Etsi

Optometrist Empathicus

educationmarjo
15.7.2016
4 min käytetty lukemiseen

My greetings to Metropolia's senior official who said empathy is meaningless in optometry:

It’s something even apes and other animals demonstrate as well - but not optometrists and corporate psychopaths on ethical performance? Though psychopaths are 1% of the population, it is logical to assume that every large corporation has psychopaths working within it. ***

I don’t really believe in people without empathy. Are they real? Are You Suffering From Empathy Deficit Disorder? How Do You Develop EDD? EDD grows when people focus too much on acquiring power, status, and money for themselves. Nearly every day we hear or read about more extreme examples: people who go over the edge in their pursuit of money, power or recognition, and end up resigning their jobs, in rehab or behind bars. And that's a killer for empathy, because then you're ripe for the delusion that you're completely independent and self-sufficient. You lose touch with the true reality, that all humans are interconnected and interdependent - all organs of the same body, so to speak. Your sense of being a part of the larger interwoven community - which is absolutely necessary for survival in today's world - fades away. And so does your awareness that we have to sink or swim together, help each other, and sustain the planet we inhabit - or else we're all in deep trouble. How to heal your EDD. When you suffer from it you're unable to step outside yourself and tune in to what other people experience, especially those who feel, think and believe differently from yourself. That makes it a source of personal conflicts, of communication breakdown in intimate relationships, and of adversarial attitudes - including hatred - towards groups of people who differ in their beliefs, traditions or ways of life from your own.

Even Adam Smith in year 1853, the father of economics, best known for emphasizing self-interest as the lifeblood of human economy, understood that the concepts of self-interest and empathy don’t conflict. ***

Why Humble, Empathic Business Leaders Are More Successful:

Salesperson Empathy and Listening: Impact on Relationship Outcomes

Empathy in Business Is Vital to an Entrepreneur's Success

A Few Practical Tips

Why Humble, Empathic Business Leaders Are More Successful

Empathy is mentioned in the Tallinn Health Care College’s characteristic features of the optometrist identity:

“A person wanting to become an optometrist should:

be a good communicator;
have an evolved sense of empathy;
be ready for customer service;
be eager to study;
have advanced skills in science subjects.

And of course, we expect the interest towards the optometrist profession from every candidate and the wish to develop oneself through coming years.”

What is empathy? That might be very difficult to understand if you have been for too long time without it.

Here is a very beautiful doctoral dissertation from the University of Stockholm by Jakob Håkansson in 2003: http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/papers/empathydissertation.pdf

A Neurodevelopmental Approach to Empathy

1.1 Affective Arousal

1.2 Emotion Understanding

1.3 Emotion regulation

The term empathy is applied to various phenomena which cover a broad spectrum ranging from feelings of concern for other people that create a motivation to help them, experiencing emotions that match another individual's emotions, knowing what the other is thinking or feeling, to blurring the line between self and other [Hodges and Klein, 2001]. In developmental psychology, empathy is generally defined as an affective response stemming from the understanding of another's emotional state or condition similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel in the given situation [Eisenberg et al., 1991]. Each of the components of empathy (affective arousal, emotion understanding and emotion regulation) will be considered separately from both developmental and neuroscientific perspectives. Empathy includes both cognitive and affective components. What happens in the nervous system? A number of distinct and interacting neurocognitive components contribute to the experience of empathy: (1) affective arousal, a bottom-up process in which the amygdala, hypothalamus and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) underlie rapid and prioritized processing of the emotion signal; (2) emotion understanding, which relies on self- and other-awareness and involves the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial (vm)PFC and temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and (3) emotion regulation, which depends on executive functions instantiated in the intrinsic corticocortical connections of the OFC, mPFC and dorsolateral (dl)PFC, as well as on connections with subcortical limbic structures implicated in processing emotional information. These networks operate as top-down mediators crucial in regulating emotions and thereby enhancing flexible and appropriate responses. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3021497/)

How about an empathy as a process with three components (cognitive, affective and behavioral aspects) and its evolutionary developmental basis?

1. Cognitive Empathy – the explicit understanding of another’s state

2. Affective Empathy – the sharing of another’s emotional state

3. Behavioral Empathy – the prosocial behaviors that follow understanding and sharing (Dadds, et al., 2008)

The Role of Empathy in Our Evolution: http://www.theemotionmachine.com/empathy-and-evolution

Thank you. The next post will consist of more empathy.

Marjo

Philosophical approach to Empathy

“The nature of aesthetic empathy is always the “experience of another human”. - Lipps, Theodor Aesthetik (1905)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/