The Conversation: Understanding others’ feelings: what is empathy and why do we need it?

Empathy is the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. It is a construct of multiple components, each of which is associated with its own brain network. There are three ways of looking at empathy.

First there is affective empathy. This is the ability to share the emotions of others. People who score high on affective empathy are those who, for example, show a strong visceral reaction when watching a scary movie. [...]

Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand the emotions of others. A good example is the psychologist who understands the emotions of the client in a rational way, but does not necessarily share the emotions of the client in a visceral sense.

Finally, there’s emotional regulation. This refers to the ability to regulate one’s emotions. For example, surgeons need to control their emotions when operating on a patient.

Another way to understand empathy is to distinguish it from other related constructs. For example, empathy involves self-awareness, as well as distinction between the self and the other. In that sense it is different from mimicry, or imitation. [...]

That said, empathy is not a unique human experience. It has been observed in many non-human primates and even rats. [...]

Interestingly, people with higher psychopathic traits typically show more utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas such as the footbridge problem. In this thought experiment, people have to decide whether to push a person off a bridge to stop a train about to kill five others laying on the track.

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The Atlantic: When Narrative Matters More Than Fact

Joseph Campbell famously said that there are only two stories in the whole world: Hero takes a journey and stranger comes to town. As an English teacher, I enjoy telling my students this nugget of wisdom and challenging them to defy it. They never can because, although stories are powerful, they are also simple. There are certain constructs, rhythms, and traits to a well-crafted story. Stories, at their heart, are either about heroes on a journey or strangers coming into a new setting. [...]

Explaining to someone, however accurately, that Donald Trump didn't help save 2,100 jobs with the Carrier deal, but rather 850, and that he may have actually had very little to do with it, or that the deal may have negative implications for the economy and job growth down the road, means virtually nothing to someone who has lost a job and gotten it back. To this person, there is a clear narrative that resonates: Trump is the hero. Telling someone whose only image and interaction ever with a woman wearing a hijab is through negative stereotypes on social media that five of the last 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners were Muslim means little to someone whose mind has generalized such a character as the villain.

Facts (or the lack thereof) mean very little to people caught up in storylines. The best way to teach true understanding is not by teaching students facts (although that is still a valuable lesson); it is to teach them to analyze, as one does with elements of narrative. [...]

Adults can teach students about unreliable narrators, about character motivation, about the need of any good storyteller to create conflicts and obstacles. Just as I explained recently to the students in my creative-writing class who are writing 10-minute plays, a good storyteller should plant minor obstacles in the beginning of the story that will indicate what the climax will be. So, as critics of stories, students might have noticed, as I did, that Donald Trump planted seeds of a treacherous media and rigged elections early on as minor obstacles in his story, so that as his story progressed those conflicts and the people who enacted them became more and more like the villains, while he became more and more the hero. Because I am a storyteller, I could see the plot unfolding. I want the same skills for my students because facts aren’t enough when it is time to understand the difference between a hero and a villain.

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Wendover Productions: Why Cities Are Where They Are

Business Insider: How the impeachment of South Korea's leader can heal its rift with China

Eight lawmakers from the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) landed in China this week to meet China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and other top officials to convey their belief that the decision to deploy THAAD should be left to the next president.

Their visit, which came even as the South Korean defence minister, Han Min-koo, reiterated Seoul’s commitment to THAAD, has fuelled speculation that the deployment of the system is not yet a done deal. The DPK’s Moon Jae-in, who is the favourite in this year’s presidential election, has already suggested rethinking the deployment.

China is concerned that even thought a THAAD system on South Korean soil would not be able to intercept Chinese missiles, its X-band radar surveillance system would be able to monitor missile tests on its northern and eastern coasts. [...]

On December 22, the Constitutional Court of Korea began a six-month-long hearing to decide whether to accept or reject Park’s impeachment. A presidential election, previously scheduled for the end of 2017, could be brought forward if the court upholds the impeachment vote. Even disregarding that vote, Park’s prospects look dimmer by the day – already she has been abandoned by 29 of the lawmakers in her ruling Saenuri party, which had previously held 128 of the 300 seats in parliament.

Any successor to Park would be “very likely” to delay the deployment of Thaad, said Zhang.

The DPK’s Moon, who lost the last presidential election to Park by 3 percentage points, has already added uncertainty to the THAAD debate by saying the next administration should reconsider the deployment.

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The Guardian: Civil activists fear new crackdown in Hungary after Trump election

The Hungarian government is planning to force non-government organisation (NGO) leaders to declare their personal assets in the same way as MPs and public officials in what has been described as an “intimidation” of civil society. The proposal is scheduled to go before parliament in April, according to the newly published 2017 legislative agenda.

The move is seen as the latest step in a campaign by Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, to transform Hungary into a self-styled “illiberal state”, which has prompted a chorus of international criticism that democracy is being eroded in a country which joined the European Union in 2004. [...]

“As a consequence of the election of Donald Trump, Orbán definitely feels that one of the only two international players – the US and EU – who care about NGOs’ situation in Hungary is now on his side because Trump is a fierce opponent of George Soros,” said Peter Kreko, senior associate in the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute thinktank, one of about 60 Hungarian groups to receive grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

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