Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
Find a photograph of someone caught unguarded, ashamed or frightened or relieved, and look at it for a while. Notice what happens in your chest and around your own eyes.
Most of the time we glance at a face and move straight on. Holding your gaze long enough for something to stir is a small test of whether the feeling is still reachable. If nothing comes, that is information rather than a verdict. Try again another day with a face closer to your own life.
Qur’an and Sunnah
or a poor person in distress (Quran 90:16). The verse holds attention on the state the other person is in, which is where this exercise puts it too.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of educational interventions for undergraduate medical students found that several approaches improve measured empathy and compassion, while noting that the evidence for which ones work best is still slender. Brief looking exercises sit inside that broad literature. Treat this as a reasonable thing to try rather than a proven technique.
Menezes P, Guraya SY, Guraya SS. (2021). A Systematic Review of Educational Interventions and Their Impact on Empathy and Compassion of Undergraduate Medical Students.. Frontiers in medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Feeling for someone often begins with looking at them long enough to be affected.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Arranging your face into a caring expression does not reliably produce the caring. Do not expect the feeling to turn up just because you set the mouth.
Feeling close to your own people does not automatically make you kinder to everybody else. Sometimes it does the opposite and sharpens the line between us and them.
Underneath both versions sits the same small dread: somebody being displeased with you. That is the thing to practise surviving, and it does get easier.