Emotional Competence. Dagmar Rudel-Steinbauer

you see persons hurt themselves, e.g. they get their finger caught in a car door. Just looking at the situation, you feel the pain, wince and suffer with the person involved.

      Jerome Littlefield, played by the actor Jerry Lewis has the same experience in the movie: “The Disorderly Orderly”. In this movie, Lewis plays a caregiver in a mental hospital, who wants to be become as well-known as his father: however, this caregiver has developed the psychological peculiarity of feeling the same pain as his patients first hand.

      What is amazing is that this film was made in 1964 and 30 years later, this peculiarity has obtained a scientific background.

      Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered this form of sensitivity through the discovery of mirroring neurons in the cerebral cortex in 1995.¹¹ Mirroring neurons have amazing mechanisms in which different areas of the brain always react the same, no matter if one is carrying out an action or just observing someone else. This is why we involuntarily wince when a person we know well recounts a painful medical intervention.¹² The closer this person is to us, the more we are able to perceive and so mirror their pain. Thus, explaining why feelings are contagious and we can understand what others are going through. Therefore, mirroring neurons contribute to sensitivity so that we can react with empathy.¹³

      Empathy can also be interpreted simply as sensitivity. This sensitivity is the ability of a person to put themselves in the thoughts and feelings of another person, in other words, to relate to the experience and thus to the feelings of the other person. Added to the ability to feel for someone, there must be the willingness to understand other people.¹⁴ It is possible that many people in our society are able to have empathy but are not willing. This describes these “restricted” persons, as Balzac puts it, or more dramatically put “emotional autistic”.

      To feel for others is one of the central “soft skills”, professionally as well as privately. Because only through empathy is it possible to build up relationships with others and to be accepted as socially competent. Without empathy, relationships and partnerships would be very short lived, because feeling for others is essential to friendship and love. Also in the working world, every working person expects a certain amount of sympathy from his or her co-workers, colleagues and supervisors. On the contrary, I do not know of any human relationship or any areas of work, in which a certain amount of empathy would be a disadvantage.

      Developmental psychology recognizes empathy as being the basis for the development of any moral behavior in mankind. Nevertheless, research of the development of empathy is in its early stages.

      Tania Singer- psychologist and neuroscientist - is a pioneer in the area of empathy research¹⁵ and wants to study the core of human relations with this research strategy. In an amazing study, in which she uses magnetic resonance tomography, she can observe emotional infection or influence on many different levels. Mostly her research about empathy concludes that empathy can be learned like working out at the gym to build up muscles, one can just as well develop and train empathy and feeling for others¹⁶- no matter how old one is.

      One can only hope that there will be empathy-training programs in the future- maybe even paid for by social security!