“It has an effect in both animals and humans that, to my knowledge, is pretty much unlike that of any other psychoactive substance,” Malenka told Live Science.
“It uniformly causes this pro-social, empathogenic response,” or warm-fuzzy feelings of empathy towards others, said Dr. Robert Malenka, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford University.
The researchers conducted two studies to explore the relationship between fiction and empathy. In the first, they recruited university students and randomly assigned them to read either a piece of fiction or non-fiction. Participants in the fiction gro…
Central to the notion of healing in connection is the power of mutual empathy in the therapeutic relationship. Isolation is a major source of human suffering and is often accompanied by immobilization, which prevents movement back into relationship aft…
Clare Carlisle: How to believe: Science questions the usefulness of evil as a concept but its rhetorical force in language shows why we need to think about it… From a scientific perspective, the difficulty of explaining evil leads to doubts a…
The final thing I want to end on is, we need a dramatic increase in empathy. There is a race against time at the moment, between the forces and voices of fear mongering that are appealing to our worst parts, to our lizard brains, and the forces of empa…
