Compassion over empathy could help prevent emotional burnout For Singer, empathy is a precursor to compassion, but too much of it can lead to antisocial behaviour. For example, healthcare workers or caregivers who are frequently faced with trauma victims can become intensely distressed themselves, feel overwhelmed and burn out. Brain scans have shown that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and the one who feels empathy. So empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering. In order to avoid this, we need to transform empathy into compassion. Compassion is a feeling of pity or a warm, caring emotion that does not involve feeling, say, sadness if the other person is sad. In order to better understand compassion, Singer has studied Buddhist monks -- renowned for being experts in pro-social meditation and compassion. When they watched videos of other people suffering, fMRI scans of their brains showed heightened activity in areas that are important to care, nurturing and positive social affiliation. In non-meditators, the videos were more likely to trigger the brain areas associated with unpleasant feelings of sadness and pain. As a result, Singer is working on a study to help people learn to become more compassionate. Using techniques that centre on compassion or the Buddhist notion of loving-kindness, Singer and colleagues have managed to shift participants brain activity to cause less activation in areas of the brain supporting negative feelings about themselves. In the early stages of training, participants seem to show more empathy, but with more training this shifts so that their brain activity more closely resembles the expert meditators. Singer believes that this could be particularly useful training healthcare professionals and people under a lot of stress in order to prevent burnout. wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/12/tania-singer-compassion-burnout
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:37:15 +0000
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