Teaching empathy to children is more important than ever, but sometimes it can be hard to get through to our older kids. Using books is a great solution. As a mom with several kids in later elementary school and now even a high schooler, I worry a…

Do you prioritize other people’s feelings over your own? You might be falling into the “empathy trap.”

Empathy is having its moment. The ability to feel what another person is feeling, from that person’s perspective, generates lots of press as the ultimate positive value and the pathway to a kinder, less violent world. Schools across the country are teaching empathy to children, and myriad books explore it from every possible angle: how to get it, why it makes you a better person, how its absence can breed evil.

Empathy is exalted by thinkers from Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhâ’t Hąnh to British writer Roman Krznaric, who just launched an online Empathy Museum where you can virtually step into someone else’s shoes. Established scientists like primatologist Frans de Waal and developmental psychiatrist Daniel Siegel explore the deep roots of empathy in animals and its essential nature in humans.

By Robin Stern, Diana Divecha

Want to know how to spot a narcissist before you date him or her?If you know that narcissists lack empathy, there are communication skills you can learn that will help you avoid getting involved with them, before you take the plunge.See it on Scoop.it,…

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if i…