According to Dr. Valentina Stoycheva, the author of The Unconscious: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications, empathy is dependent on having developed a 'Theory of Mind,' which is the ability to understand and share the emotions of others.
"Many factors, such as upbringing and personality disorders (such as narcissism, for example) may result in an inability to experience empathy," Stoycheva told Bored Panda. "In addition, some people may situationally struggle with this if they are in an active state of being traumatized or have significant mental health difficulties. As a result, temporarily, they may have a hard time empathizing with others due to a lack of internal resources to do so."
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"Empathy is hard-wired into our species, some believe, which allowed our species to work in groups, form communities, and prosper," Dr. Ann Gold Buscho, who penned the book The Parent's Guide to Birdnesting, also told Bored Panda.
"They may lack empathy because of trauma in childhood, especially abusive parenting. They are in survival mode and scanning for threats (hypervigilant). Lack of empathy is associated with low intelligence and several mental health disorders, and some people may not have the internal resources necessary for empathy when they are overly stressed, just trying to keep their heads above water."
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The good thing is that egoistic behavior can be modified. "Empathy is a part of high EQ (or emotional intelligence)," Dr. Buscho explained. "It is a skill that many people can be taught through therapy and a desire to develop more intimate relationships with friends, families or partners."
However, she said that if someone doesn't recognize their deficit of empathy or isn't motivated to develop it, it will be difficult or even impossible to remedy, even with professional treatment. "Therapy would be helpful, as would coaching and feedback from others, ... [however,] certain personality disorders are so entrenched that the egoistic behavior may not be changed unless the consequences of that behavior are so painful that the person becomes curious or motivated to commit to change."
Interestingly, women are better at empathizing with other people than men.
Recently, researchers asked people to look at photos of the area around a person's eyes (the person is making a particular kind of facial expression, and the study participant had to identify what that person is thinking or feeling from a set of possibilities).
To see if cultural differences impacted empathy scores, data was collected from teams around the globe. Merging their results with large samples from different online platforms, the authors of the study were able to capture results from nearly 306,000 people across 57 countries including Argentina, Croatia, Egypt, India, Japan and Norway, and in 36 countries, women scored on average significantly higher in their cognitive empathy scores than men did, while in 21 of the countries, their results were similar.
There wasn’t a single country in which men scored better, on average, than women.
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“This study clearly demonstrates a largely consistent sex difference across countries, languages, and ages,” study co-author Carrie Allison, who is the director of applied research at the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, said in a press statement.
“This raises new questions for future research about the social and biological factors that may contribute to the observed on-average sex difference in cognitive empathy.”
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However, I am willing to bet that many of you, dear Pandas, have had strong reactions browsing through these pictures.
Dr. Valentina Stoycheva highlighted that this happens because most of us have a need for the world to be, at least to a degree, organized and predictable in order to feel safe. "People who act like jerks break social contracts that we all need in order to function in society," she said.
"Even if their behavior does not concern us, we still experience it as possibly dangerous or threatening. If everyone started acting this way, then society as we know it would collapse and that is scary."
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