The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science

"Well, as I mentioned, one of the categories of emotional intelligence is empathy : social awareness, understanding the other person’s feeling. But there are three kinds of empathy. One kind of empathy is where you sense how the other person thinks. So this can help you be a very effective communicator because you can put your message in terms that person understands. The second form of empathy is emotional empathy, where you feel along with the person. You pick up their feelings, and actually experience them yourself. This also helps tune into the other person quite effectively. The third kind is now getting into the realm of compassion. It’s called empathic concern. Each of these is based on a different set of circuits in the brain, and empathic concern activates the parental care-taking circuitry. Every mammal has this. It’s a parent’s love for their child. And it means you truly care about the person. It’s not just that you understand them but you feel as them. “Everything from politics and policy on down to our personal lives benefits from the attitude of caring for other people around us” I think this is absolutely crucial going forward in the world today. As Burt Bacharach said: “Love, sweet love / It’s the only thing / that there’s just too little of.” I feel that everything from politics and policy on down to our personal lives benefits from the attitude of caring for other people around us. It might be that the Oxford Handbook , just as the Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning , are emotional intelligence books that bring together the best research in the area. Because it can sound very squishy and soft – ‘oh, compassion, there’s no hard metric for it’ – well, actually, there is, and the Handbook offers up the best summary of what we know about compassion."