The Empathy Continuum – part 2

In the first part of this essay, I briefly introduced the idea of an empathy continuum, before diving straight into what might have seemed like a totally unrelated topic – our stress response system. In this post, I will try to explain how these two things are crucially connected and what this means for us all. So what is Empathy? The word “empathy” is thrown about a lot these days, often in vague and imprecise ways to cover to a variety of things from sympathy to compassion, but true empathy refers specifically to a natural capacity found in humans and known to exist in other mammals, allowing us to literally feel for others. To empathise is to place oneself in another’s shoes, see things from the other’s perspective, and to some extent, to actually feel what that person is feeling. Before we look at how this works, perhaps the first question should be why. Why did humans evolve empathy? When our ancestors first parted company with our ape cousins and stepped onto the African plains some six to seven million years ago, they had many disadvantages compared to both predators and prey, most of which were faster, stronger and better adapted to life on the savannah. To survive in this harsh new environment would have required, above all else, cooperation. Although there is still debate over exactly how and why our brain capacity increased so dramatically between then and now, most theories involve social cohesion, whereby through a combination of language, culture and shared responsibility,...