Empathy And Development

A walk in someone else’s shoes Empathy, defined by Google dictionary, is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Why do people have this feeling and how does it affect human behavior? According to Evan Staub, author of “Empathy and its Development” “Empathy is a source of connection between people that leads to a positive mode of relating to others. In time this can result in positive feelings toward human beings in general.”(p. 110 Staub). A world where nobody felt positive feelings toward one another would not be a pleasant place to live. Empathy affects everyone weather they feel it or not it plays a large roll in human interactions. If all people lacked empathy and only lived for them self’s, humans would not progress. Teamwork is the bases of all human progress. People are pack animals. Without each other they could not function. People work together as a whole. Most people spend a great deal of their lives looking for “their other half”. People are not meant to function alone. If they didn’t divide the chores of living; getting food, making clothes, building homes, etc., people would spend their lives just surviving and not thriving. Humans would not progress if they spent all of their time worrying about how they will
In order for people to successfully bring new human life to this plangent they need to feel empathy, or at least have an understanding of it. Keith O’brian, journalist and blogger, believes “Empathy is such a basic ingredient of the human experience that even babies exhibit it, crying when other children cry or reacting to the facial expressions of adults and parents.” (p. 2 O’brian) If mothers didn’t feel the pain of their children crying they would not feed them or care for them. Empathy is the basis of our instinctual behavior. Empathy is what makes humans able to care for their young, and for their young to make connections and full develop into functioning