Empathy, Self-Other Differentiation, and Mindfulness Training

Decety and Lamm argued that empathy is “the ability to experience and understand what others feel without confusion between oneself and others” (italics added; 2006, p. 1146). Excessive identification with another who is suffering appears to lead to personal distress and avoidance rather than empathic concern. This is particularly a problem for roles involving helping or other forms of emotional labour. And yet there is a potential paradox here as empathy appears to be motivated by a felt sense of connection between self and other. How can we understand self-other differentiation in a way that allows us to improve it in organisations? In this chapter I present a contextual, behavioural approach that explains why mindfulness programs work to improve self-other differentiation. We can see self and other either in terms of a) conceptualisations, b) a flow of experiences or c) as awareness itself. Responding to conceptualisations of self and other can be helpful but can also impair empathy. Self-other differentiation at the level of content generally creates separation and judgement rather than empathy. Responding at the level of present-moment experience is the essence of responding to the others experience but it is here that differentiation of self and other is essential for mature, sustainable empathy. At the level of awareness itself, a stable sense of self beyond threat can be contacted in such a way to support empathy. Furthermore, in rare instances one can experience a sense of shared awareness that transcends difference. Mindfulness training appears to support the development of all three senses of perspective taking in a way that can enhance empathy, but also improve organisational outcomes in other areas such as authentic leadership. If organizations are to become more empathic, simple and effective interventions are required to improve individual empathy. Historically efforts to increase empathic responding in organizations have relied mainly upon either communication skills training or emotional intelligence training. Both of these approaches tacitly assume that improving empathy is a matter of improving skills. While both approaches can be extremely effective in organizations, in this chapter I argue that both ignore a deeper aspect of sustainable empathy, the capacity to balance a felt sense of connection with ongoing differentiation from another. Empathizing with others in the absence of a welldifferentiated sense of self can lead to secondary stress and burnout particularly in roles involving helping or other forms of emotional labor. This chapter presents an approach to understanding the basic psychological processes underpinning the construction of a sense of self and the capacity to take the perspective of others. I describe the interplay between thinking about the self and other that results in empathic concern, personal distress, or a range of other more or less helpful affective responses in the presence of another person (Atkins & Parker, 2012). In brief, I describe how we can see self and other either at the level of a) conceptualizations, b) a flow of experiences or c) as awareness itself; and how the nature and extent of differentiation needed at each of these three levels to support empathy is distinct. The chapter then reviews evidence that mindfulness training demonstrably improves empathy and suggests that this positive effect is at least in part the result of a changed relationship to the self and improved perspective taking. Empathy can be understood in its broadest sense as simply the responses of one person to the observed experiences of another (Davis, 1983). In the West at least, empathic responses are generally understood to consist of both cognitive and affective elements. Empathy involves both understanding the perspective of the other but it also involves caring, a bodily or emotional response to the other. For Davis (1983), perspective taking is the “tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others” (Davis, 1983, p. 114). Having understood another’s perspective, a range of possible affective responses are possible including empathic concern and personal distress. Empathic concern refers to the “other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need” (Batson & Ahmad, 2009, p. 6). By contrast, personal distress is a “self-focused, aversive reaction to the vicarious experience of another’s emotion (e.g. as discomfort or anxiety)” (Eisenberg, 2010, p. 130). Perspective taking appears to be a primary process associated with noticing and appraising the experience of another, while empathic concern or personal distress are secondary processes that are the products of that noticing and appraising (Atkins & Parker, 2012). Perspective taking can also lead to other emotions. Atkins and Parker (2012) argued that a person may take the perspective of another in the sense that they understand the other is suffering but fail to respond if they appraise the person as irrelevant to their goals or selves in some way. This corresponds to a kind of ‘cold’ perspective taking of understanding the other without really caring about them. Similarly, if an appraisal is made that the other is deserving of their suffering, then other emotions such as anger or disgust may occur. And if a person appraises that they do not have the capacity to cope with a secondary experience of suffering they are likely to act defensively to avoid exposure to that suffering. This is what the literature refers to as a personal distress