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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying for wisdom in using empathy

Lynne Baab • Wednesday February 7 2024

Interest in empathy skyrocketed after the discovery of mirror neurons in the early 1990s. As I wrote two weeks ago, mirror neurons enable us to respond to and even experience the actions and emotions of others. The number of academic studies about empathy is astonishing. Empathy is studied in relation to just about any profession or life activity you can imagine.

I want to give you a sampling of the kinds of articles about empathy you’ll find online.

Here’s a quotation from a consulting firm specializing in negotiating skills: “Evidencing empathy leads to negotiation success.”

From an education center at U.C. Berkeley: “Students who...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying for empathy . . . and sympathy?

Lynne Baab • Thursday February 1 2024

When I first learned about the difference between empathy and sympathy, here’s what I absorbed from explanations of both words: Empathy is feeling sad (or happy, angry, or some other emotion) when you tell me about something that made you feel that emotion. Sympathy is seeing your sadness and acknowledging it, perhaps by saying something like, “That’s too bad.” With empathy, we feel some degree of the other person’s emotions. With sympathy, we can see the other person’s emotions and acknowledge them, without necessarily feeling them ourselves.

The tone of voice makes a big difference with the words, “That’s too bad.” A...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying for our mirror neurons (and empathy)

Lynne Baab • Wednesday January 24 2024

In the 1980s, neurophysiologists began putting electrodes in the brains of macaque monkeys, and in the early 90s they discovered a new kind of neuron that they named “mirror neuron.” These neurons fired when the monkeys did a certain action, and they also fired when the monkeys saw someone else do the same action. Humans have mirror neurons, too, and later research revealed that about 10-20% of the neurons in human brains have mirror properties. In addition to mirroring other people’s actions, neurologists hypothesize that mirror neurons enable us to feel sad or happy when we see another person feeling sad...

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