1. Judging empathy
Digby Tantam
New School of Psychotherapy and
Counselling//
Dilemma Consultancy//
Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge

2. • Contrasts ―sympathy and antipathy‖
• ―An idea leading to an impression‖ (when we
imagine being someone else we feel like them)
(the root for Adam Smith of fellow feeling)
• RELATION, ACQUAINTANCE, and
David Hume: RESEMBLANCE
Treatise of • But sympathy with a widowed mother (but not a
father) diminishes if she marries again
Human Nature
• Hume unconvincingly says that the impression
has to be returned to be effective, and if mother
remarries it gets lost in her second husband
• Another possibility is that we can stop
ourselves empathizing if we feel estranged from
them.
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3. David Hume: Treatise of Human
Nature
• ―the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only
because they reflect each others emotions, but also because
those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be
often reverberated and decay away by insensible degrees‖
• The passions are so contagious, that they pass with the
greatest facility from one person to another, and produce
correspondent movements in all human breasts
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4. Adam Smith
• See things from another
person‘s point of view, and
by their values
• But only if those values
are those with which we
can identify: they are
within the ―human
community‖ Agosta, L.
(2011) Internet
Encyclopedia of
Philosophy: an inhuman
murderer
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5. The orbitofrontal cortex as cache? fNIRS evidence
Brink, T. T., Urton, K., Held, D., Kirilina, E., Hofmann, M. J., Klann-Delius, G., et al. (2011). The role of
orbitofrontal cortex in processing empathy stories in 4- to 8-year-old children. Front Psychol, 2, 80.
Negative
affective
empathy
Positive
affective
empathy
Logical
cognitive
empathy
Non-
logical
cognitive
empathy

7. Gaze following and the
interbrain

8. The Wright brothers
Synchrony
Armies, churches, organizations, and communities often engage in activities for example,
marching, singing, and dancing that lead group members to act in synchrony with each
other.….Across three experiments,
people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic
exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice. Our results also showed that positive
emotions need not be generated for synchrony to foster cooperation. In total, the results
suggest that acting in synchrony with others can increase cooperation by strengthening social
attachment among group members
Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009, Psychological Science

9. Schurmann M, Hesse MD, Stephan KE, Saarela M, Zilles K, Hari R, et al. Yearning
to yawn: the neural basis of contagious yawning. Neuroimage. [doi: DOI:
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.10.022]. 2005;24(4):1260-4.

10. 01/12/2011 www.nspc.org.uk 10

11. EMG responses in patient G.Y. (A) Mean responses in the ZM for seen stimuli.
Tamietto M et al. PNAS 2009;106:17661-17666
©2009 by National Academy of Sciences

12. Factors that influence Hume‘s
mirroring
• Paying interested attention
– to the other person as a person rather than as a curiosity
– Looking at the eyes for facial expression (influences unconscious
and conscious processing)
– Possibly attentive listening
– Body isomorphism for paying attention to the body
– All of these are ‗counselling skills‘ known to increase empathy
• Inferences too about other people‘s state of mind from the
direction of their gaze
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13. Jan
Swammerdam,
Author of De
Bybel der Natuure
22 May 09 ARC club and
book launch

14. Knowing about the world using non-verbal
cues
Who is being
shot?
Terrorists or
partisans?
Goya, Francisco
The Shootings of
May Third 1808
1814
22 May 09 ARC club and
book launch

15. 22 May 09
Edouard Manet. The Execution of Maximilian. 1868–69.
ARC club and book launch

16. Skipping some steps, many
of which
Have been filled in by
neuroimaging:
Emotional contagion
generalizes into feeling
akin to movements that can
be imitated.
So for Lipps became an
aesthetic principle
But for later psychologists,
firstly Vischer and then the
Theodore Lipps,
American George Titchener
Translator of David Hume, from whom he took
the notion of ‗sympathy‘ It led to an explanation of
why we have ‗fellow feeling‘
and how we distinguish
animated objects with souls
from soul-less objects

17. Lipps argued that
‗Einfühlung’
allowed us to perceive
nature
and know about the
feelings of
other people
We think of the lines not being parallel because we
think of one line wanting to go towards the other:
empathy can be misleading

18. What is the difference between
empathy and sympathy?
• Remember the very rapid • But we may accurately
facial responses? respond to empathy, but react
without pity or compassion or
• We can suppress them by an
simply not take action on our
act of will, but
responses
• The amplitude of the rapid
• Pity, compassion, or the
response is also correlated
readiness to interfere are all
with self-ratings of
linked to how the term
‗dispositional empathy‘
‗sympathy‘ is currently used
• We can withold our empathic
• Sympathy may not always be
responding
appropriate
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19. What Hume originally meant by
sympathy
• Theory of mind (ToM)
• Perspective-taking
• Cognitive empathy
• Imagination—or as we would say, ‗narrative ability‘

20. Exercising the narrative ability
• How supple are our stories
• Do we extract objective principles from
stories or also subjective reasons:
• In his Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,
Soren Kierkegaard concluded that
‗subjectivity is truth‘: but that is the
subjectivity of the other, and not the
self
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21. Fig. 2.
Results from
Study 2: the
interactive
effect of
Machiavellian
ism and
emotion-
regulation
knowledge in
predicting
interpersonal
deviance.
Côté S et al.
Psychological
Science
2011;22:1073-1080
Copyright © by Association for Psychological Science

22. Some factors that emerge as
possibly relevant to empathizing
• Better at paying personal attention
– Means more tolerance of factors the inhibit attention like disgust or shame
• Better at picking up cues, especially blended ones
– Means not just focussing on main expression, but noting masked ones
• More able to reflect on what these cues or stories might mean without judging
– Using ‗judging‘ in its everyday sense of rejecting justifications
• Less willing than Adam Smith to conclude that there are some people who are
outside the human tribe
– Talking about those who are different, or just talking
• Being less Machiavellian

23. Even more complications
• Machiavellianism
– NOT ‗honesty is the best policy‘
– BUT ‗the best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to
hear‘
– OR ‗it is safest to assume that all people have a vicious streak and it
will come out when they are given a chance‘ from the 20 item MACH
IV scale by Christie and Geis, 1974
• Linked to sales volume but not customer satisfaction
• Ethics
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24. Blind spots: when antipathy kicks in
• Empathy may be generally diminished, but this is rare
• Most likely that there is selective ‗blind spot‘
• For example, Hume‘s example of the remarried mother
• In psychotherapy, dealt with in supervision
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25. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsNfnq95mrE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se749koezXc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4-sXODP6J8
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