Here’s a gathering you can care about.
University scholars are holding the first academic conference on empathy to explore how people develop feelings of concern for others and to discuss some of the unexpected consequences of that concern.
The sessions, which are open to the campus community free of charge, will begin at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 30, in the Gleacher Center, 450 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive. Registration for the conference, “How the Social Brain Experiences Empathy” is required and can be completed at: http://ccsn.uchicago.edu/empathy.
“Empathy, the natural capacity to share, appreciate and respond to the affective states of others, plays a crucial role in much of human social interaction, from birth to the end of life,” said Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology & Psychiatry and a leading expert on empathy. Decety organized the conference with support from colleague John Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology.
Empathy is thought to have a key role in motivating positive social behavior and providing the basis for moral development, he said. The subject has been a focus of speculation in philosophy as well as the subject of empirical research in social psychology and developmental science.
“But in the past decade, empathy research has blossomed into a vibrant and multidisciplinary field of study, which includes cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and affective neuroscience,” said Decety.
Researchers will discuss the occurrence of empathy in animals, the connections between empathy and morality, and how empathy develops in children. They also will examine the management of empathy and how, in some ways, it is not necessarily a good trait.
Decety will present “The Benefit and the Costs of Empathy: the Price of Being Human,” in which he’ll look at the physiological and social costs associated with being too empathic. A growing number of Decety’s functional neuro-imaging studies of pain empathy demonstrate the overlap between the first hand experience of pain and the perception of pain in others.
This overlap is likely to lead to personal distress and burn out, and compassion fatigue can be experienced. “Empathy is thus something that needs to be regulated, and such regulation can be unconscious or intentional,” he said.
The conference will highlight some of the best representatives from each academic area examining empathy, including neurobiologist C. Sue Carter, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, an expert on how the hormone oxytocin affects social behavior; developmental psychologist Nancy Eisenberg, Regents Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University, who has led research on empathy and positive social behavior for the past 30 years; and evolutionary biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, Professor of Psychology at Emory University, who has made unique empirical contributions to empathy and social behavior in non-human primates.
The conference is made possible through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, “Working Beyond Boundaries: University of Chicago Consortium on the Scientific Study of Sociality and Spirituality,” which Cacioppo directs. It is being sponsored by the University’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.
