How long does it take to Read a Person’s Emotions?

Psychology professor William Ickes found that our ability to read strangers during a six-minute interaction is limited, but other experiments showed that we have much greater accuracy when reading our friends’ behavior. That’s not really shocking, but what is surprising is that when study subjects spent just a little more time with a stranger, their ability to read that person was just as good as their ability to read close friends. The magic time span? Thirty minutes. Time, or at least the amount of information acquired over time, is crucial to empathy. That is not only the case for real-life encounters, but also for stories.

Lene Bech Sillesen writing in the Columbia Journalism Review

Empathy is a Choice

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. … This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams 

If I Really Cared

If I really cared . . .
I’d look you in the eyes when you talk to me;
I’d think about what you’re saying rather than what I’m going to say next;
I’d hear your feelings as well as your words.

If I really cared . . .
I’d listen without defending;
I’d hear without deciding whether you’re right or wrong;
I’d ask you why, not just how and when and where.

If I really cared . . .

More of Ruth Senter’s poem

Empathy at Work

One recommendation that executive coach Keith Ferrazzi gives clients is to conduct “energy check-ins” at the start of meetings, asking others to rate their energy level on a 0-5 scale. A low score is a chance to ask: Is there anything we or I can do for you?"

Empathy can easily be misinterpreted, says Kim Scott, a CEO coach and former Google executive whose book “Radical Candor” advocates for direct communications at work. Managers sometimes mistakenly assume they should ask a lot of questions about staffers’ lives outside work in a way that can feel intrusive.

Too much focus on empathy can cause some leaders to hold off on tough feedback. It’s counterproductive “when empathy begins to paralyze us to ‘I’m so aware of how you might feel that I’m afraid to talk to you,’ ” she says.

Ray A Smith writing in the Wall Street Journal

Leading with Empathy

Leaders can demonstrate empathy in two ways. First, they can consider someone else’s thoughts through cognitive empathy (“If I were in his/her position, what would I be thinking right now?”). Leaders can also focus on a person’s feelings using emotional empathy (“Being in his/her position would make me feel ___”). But leaders will be most successful not just when they personally consider others, but when they express their concerns and inquire about challenges directly, and then listen to employees’ responses.

Leaders don’t have to be experts in mental health in order to demonstrate they care and are paying attention.

Tracy Brower writing in Forbes

The important Tool of Silence

Your most important tool when a fellow human being is in distress is silence. Don’t be afraid of silence; learn to hold it. Although it may feel uncomfortable to you, it won’t to them. They’re working through painful thoughts and feelings, so don’t rush them. People will start opening up if you don’t interrupt.  

Moya Sarner writing in The Guardian

Why couples start to look alike

It’s folk wisdom that couples in long and happy relationships look more and more alike as the years go by. Peer closely at those old photographs, and you’ll see that the couples haven’t actually grown similar noses or chins. Instead, they have reflected, each other’s expressions so frequently and so accurately that hundreds of tiny muscle attachments to their skin have reshaped their faces to mirror their union. How this happens gives us a window on one of the most fascinating recent discoveries about the brain, and about how we come to “feel felt” by one another. 

 Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight

Climb Down & Sit with Them

The hardest habit for me to break was the instinct to turn the conversation round to the positive. It took a while for me to understand that if a friend is in a dark place, the most compassionate thing we can do is to climb down into that place and sit with them for a while. “If a person trusts you enough to talk about their distress, trying to cheer them up is like shutting them up – you are dismissing and trivialising their feelings. Give them the space to say how bad they feel and stay with it. Swerving away from it, talking about a silver lining, can signal you don’t want to hear it.” Focus on your friend and their words. Thinking too much about your responses can be detrimental. “I make a constant effort to calm my mind down and tune into what is being said.”

Moya Sarner writing in The Guardian

Most problems feel better when they’re on the outside

Adolescents, just like adults, may find the best relief from simply articulating their worries and concerns. Indeed, it’s an aphorism among psychologists that most problems feel better when they’re on the outside rather than on the inside, and this holds true whether the difficulties are big or small.

Adults can help create the space teenagers need to do this, so long as we remember to listen without interrupting and hold back from adding our own thoughts to the pile.

Much of what bothers teenagers cannot be solved. We can’t fix their broken hearts, prevent their social dramas, or do anything about the fact that they have three huge tests scheduled for the same day. But having a problem is not nearly so bad as feeling utterly alone with it.  

Lisa Damour writing in the New York Times

The Other Fellow

When the other fellow is set in his ways, he’s obstinate. When you are, it’s just firmness. 

When the other fellow doesn’t like your friends, he’s prejudiced and narrow minded. 

When you don’t like his friends, you are simply showing you’re a good judge of human nature. 

When the other fellow tries to treat someone especially well, he’s buttering them up. When you do the same game, you’re using tact.

When the other fellow picks out flows in things, he’s cranky. When you do, you are discriminating and just be careful.

When the other fellow says what he things, he’s spiteful. When you do, you’re just plain spoken.  

Diversity’s connection to Creativity

When people are exposed to a more diverse group of people, their brains are forced to process complex and unexpected information. The more people do this, the better they become at producing complex and unexpected information themselves. This trains us to look more readily look beyond the obvious - precisely the hallmark of creative thinking. 

Researchers have also found that creating and enjoying the arts can help us see things from a new perspective, by putting ourselves in a character's shoes. They can also create a feeling of connectedness and general kindness.

Opening ourselves to new experiences can seem hard to do, but it can help us cross divides and nurture new and inclusive friendships.

Julie Van de Vyver & Richard Crisp writing in BBC News 

A Simple Trick, Scout

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—"

“Sir?”

“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Empathy is always a risk

A few selfies in front of Tokyo Tower or the temples of Kyoto won’t be enough to understand the Japanese people. To understand them, you must be willing to live with them, eat their food, work alongside them.

This is one reason, perhaps, why the arrogant end up with few genuine friendships. How can you connect with someone when you think you know everything there is to know?

Empathy is always a risk. On one hand, we risk asking the wrong questions and, as a result, hurting or insulting someone. On the other hand, we risk creating a connection, an emotional two-way street we cannot close, that forces us to feel someone else’s pain and suffering.

Charles Chu writing in Medium 

Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.

Impulsivity and selfishness are just two halves of the same coin, as are their opposites restraint and empathy. Perhaps this is why people who show dark traits like psychopathy and sadism score low on empathy but high on impulsivity. Perhaps it’s why impulsivity correlates with slips among recovering addicts, while empathy correlates with longer bouts of abstinence. These qualities represent our successes and failures at escaping our own egocentric bubbles, and understanding the lives of others—even when those others wear our own older faces.

Ed Yong writing in The Atlantic

Fearing Outsiders

"It’s what we call an over-exclusion bias," Mina Cikara, a Harvard psychologist who studies intergroup conflict, said. When you start fearing others "your circle of who you counted as friends is going to shrink. And that means those people outside of the bounds get less empathy, get fewer resources." It also means you become more vigilant and obsessed with marking who is an insider and who is not. "You want to draw those boundaries brighter, so you don’t make any mistakes about who you want to share your resources with or who you want to trust," she says.

Brian Resnick writing in Vox

I’m on a search

At the trial in which he would be sentenced to death, Socrates (as quoted by Plato) said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you’ve done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone. It is a solitary activity that connects you to others.

So I’m on a search—and have been, I now realize, all my life—to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I’m at it.

Will Schwalbe,  Books for Living