations in which conflict in intimate relationship arises:6 Communication. This includes everyday conversation between partners, sharing feelings, mutual relaxation, leisure time activities and lifestyle. Sexuality and intimacy. This includes physical affection together with the style and frequency of sexual intercourse, sexual development of partners and intensity of sexual desire in long-term partnership. Jealousy. This occurs in situations where one partner tends to more or less make contact with individuals of the opposite sex, or if there is presence of a third person who can potentially jeopardize the relationship. Family relationships and friends. By this we mean all interactions within family, the amount of time spent with family of origin and friends, and the place of these interactions in intimate relationship. Zuzana Hradileková and Ivona Kunertová 191 ______Chores. This includes a wide range of responsibilities which are morally and culturally expected in relationship; e.g., household maintenance, anniversary celebrations, holiday gifts and so on. According to couple therapist Vidal-Graf, this area represents the most conflicting area and it is particularly here that we encounter the problem of different attitudes.7 Couple therapists Segre and Carolle Vidal-Graf further added money and leisure time as another sources for conflicts:8 Money. It includes dealing with finances, spending, saving, contributing to the budget, etc. Leisure time. Joint and individual leisure time activities, hobbies and other activities, as well as the amount of time spent on the internet, phone or watching television.
5. Gender Differences According to Čerešník the differentiation of emotions is nonessential.9 We encounter the same emotional experience both among men and women. The difference is found in the manifestation of emotions. Women are able and willing to express their emotions while for men the level of restraint in expressing genuine emotions is higher. Raush et al. state that women have the ability to control their emotional behaviour better than men.10 However, Kusá contradicts this finding with conclusions from the observation of physiological reactivity and expressiveness of men and women.11 Physiological reactivity of women in couple interaction is lower but expressiveness is higher, and for men it is vice versa, physiological reactivity is higher and expressivity is lower. Plaňava describes the differences in communication between men and women.12 He states that predominant subjective formulations are prevalent among women while men often decide the topics of conversation. Women accept the proposed topics more often than men. According to Hargašová and Novák, women reported personal and relational challenges as reasons for breakup-conflict while men claimed lack of interest in relationship, sexual incompatibility and geographical distance.13
6. Hypotheses of the Research In our research we set four hypotheses based on the theoretical assumptions discussed above:
H1: We assumed that women will achieve the highest score in the category of Emotions considering reasons for conflict.
192 Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts ______H2: We assumed that men will most frequently claim Sexuality and Intimacy as the basis of conflict situations.
H3: We assumed that men will score higher than women in the category of Domination conflict resolution style.
H4: We assumed that the most frequently used conflict resolution style both for men and women will be Compromise conflict resolution style.
7. Research Sample The age limit was set on the basis of Levinson’s and Ericson's theories: the lower limit was 20 years and the upper limit was 28 years.14 Another condition was that respondents were at the time of the research in relationship lasting for a minimum period of one year. All respondents included in the research were either university students or had recently graduated. Together we received 94 responses from respondents, but on the basis of non-compliance with the conditions of age and length of relationship, we excluded 3 respondents. The final number used in the statistical elaboration was 91 respondents, among whom were 50 women and 41 men.
8. Research Method We chose questionnaire method to obtain data from respondents for the purposes of our research. This method has the advantage of saving time and the possibility of well-quantified results from obtained data. The questionnaire consisted of two parts. The first part was our own design and the second part was made up of a non-standardized questionnaire.
9. Questionnaire on the Most Common Reasons for Conflict Situations The first part of the questionnaire was focused on detecting the most common reasons for conflicts in intimate relationships of young people. The questionnaire was structured into 72 statements in random order. Nine categories based on the most common causes of conflicts, following Gottman15and Vidal-Graf16, were created in the questionnaire. Categories were structured as follows: Belief and Intellectual area, Communication, Sexuality and Intimacy, Money, Family and Friends, Chores and Leisure time activities, Jealousy, Emotions, Avoidance. Each category had 8 statements related to the particular topic. Respondents, on the basis of instructions given at the beginning of the questionnaire, identified associated value of individual statements on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 means ʻI have never experienced this in my intimate relationshipʼ and 5 means ʻI often experience this in my intimate relationshipʼ. The statements from all of the categories were randomly placed throughout the questionnaire so that respondents did not know Zuzana Hradileková and Ivona Kunertová 193 ______what statement belonged to which category. Particular statements were designed in a way that made them appear similar to each other. Thus we tried to reduce the incidence of socially desirable responses and we monitored whether respondents responded in the same way to similar statements.
10. Romantic Partner Conflict Scale (RPCS) Questionnaire The second part of the questionnaire was focused on detecting conflict resolution style of everyday conflicts among young people. For this part we used a non-standardized questionnaire, Romantic Partner Conflict Scale (RPCS), which consists of 39 statements. The authors of the questionnaire are Zacchilli, Hendrick and Hendrick.17 There are 6 conflict resolution styles: Compromise, Domination, Separation, Submission, Avoidance and Interactional reactivity style. Each of these styles has a specific number of statements. Each respondent expressed the level of agreement or disagreement on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 stands for complete disagreement and 5 represents full agreement. Such statements were randomly placed in the questionnaire so that the respondent did not know about the different conflict resolution styles and the statements belonging to them.
11. Data Gathering and Elaboration The questionnaire was distributed electronically via the site www.docs.google.com. Participants were aware that the data was anonymous and used only for the purposes of our research. Research sample was obtained by self- selection. Research participants had the opportunity to decide for themselves whether to participate in the research by meeting the above conditions. We used Excel 2007 statistical program SPSS 20.0 for the purpose of data elaboration.
12. Results Analysis After application of the normality test on our results in the statistical program SPSS 20.0., we found out that the sample did not come from the group of normal distribution. Based on this result, we used nonparametric statistical methods, namely the Mann-Whitney test. This test helped us to describe the differences that have been seen in the graph below and also gave us information about the differences that were statistically significant.
13. Questionnaire on the Most Common Reasons for Conflict Situations This averaged the common values as well as the particular average values for men and women pertaining to categories of reasons for conflicts. Category with the highest rating for both genders was Jealousy (with a value of 3.35). Category with the highest rating was Emotions for women (with a value of 3.39), and Jealousy for
194 Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts ______men (with a value of 3.33). The lowest ranked category for both genders was Sexuality and Intimacy (with a value of 2.62). Top rated conflict resolution style overall (with a value of 3.81), but also individually for women (p value 3.79) and for men (with a value of 3.83), was the Compromise conflict resolution style. The lowest ranked overall style (with a value of 1.89), but also individually for women (with a value of 1.92) and for men (with a value of 1.86), was Interactional reactivity conflict resolution style.
14. Discussion of the Research Results Hypothesis 1: We assumed that women will achieve the highest score in the field of reasons for conflict in the category of Emotions. The first hypothesis has been confirmed on the basis of statistical evaluation of statements in the category of Emotions. In this category we can see the greatest incidence of differences in responses between genders. Similarly, we have also recorded the highest differences within the responses of particular statements. In statement no. 46: ʻI feel that partner can not empathize with my feelingsʼ, the overall average value was 3.59 for both sexes. The average value was 3.94 for women and 3.17 for men. On the basis of this outcome, it is significant that women evaluate their partners as insufficiently able to empathize with their feelings. Women have assessed this statement as highly present phenomenon in their intimate relationships. Men have not experienced this situation in relationship to such extent as women. Men have rated it more neutrally, ʻI experience it in my relationship only occasionallyʼ. In statement no. 54: ʻMy partner insufficiently expresses his or her emotions in our relationship ʼ, the overall average value was 3.18. The average value was 3.46 for women and 2.83 for men. We can see that women are faced with this situation more often than men. Men have conversely evaluated such situation as only occasionally occuring in their relationship. As Čerešník stated , women are more able and willing to express emotions outwardly.18 We more often meet with greater restraint in expressivity among men. In statement no. 55: ʻSometimes I feel that I take more care of my relationship than my partner doesʼ, the overall average value was 3.42. The average value was 3.76 for women and 3.00 for men. Women have considered these feelings as quite frequently occurring in relationship. Conversely, men have not experienced these feelings, or reported as uncommon in the relationship. An interesting feature was that in statement no.58: ʻI can not identify what my partner feels during the conflictʼ. The average value for both groups was 4.13, and average value for men reached 4.66, which means that we had unusually high values in the responses of men. This value tells us that men experience inability to identify partner's emotions during conflict quite often (value 4) or often (value 5). Unlike men, women evaluated this argument below average, with an average value Zuzana Hradileková and Ivona Kunertová 195 ______of 3.70. This can be explained by society attributing better ability of women to perceive and read other people’s emotions. Hypothesis 2: We assumed that men will most frequently choose as reason for conflict situations the category of Sexuality and Intimacy. This hypothesis was disproved on the basis of statistical evaluation of the results. Category Sexuality and Intimacy was ultimately assessed both by women and men as the least occurring conflicting reason among all others. Responses in all statements were in neutral or even negative values for incidence within relationship. As an explanation, we could offer situation in society where sex is no longer taboo to an extent it used to be. Nowadays we quite often come across sex and nudity, especially in public media. An interesting future research would be a comparative study of sexuality and intimacy with couples in the generation of mature adults who were educated when the media were not so focused on sex. The most frequently chosen reason for conflict among men was Jealousy. However, this was not the case among women. The average value for both genders within the whole category was 3.35. This value tells us that Jealousy has become the most frequently chosen reason for conflict. Partners of both genders reported that they encounter this issue sometimes (value 3) or quite frequently (value 4). Hypothesis 3: We assumed that men will achieve higher score than women in the category of Domination conflict resolution style. This third hypothesis was also disproved based on the statistical evaluation of the results. Recorded average values for the various arguments reveal the most significant differences between genders in statements no.16 and no.26, which is also statistically significant. The greatest differences in responses among all the conflict resolution styles occurred in these two statements. Other responses between men and women displayed only minor differences. Based on the statements in the questionnaire, we inferred that men prefer submissive attitude towards conflict resolution, which means they accept the partner’s opinion not because they agree with it but to avoid possible further conflicts in a relationship. Men indicated that they occasionally agree with their partner just because they want to terminate the conflict. Interesting was that women scored higher values in this situation. Women expressed their desire to win over partner more than men. Hypothesis 4: We assumed that the most widely used conflict resolution style both for men and women will be the Compromise conflict resolution style. The fourth hypothesis was confirmed on the basis of statistical processing of the questionnaire results. These data tell us that women and men prefer the Compromise conflict resolution style and they prefer compromise as the most frequently used way of resolving disagreements in their relationship. We could say that young people are trying to solve their conflicts in intimate relationships in ways that do not permanently jeopardize intimate relationship but give them
196 Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts ______opportunity for growth and achievement of solutions that would be satisfactory for both parties. This style is assessed as constructive as well as efficient in finding healthy solutions. It is worth noticing the category of Avoidance conflict resolution style which emerged as the second best-rated style in this research. High values of Avoidance conflict resolution style was expected following the theoretical results mentioned above. Partners who do not feel commitment would rather prefer Avoidance conflict resolution strategies to constructive ones.
15. Conclusion This research has helped us to clarify how young men and women approach conflicts in intimate relationships and the consequent ways of resolving them. Based on the research results, hypotheses regarding reasons for conflicts among women in the category of Emotions have been confirmed as well as the most widely used conflict resolution style, namely Compromise. On the contrary, hypothesis about the most common reasons for conflicts among men in the category of Sexuality and Intimacy was completely disproved. This area has not become dominant and has even reached the lowest values both among men and women. Another hypothesis concerning the Domination conflict resolution style as highly preferred among men has also not been approved. The results of the research show that the Domination conflict resolution style is preferred to a greater amount among women. We have also noticed that men have had a greater tendency to apply the Submission conflict resolution style. Research results could be useful for a follow-up research, which could be extended to older generation than this sample group is. We would focus on a comparison of responses from people in mature adulthood and investigate the differences between two generations regarding reasons for conflict in intimate relationship and their conflict resolution style. We expect that such research will show differences in both areas because the older research group will have commitments such as marriage, shared household and children. New research could also focus on the link between emotional attachment and preferred conflict resolution style or on other intergenerational contexts considering emotional bonds and conflict resolution style.
Notes
1 Kathleen O’Connel Corcoran and Brent Mallinkrodt, ‘Adult Attachment, Self- Efficacy, Perspective Taking, and Conflict Resolution,’ Journal of Counseling & Development 78.4 (2000): 473-489. 2 Evert Van de Vliert, Complex Interpersonal Conflict Behaviour: Theoretical Frontiers (New York: Psychology Press, 1997), 188. Zuzana Hradileková and Ivona Kunertová 197 ______
3 E. Mark Cummings, Marcie C. Goekemory, and Lauren M. Papp, Couple Conflict, Children and Families (NJ: Lawrence Erlabum Associates, 2001), 147; Arnie Cann, M. Ashley Norman, Jennifer L. Welbourne, and Lawrence G. Calhoun, ‘Attachment Styles, Conflict Styles and Humour Styles: Interrelationships and Associations with Relationship Satisfaction,’ European Journal of Personality 22.2 (2008): 131-146. 4 T. L. Zacchilli, T. L. Hendrick and S. Hendrick, ‘The Romantic Partner Conflict Scale: A New Scale to Measure Conflict in Dating Relationships,’ Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 26 (2009): 1073-1096, viewed 20 December 2012, http://www.midss.ie/content/romantic-partner-conflict-scale-rpcs. 5 Ibid. 6 John Gottman, Howard J. Markman, John Gonso, and Clifford Notarius, A Couple´s Guide to Communication (Champaign: Research Press, 1979), 252. 7 S. Vidal-Graf and C. Vidal-Graf, Jak se dobře pohádat s partnerem... aneb O Jak se dobře pohádat s partnerem... aneb O správnémsprávném využití zdravé hádky (Praha: Portál, 2007), 104. 8 Ibid. 9 Michal Čerešník, O mužoch a o Ženách. Psychologický Pohľad na Problematiku Rodu (Nitra: PF UKF, 2011), 122. 10 H. Raush, W. Barry and R. Hertel, Communication, Conflict and Marriage (San Francisco: Jossey – Bass, 1974). 11 Dagmar Kusá, ‘Dimenzie Emocionality a Rodová Odlišnosť: ʻAktívaʼ a ʻPasívaʼ v Emočnej Bilancii Mužov a Žien,’ Psychológia na rázcestí, ed. Zborník, (Bratislava: Stimul, 2002), 439-455. 12 Ivo Plaňava, Manželství a Rodiny: Struktura, Dynamika, Komunikace (Brno: Nakl. Doplněk, 1999), 300. 13 M. Hargašová and T. Novák, Předmanželské poradenství (Praha: Grada, 2007) , 144. 14 D. J. Levinson, E. B. Klein, M. H. Levinson, and B McKee, The Seasons of a Man's Life (New York: Knopf, 1978), 363; Eric Ericson. Dětství a společnosť (Praha: Argo, 2002), 390. 15 Gottman, A Couple’s Guide. 16 Vidal-Graf, Serge, Jak se dobře pohádat s partnerem. 17 Zachilli, Hendrick and Hendrick, ’The Romantic Partner Conflict Scale.’ 18 Michal Čerešník, O mužoch a oŽenách.
198 Conflict Resolution Styles and Reasons for Conflicts ______
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Zuzana Hradileková is a psychologist in private practice in Bratislava, Slovakia. She also works part-time at the Ministry of Labour, Family and Social affairs as a counselling psychologist and methodologist.
Ivona Kunertová is a student of psychology at Comenius Univeristy in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her main research areas are couples and family therapy.