Excessive empathy?It may not be self -understanding enough

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Author | Sonia Krolis

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The ability to distinguish between self and others may be related to beneficial empathy. Compassionate attention is a kind of emotional response centered on others, which usually brings a desire to help others reduce pain.

Compassion is a ability to understand and share others, and the basis for our connection with others. Studies have shown that this is essential for moral development, maintaining intimacy, promoting relationships between groups, and suppressing aggressiveness. Because it plays a vital role in many social processes, we need to understand factors that promote empathy and make empathy more likely.

Most of the entertainment intervention measures are concentrated on improving the ability to consider problems from the perspective of others. For example, you can guide someone to imagine the thoughts and feelings of a specific person or group, or to show them a video or letter they experienced. This intervention has proven to be able to successfully increase empathy and promote help between people.

It is wise to build empathy by cultivating understanding of others. But we have reasons to believe that although not so intuitive, it is also important to understand that we are empathy.

A way of social psychologists describing a person's self -awareness is to assess their self -conceptual clarity. People with high clarity of self -concept mean that they have a clear understanding of what kind of people they are. Whose they feel about themselves are stable over time, and their personality is consistent with each other's beliefs. In contrast, people with lower clarity of self -concepts to themselves, including their characteristics and desires, are not clear. They are used to describe their characteristics that may be contradictory, or they are changing every day. Perhaps it is not surprising that there are other benefits to have a high degree of self -conceptual clarity, including higher self -esteem, higher ability and relationship satisfaction with stress.

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In order to understand why there is a clear self -concept is also related to empathy, we need to study an aspect that is often ignored. In order to empathize well, you not only need to understand and share the emotions of others, but also need to be aware of your feelings from others, not what you are experiencing. This needs to fully recognize that your experience and you are different from others and their experience. Some people can distinguish between themselves and others more than others.

It is important that researchers have proposed that distinction of self -ability is related to the benefit ways of empathy. Compassionate attention is a kind of emotional response centered on others, which usually brings a desire to help others reduce pain. For example, imagine that your upset friends call you and tell you that they just broke up with their lover. You may try to understand their feelings from the perspective of a friend. As a result, you will feel a little sad. But if you can insist on soberly realizing that the root of this sadness is the breakup of your friend, not what actually happened to you (self -distinction between yourself), you may respond to friends in a kind of empathy, and will be a empathy way, and will be a empathy way, and will and will be a empathy way and will be a empathy and will be a empathy and will and will be a empathy and will and will be a empathy and will and will be a empathy and will and will be a empathy and will be a empathy and will and will be a empathy and will and will be a empathy and will and will be. Your attention has shifted to your care of your friends -listen, express your understanding of their feelings, and may invite them to dinner.

Compassionate attention can compare with a more self -self, disgusting emotional response: personal pain. This reaction may be caused by the poor ability of others-others. This reaction ignores such a fact: your emotional state comes from the experience of others, not your own experience. The overwhelming personal pain actually hinders an effective empathy response, causing a person to stay away from those who need help, not to help them.

In a dialogue with friends, a response with personal pain characteristics may be like this: you start to vividly imagine the feeling when you experience the breakup, as if you have experienced it yourself. So you feel sad and anxious. Suddenly, your response is no longer aimed at friends, but your own feelings. You might tell your friends: "I don't know how I should deal with it. It is so terrible." After listening to a friend for a few minutes, you will transfer the topic to a easier topic to avoid standing at your perspective Consider the feeling of the problem. "

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So what role does the clear self -concept play in it? There is a clear self -awareness that makes you easier to recognize your differences with others, and separate yourself with them spiritually. This may help you share the emotional experience of another person at a proper distance. In contrast, a low -definition self -concept may cause the boundaries between yourself and others to blur, which may make it difficult for you to separate your emotional experience with others, leading to unparalleled personal pain.

In order to test these ideas about self -concepts and empathy, I conducted a series of studies with my instructor Jennifer Bazz during her doctorate degree. In the initial research, we asked the participants to complete a questionnaire to evaluate their self -conceptual clarity and asked them the degree of recognition of the following statements: "In general, I clearly know who I am and who I am. "Or" If I describe my personality, my description may vary from the day "(reflects the low definition of self -concept). They also tend to pay attention to their empathy (for example, "I often have a gentle and concern for people who are not as lucky") and personal pain (for example, "when I see people who need help in emergency situations, people who need help in urgent situations need help , I collapsed ") responded. Based on these reports, we find that the clarity of self -concept is positive with the tendency of empathy and attention to experience, and it is negatively related to the tendency to experience personal pain. This shows that people with clearer self -awareness are more likely to respond to the pain of others, and it is unlikely to be drowned by their emotions. Of course, it is possible that people do not accurately report their general reactions under the circumstances of inducing empathy. To solve this problem, we conducted a follow -up study for participants to face a person who needs help.

Participants listened to a recording made by experimenters, which was described as a university broadcast program. They heard an interview with a young woman named Katie (actually an actor). She lost her parents and a brother and sister in a car accident. She had no money, and she had to take care of the two young brothers. sisters. Katie described that while working hard to complete college studies, she also worked hard to support her siblings. After listening to the interview, the participants scored the degree of their emotional response to different adjectives. Some of them represent the feeling of personal pain (for example, "restlessness", "alert", "worry"), and others represent the feeling of empathy ("sympathy", "sympathy", "gentleness"). The participants also completed the questionnaire on the clarity of self -concept.

We also want to verify our assumptions, that is, the connection between unclear self-awareness and personal pain can be partially interpreted as the lack of self-the distinction of others. To this end, the participants evaluated themselves based on a series of personality characteristics and evaluated Katie based on the same personality characteristics. Participants' evaluation of ourselves and the overlapping level of Katie is an indicator we use to evaluate their self-the distinction of others.

Consistent with our previous research is that participants with high conceptual clarity will feel more empathy and less personal pain when listening to Katie's story. Moreover, consistent with our predictions, people with low conceptual clarity seem to be difficult to distinguish themselves from Katie, which seems to help explain that they have experienced more personal pain.

VIA: "Ma Nan Po Jack"

Perhaps more importantly, the clarity of self -concept is also related to helping people. After listening to the interview, the participants had the opportunity to donate to Katie. We found that people with lower clarity of self -concepts have less money, which may be related to their increasing personal pain and low empathy attention. Therefore, unclear self -awareness will not only make a person more likely to experience the pain of self -centered, but also care about the well -being of others. These emotional reactions may also have practical consequences on a person who needs help.

These findings may affect intimacy. Usually, the people we love will be integrated into our self -identity, which helps explain why we often suffer the pain of the closest people. However, our research results show that the intimate recognition with the loved ones should supplemented with clear self -awareness to allow emotional attention. Otherwise, people may feel too much and strongly feel the pain of the people they love, making them (ironic) unlikely to provide any useful help.

This work echoes the theory and insights of development psychology. A key milestone of human development occurred around 15-18 months. At that time, the toddler child began to recognize himself in the mirror. This is considered a sign of self -awareness and evidence of children's self -consciousness. Interestingly, it seems that the ability to care about others and the desire to help others appear only after this self -conscious development. Developing psychologists use this as evidence to prove that the empathy response of those who need help depends on the development of self -awareness. Our research shows that this situation has continued until adulthood.

Our discovery also puts forward such a possibility, that is, people can better understand their ability to have empathy for others by better understanding themselves. One way to build a clearer self -awareness is to determine your values ​​-a very important quality in your life, such as honesty, spontaneous or ambitious. Values ​​help to answer this question: "What are you doing?" However, it is not always easy to find out what is important for you. For many people, it is helpful to work hard to cultivate clearer self -awareness with psychotherapists.

Although empathy intervention is usually designed to help people look at the world through the eyes of others, our research shows that when people lack a clear understanding of who they are, the impact of these intervention may be very limited. In these cases, first focusing on more understanding that it may be beneficial. Knowing who you are more clearly, you can feel easier to feel the position of you and others in this interaction -and respond to their feelings in a useful way. VIA: "Ma Nan Po Jack"

Reference (click slide to view)

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