2025-10-04 - Jodie Jensen

Edwin Rutsch15min

Speaker 1

00:00

It is now my pleasure to introduce Jodi Jensen. Jodi an empathy researcher at Brigham Young in university, she is pursuing a doctorate degree in social psychology and studies empathy in the broader context of positive psychology and character development. Oh, I'm already excited. Today, Jody will be talking about a clearer empathy definition for a stronger empathy movement, take it away.

Jodie Jenson

00:26

Jody, thank you so much. Just while, while Edwin was talking, I was looking at everybody's pictures or their their video screens and trying to connect over the screen with each of you, it feels a little bit I feel a little bit disconnected right now, and I wish that we could have a conversation about this topic. And so after I'm done speaking, I actually have to leave to go to another conference, but reach out to me if you want to continue talking about the definitions of empathy. I really want this to be a continued collaborative process. Just to give you a little bit of background, I've been meeting with Edwin for the past like nine months, because we've been trying to figure out, how do you define this term empathy. And so a few years ago, when I decided I wanted to be an empathy researcher, I thought I knew what it meant, and so I'm just curious if everybody can put in the chat how you define this term empathy? Maybe just like a one sentence definition of how do you define empathy? Yeah,

Jodie Jenson

01:52

and if one of the hosts can allow me to share my screen, I have a little presentation. Excuse me. I Okay, so I'm seeing a process of connecting of the other, accepting being present and connected with myself and others, attunement to someone's experience, imagining how the other feels, and active listening. These are all really great definitions. Okay, if it's going to let me share my screen, we'll get into this. Okay, so as as Edwin said, it's, it's important for us to have a clear definition of what we mean by this term empathy, if we want to create a stronger empathy movement. And I'm sorry it's not letting me change my slide. Here we go. This is maybe getting into a little bit of my background of why this kind of thing, why this topic matters so much to me. I remember as as a teenager and as a young adult, seeing pictures like this and feeling deeply, deeply moved by the plight of so many suffering in the world. And so I wanted to devote my life to perhaps overcoming some of the inequality that there is in the world, perhaps helping those who cannot help themselves. When I see this picture, I feel a deep sense of love, concern, sadness, and I want you to maybe tune in right now to some of the things you might be feeling as you look at this. And we already talked about this, your definitions of empathy, I'll read a few more of them, seeing the world through someone else's eyes, receiving another being. I love that one, feeling and understanding others emotions and circumstances and dealing with others with passion and practice mutual emotional connection, connecting to one another. Thank you so much for sharing those thoughts. So excuse me, I should have gotten a drink of water before coming on. In the empathy literature in psychology, there are a lot of different definitions of this term, and some of them overlap with things that people shared in the chat, and some of them are a little bit different than what we might expect. So I'll just really briefly go through some of these. It could be that it's an intellectual perspective taking process where you don't feel the emotions of another. So that's one perspective. Another perspective is that it's an emotionally reactive process where you feel the emotions of the other person only. So that's how it's been operationalized by other researchers. Another perspective on this is that you identify and you feel the emotion of the other person, recognize and share. That's maybe another way of saying that same thing. Let's see. Perhaps it's emotion contagion. Perhaps you're able to maintain your step. Appropriateness while objectively looking at the state of the other person. Perhaps it is an active listening process, which is a communicative process. Perhaps it's a vulnerable process where you show up vulnerably and you're allowing yourself to enter into the world of another person. Perhaps it's a set of skills. Perhaps it is a self aware intention to understand perhaps we're talking about it from a neurological, neurological perspective, and we're talking about mirror neurons firing together. So maybe it's neural resonance, kind of an overarching theme in a lot of the empathy literature in psychology and neuroscience is a three pronged approach, where it's cognitive empathy, which is similar to that perspective taking definition for her, and the second would be this affective empathy, which is the emotion sharing with another person. And the third is empathic concern, which many people would call compassion as well. So it looks like we're kind of a little bit all over the board on this, right? In general, though, it seems that most people, like, according to Hodges in 2009 most people see this term as a good thing. Um, fast forward to today, and maybe not everybody agrees on that, right? So we have all of these different aspects of this one umbrella term, which is empathy. So perhaps it's emotion contagion, emotional awareness, emotional understanding. Maybe it's compassion, maybe it's a cognitive awareness or perspective taking. Perhaps it's neural resonance or active listening. It leaves me scratching my head. What are we even talking about here, right? So if we have so many different ways that we use this one word, it's no wonder that we have a bit of confusion about if it's a beneficial process or if it's a negative process. This is a great quote from West and colleagues in 2007 it's he says progress is often hindered by poor communication between scientists with different people using the same term to mean different things, or different terms to mean the same thing, the potential for such semantic confusion is greatest with interdisciplinary research, and so perhaps what I call empathy is what somebody else calls emotion contagion, but yet another person might call empathy the same thing as active listening. But are we talking about the same thing, or are we talking about separate processes? So this has led to a bit of a measure. Just really quickly in psychology, we have different researchers using different definitions and operationalizing it based on those definitions. And then, if you have a scale that is created to operationally measure a certain version of empathy, then another researcher uses that scale to measure something different. We end up with, according to this study here by stossic and colleagues, 50% of these studies are not actually defining it the way that they're measuring it, which is kind of concerning. It's very concerning, actually. So I'm going to skip over this one for the sake of time, but I do want to focus in on Fisher's einfuhren. So einfuhleng is a German term, and if you speak German. I apologize for my pronunciation of the term, but this term it It came from the world of esthetics, like it's a way of interacting with art. It says in online etymology dictionary, a term for the theory of art appreciation that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer's ability to project his personality into the viewed object. So keep that in mind, the viewer's ability to project his personality, or her personality, into the viewed object. This becomes a problem. It's fine when we're talking about art, but it becomes problematic when we start talking about it in terms of empathy. So it's very focused on the individual here, and she is projecting the way she sees the world into the art. Okay, so really quickly to go through this. So we have a bit of a problem here. So when I'm feeling was appropriated into psychology, it became this process where self is king and other is diminished, okay, so it's a very egoistic approach that's very Freudian, and there becomes a misunderstanding of the value of empathy. So this has led to two different camps. So we have some researchers and political activists who are saying empathy is a bad thing because of the way that we have defined it. And then there are other people are like, well, it's not a bad thing. We just need to revise the definition. And so because we have these two different camps here, what has happened is we really can't have a productive conversation about what empathy is anymore. And so that's what we're trying to address today. Okay, so I'm. I'm sure that some of you have seen this. There are many different active discontents. We're very vocal about this. They call it suicidal, they call it toxic, they call it a sin, and they they're very openly against empathy. So if, according to Hodges, in 2009 most people in society see empathy as a good thing, what is happening? Why do we have such a wide disconnect? Right now, I'm going to skip over that as well. I think that we can kind of get to the bottom of this by understanding that when I'm fueling was brought into psychology to inform the way that we define empathy. It really inflated the self and empathy is a process that happens inside of me, and it doesn't matter how it's really like, how reality is actually happening inside the other person. So I get to decide how the other person feels. And so that's why, at the beginning I was saying I really I wanted to be able to connect with all of you, because I feel like when there's a speaker and people listening that allows me to inflate myself and diminish the others which I don't like. I don't like that process. I don't like the feeling of others being objectified, or maybe even subconsciously thinking that they're incapable of feeling or experiencing without myself projecting what I think that they're feeling okay. So maybe, with all of these problems, maybe we just scratch the whole thing. Maybe we just say empathy is a bad term, and we can't, we can't make any progress if we're using this term empathy,

Jodie Jenson

11:38

but if we are informed by some really powerful thinkers over the past two centuries. Perhaps we can see that the term itself is not the problem. Perhaps it's a deeper problem of the way that we see other human beings. And if we can address those underlying problems, then when we when we come up with a definition of empathy, for our empathy movement, it will be informed by seeing another person, not as an object and not as a subjective representation of how we see the world and how we believe that they should see the world and as as we Understand that the other is ungraspable and infinite and powerful, then we create what is called an i thou relationship, which is very different from this objectification that has crept in to psychology, where it happens inside the person and it doesn't happen in the in between. So Martin Buber would say, not only is it the I thou relationship, but he really focuses on this space between the two people. So you'll notice in this, in this graphic, I shrunk the size of the self a little bit, and I increased the size of the other, because empathy is a process that happens between us and a great thinker of our time, Edwin Rutsch, has said, when people complain that empathy is harmful to them, it is because it is unidirectional. It is not a problem with empathy, but a lack of empathy from the other person. And so we can get into a lot of the nuances of this, but I think the most important thing is that we're viewing the other person as equal to ourselves, no matter who they are. My perspective is important. Your perspective is important. And when we fundamentally understand that, that's when we see that empathy becomes something that should become a shared cultural value, rather than it being something that objectifies some people and calls other people perpetrators and they're, you know, other people, victims. It creates this space where we are all equal, rather than creating the problems that many researchers and many active activists have said that that empathy can create. So to bring it all together, I'm just going to read this definition. I'll leave this one out for now, but we can talk about it later, but I'm almost out of time, but this is the way that Edwin. Edwin has defined the term, broadly defined, empathy is a way of being in relationship with life. It is an attitude of living with presence, deep, listening, openness, being grounded sensitivity to feelings, curiosity and care. And so as we're moving forward, talking about this empathy movement, that's the definition that we're talking about. And my time is up, but I would love to continue this conversation offline. If you want to reach out to me, I'll put my email address in the chat. Thank you.

Speaker 1

14:56

Thank you, Jody, that was amazing. I also. Thought that I had a deep understanding of what empathy meant, until this talk blew up the possibilities for me, and I'm very excited to dive down the rabbit hole of operational applications of empathy in connection to the othering experience. Thank you for my new rabbit hole. I appreciate you, everyone. Reminder, she said, if you would like to connect on to have more chats on empathy and the relationship of self with others, Jody's in let's do that. See in the chat, do.

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