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The Effect of Fictional Literature on Empathy in Children
... Due to its importance, empathy enhancement is central in anti-bullying strategy (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). For Learn & Cueto (2018) prejudice is also a result of a lack of empathy but little or almost none research has been done to see if children's literature can foster empathy and at the same time reduce prejudice, discrimination and enhance positive ethnic identity. ...
A person who witnesses someone experiencing pain can display a gamut of reactions ranging from concern for personal safety, such as feelings of alarm and fear, to concern for the other person, including sympathy, compassion, and the desire to give care. This chapter examines experimental and clinical evidence about the nature and the determinants of a human observer’s empathic reactions and their impact not only on the observer but also on the suffering person in clinical and everyday life situations. It first describes the cognitive and affective components of empathy before turning to the complex nature of pain. It also discusses the benefits and limitations of accurate empathy, the adult capacity for pain-related empathy, factors involved in the person observed to be suffering from pain, factors related to the observer, and the relationship between the observer and the person in pain.
The mentalizing (theory of mind) system of the brain is probably in operation from ca. 18 months of age, allowing implicit attribution of intentions and other mental states. Between the ages of 4 and 6 years explicit mentalizing becomes possible, and from this age children are able to explain the misleading reasons that have given rise to a false belief. Neuroimaging studies of mentalizing have so far only been carried out in adults. They reveal a system with three components consistently activated during both implicit and explicit mentalizing tasks: medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporal poles and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). The functions of these components can be elucidated, to some extent, from their role in other tasks used in neuroimaging studies. Thus, the MPFC region is probably the basis of the decoupling mechanism that distinguishes mental state representations from physical state representations; the STS region is probably the basis of the detection of agency, and the temporal poles might be involved in access to social knowledge in the form of scripts. The activation of these components in concert appears to be critical to mentalizing.
Bullying has proven to be a major problem in our society, one that can no longer be ignored. Unfortunately, every day children of various ages leave schools feeling scared, sad, anxious, and embarrassed, which greatly interferes with their ability to learn and to enjoy their childhood. This paper will review literature on bullying as well as the typical characteristics of the bully, the bullied, and the bystander. This paper will also describe a 2011 bullying survey and program that was presented to 500 middle school students by the author. In the Anti-Bullying Presentation, students were given short messages that could easily be remembered in the future when confronted with bullying situations. For example the scars that bullying leaves are like tattoos, everyone comes to school with a bag of chips; some bags are full and some only have crumbs left, everyone can make a decision on what kind of person they want to be in life, or what shirt they want to wear in life, etc. The term pro-respect was also emphasized with the students. If bullying is ever going to be a thing of the past, parents, students, and teachers must collaborate to overcome this epidemic of a lack of empathy for others feelings amongst todays youth.
Psychopaths commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, and this places a substantial economic and emotional burden on society. Elucidation of the neural correlates of psychopathy may lead to improved management and treatment of the condition. Although some methodological issues remain, the neuroimaging literature is generally converging on a set of brain regions and circuits that are consistently implicated in the condition: the orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, and the anterior and posterior cingulate and adjacent (para)limbic structures. We discuss these findings in the context of extant theories of psychopathy and highlight the potential legal and policy implications of this body of work.
Individuals with psychopathy show impaired emotional and social behavior, such as lack of emotional responsiveness to others and deficient empathy. However, there are controversies regarding these individuals theory of mind (ToM) abilities and the neuroanatomical basis of their aberrant social behavior. The present study tested the hypothesis that impairment in the emotional aspects of ToM (affective ToM) rather than general ToM abilities may account for the impaired social behavior observed in psychopathy and that this pattern of performance may be associated with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) dysfunction. To assess the emotional and cognitive aspects of ToM we used a task that examines affective versus cognitive ToM processing in separate conditions. ToM abilities of criminal offender diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder with high psychopathy features were compared to that of participants with localized lesions in the OFC or dorsolateral, participants with non-frontal lesions, and healthy control subjects. Individuals with psychopathy and those with OFC lesions were impaired on the 'affective ToM' conditions but not in cognitive ToM conditions, compared to the control groups. It was concluded that the pattern of mentalizing impairments in psychopathy resembles remarkably that seen in participants with lesions of the frontal lobe, particularly with OFC damage, providing support for the notion of amygdala-OFC dysfunction in psychopathy.
An Empathetic Literary Analysis of Jack London's The Call to the Wild: Understanding Life from an Animal's Point of View
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Developing Empathy Through Children's Literature
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The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
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The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools
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Simulating Fiction: Individual Differences in Literature Comprehension Revealed with fMRI
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Helping Your Child Become a Reader
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