Reading literature builds empathy. Empathy is important in our daily lives in many different ways. (Be sure to specify about “many different ways) One way this effects our lives is of course, understanding of feelings. Being able to understand other people and the way they feel builds stronger relationships, a larger social “bandwidth.” Feeling empathy could also be the same as feeling compassion and sympathy. Sometimes you may feel so much for one person it will actually effect the way you literally feel. There are many different types of empathy. For example, let’s say your best friend has had a bad day and feels sad, and you start to feel the same way. That can be defined as emotional empathy. Or there is compassion empathy, which is instead …show more content…
A diverse team work may turn out to be better than a group of similar people with similar skills. By having a variety of people, you will hear different ideas and people will have different skills which may be way more helpful than working with people with very similar mindsets and imaginations. Plus, you can build those relationships as well! Personally, I believe talking to people boosts my mood and makes me a happier and brighter person. Feeling empathy would help me builds those relationships, and help me become a happier, cheerier version of myself. One way reading can help us with our empathy skills is by getting our emotions attached to it. Now I don’t know about you, but through my experiences of reading I tend to have my emotions get involved with the book. What I mean by this is I usually have a favorite character, and I get excited and light up when something good has happened to them. I may even have a certain dislike for someone, or even a hope for romance between two characters! Books can make me feel more than emotions than some people can make me feel sometimes. When something goes wrong in a book I’m reading I occasionally experience actual pain or hurt just from
When you read, especially fiction, you experience a broad sweep of human life. You gain access to the thoughts of others, look at history through another person’s eyes and learn from their mistakes, something that you otherwise would not be able to experience.
Compassion and empathy are two different feelings that humans can have for others. Sometimes one does not always recognize the difference between the two. Ascher and Quindlen convey the importance of having a place to call “home,” and to illustrate how homeless people are individual’s who need compassion shown towards them by the human race.
With that empathy gained from reading a person would be more likely to be civic-minded, be active in their choices and actions, and of course reading creates imagination. Empathy is not created by reading, empathy is not only for the literate. The fact that a person does or does not hold the skills to understand text is not a determining factor in whether or not they can show compassion and understanding for another or a situation. However, I do feel that reading allows a person to broaden that innate empathy through literature and learn of others lives, predicaments and struggles that are not like their own. Being able to read helps expose a person to the diversity of new worlds where norms collide and rights are taken and given. Worlds where morals can grow and shift and beliefs can take hold and wilt or strengthen. All from the text in a book, on screen, or found on the page of a newspaper or magazine. “What literature does—nowhere more powerfully than in fiction (the novel and the short story)—is put us in the inner lives of other people in the dailyness of their psychological, social, economic, and imaginative existence. This makes us feel, more intensely probably than anything else, the reality of other points of view, of other lives”(Gioia 422). The following text is an example of an essay that causes readers to empathize and understand
Burton defines empathy as the ability to not only recognize but also to share another person’s or a fictional character’s or a sentient beings’ emotions. It involves seeing a person’s situation from his or her own perspective and then sharing his or her emotions and distress (1). Chismar posits that to empathize is basically to respond to another person’ perceived state of emotion by experiencing similar feelings. Empathy, therefore, implies sharing another person’s feeling without necessary showing any affection or desire to help. For one to empathize, he or she must at least care for, be interested in or concerned about
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Compassion and empathy inspire change in a society whether it be changing individual’s usual way of thinking, uniting, or accepting those who are different. Individuals can use their compassion for something to cause a change in someone else’s thought of that thing. Several people have used empathy to bring others feelings together. People can also use empathy to show others to have acceptance towards ones who may not be like themselves.
In the article “The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy,” Paul Bloom puts forward a tendentious thesis. Empathy, according to him, is overrated. The imaginative capacity to put oneself in the place of an oppressed, afflicted, or bereaved person does not lead to rational, thoroughly-considered solutions to important problems. Indeed, it can lead to hysterical displays of ill-directed charity, the misallocation of resources, and total blindness to other significant issues. Bloom appeals to his readers’ sense of logic by using examples of environmental and geopolitical crises that require forward-thinking solutions; he suggests that, because of the need to think about the future and the big picture, a politics of empathy cannot be relied
I began to read not out of entertainment but out of curiosity, for in each new book I discovered an element of real life. It is possible that I will learn more about society through literature than I ever will through personal experience. Having lived a safe, relatively sheltered life for only seventeen years, I don’t have much to offer in regards to worldly wisdom. Reading has opened doors to situations I will never encounter myself, giving me a better understanding of others and their situations. Through books, I’ve escaped from slavery, been tried for murder, and lived through the Cambodian genocide. I’ve been an immigrant, permanently disabled, and faced World War II death camps. Without books, I would be a significantly more close-minded person. My perception of the world has been more significantly impacted by the experiences I've gained through literature than those I've gained
When we read books we think. We think about how the point of view of the main character does the stuff that they do. Books make us different from others. Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451 is the perfect example. She walks,
Empathy is the ability to identify with or vicariously experience another person’s situation ‘putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Empathizing is both an intellectual and emotional process that makes it far easier to understand and help others solve their problems. Finally empathy is a quality and a skill that all social care works must have (USC, 2012).
Empathy is the ‘capacity’ to share and understand another person’s ‘state of mind’ or their emotion. It is an experience of the outlook on emotions of another person being within themselves (Ioannides & Konstantikaki, 2008). There are two different types of empathy: affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is the capacity in which a person can respond to another person’s emotional state using the right type of emotion. On the other hand, cognitive empathy is a person’s capacity to understand what someone else is feeling. (Rogers, Dziobek, Hassenstab, Wolf & Convit, 2006). This essay will look at explaining how biology and individual differences help us to understand empathy as a complex, multi-dimensional trait.
Before reading these chapters, and listening to the lectures I had thought empathy was the same thing as sympathy. This brought me back to my first counselling session. It was about ten years ago, and I was telling the counsellor all about my problems at the time. When I looked over to see what she had to say, she was bawling her eyes out beside me. I had always assumed that is what empathy looked like, because I never understood the difference between the two, until now.
Sympathy; what dangerous feeling to us Social Workers, yet it comes naturally without any warning and we have to make sure we convert it to empathy before its too late. We have to make sure we do not only agree with some aspects of the clients feelings, beliefs, etc. that he/she believe in which translates into sympathy, but above all we should involve experience, understand and tune into her/his entire inner world to represent empathy. If we Social service workers use empathy, we will respond more expandable to the client.
Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling (Pink, 2006). Rather than simply sympathizing, empathy enables us to put ourselves into the shoes of another and actually feel what they are feeling. This vicarious sense allows us to better understand people and their experiences. Understanding others and their experiences is vital in education. Whether dealing with different races, religions, sexes, etc., empathy provides us with an avenue to widespread understanding of others that even language cannot.
• What does literature offer an individual? Literature offers an individual escape from everyday life. In the hope that he or she can take their mind to the unknown scenario that is fascinating and interesting. A person wants to expand their knowledge as well as experience what is the author genre.
Careers, school, work, activities, and spending time with friends are only some of the reasons why people are becoming inconspicuous and are unable to show compassion towards the problems and feelings of other people. Having compassion and sharing the feelings and problems of another is called empathy. Displaying empathy towards another person’s stress and worries is an extremely important concept that more people should know about because it will help both themselves and the other individual. Not only does it help them, but it helps shape society. Even adolescent students