Articles tagged with: empathy

Sep10

Developing Empathy to Increase Emotional Intelligence

Developing Empathy to Increase Emotional Intelligence

The ability to understand why people behave the way they do is a critical component of emotional intelligence, and it is a skill that can be taught. To be successful, it helps if you can develop empathy towards the person or people whose behaviour you are trying to understand. The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik (a student of Sigmund Freud) defined empathy as a process involving four components:

 

  1. Identification - focusing one’s own attention to another and allowing oneself to become absorbed in contemplation of that person.
  2. Incorporation - making the other’s experience one’s own via internalizing the other.
  3. Reverberation - experiencing the other’s experience while attending to one’s own cognitive and affective associations to that experience.
  4. Detachment - moving back from the merged inner relationship to a position of separate identity, which permits a response to be made that reflects both understanding of others as well as separateness from them.

Steps 1 through 3 involve the ability to put your self in the shoes of the other while step 4 requires that you detach yourself from the situation so you can present a “rational” and “objective” response.

Without being able to do steps 1 to 3 you can’t accurately do step 4, and as my experience has born out, it is not so easy for people to do steps 1 to 3. That is, people have great difficulty putting themselves in the shoes of others.

So what can you do to develop this ability? There are a few techniques that can be used such as:

Emotional attribution tasks where participants are presented with short stories describing emotional situations and asked what the protagonists might feel in those situations;

Faux pas task where participants are read a story with the occurrence of a faux pas and asked if they detected the faux pas—that is, a socially awkward situation;

Being assigned to groups that differ in terms of perspective-taking instructions before watching videotape or listening to an emotionally laden story and then discussing their reactions.

These techniques put the focus on developing self-awareness and mental flexibility, so you can step outside your own immediate reactions and put yourself in the shoes of the other. Empathy then is a skill that can be learned and you can use it to enhance your emotional intelligence.

Posted in Business Management