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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Empathy & Intuition

Do you think that the ability to pick up on and understand people's feelings - even when they are hiding them - is a skill one is born with, or are people more empathetic at first*, and then learn to pick up on people's thoughts and feelings as they mature?

* I'm assuming that empathy is more natural; feel free to dispute this as well.

12 comments:

  1. As with most aspects of the nature-nurture debate, I think it's a bit of both. However, I do believe that empathy specifically, and probably intuition as well, do have innate tendencies and some people embody them from birth more than others.

    As to your assumption that intuition is built as one matures, I actually think this could be an erroneous assumption - many times, children pick up our emotional states very naturally and affected by them, whereas once we get older, we often have so much static and interference going on in the form of assumptions and biases and our own egos, that we often completely miss out on what others are feeling.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. 2 comments and one post in one week! what is this world coming to?
    I think that people can have this "ability" beginning at any age if they are close to that person. Detecting the feelings of some random stranger on the subway, no matter how old you are, is quite near impossible. Unless of course they are bawling their eyes out. Then you would have to be an idiot not to be able to tell. And believe me, I have seen this several times in my few years of subway travelling in smelly new york.

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  4. Shoshana - I do think that kids are in their own class. I think what kids do realize, though (and it is incredible) falls more under empathy than intuition; they do intuit that something is wrong and the person is (say) sad, but they can't pick up on what it might be or how to help.

    As for the post itself, I personally think it's learned far more than ingrained, but I'm asking because at least one friend disagreed.

    IPTMFMH - I'll disagree. I can pick up on the feelings of a lot of random strangers on the subway...

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  5. "I can pick up on the feelings of a lot of random strangers" - maybe as you get older, or more aware, you learn to 'read' people better. You can pick up a feeling from watching someone's body language and expression which is a major part of how one communicates.

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  6. Sarah - Exactly. You learn to pick up on all the little things: Slight hesitations, how they lean, where their eyes go, where their hands go...

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  7. i think that its not a natural thing everyone is born with, i think that its a skill that is picked up - and not by everybody

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  8. now i am commenting to say CHANGE IT BACK TO THE POP OUT COMMENTS WINDOW.
    :)

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  9. I think that some people are born with the ability to read people, at least to some degree; how much they develop this ability may depend on their life circumstances. Certainly some people are empathy-impaired (I should know, I've met some of them), so it would make sense for some people to have a particular aptitude for it as well.

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  10. Children who are abused learn to watch for clues that they are about to be abused. The worse the abuse, the better they get at reading the signs of what's coming so they have lead time to escape to another room, etc (if it's possible). They watch their abusers' body language, facial tics and eyes very carefully.

    Many of these children grow up to excel in helping professions, because they have developed great empathy for the underdog and empathize so strongly with those in abuse situations such as what they experienced. They are especially intuitive of the suffering of their patients. Some adults who were severely abused as children develop such sharp intuition, people wonder if they're psychic. They're not; it's just one of the survival mechanisms they developed out of necessity as a child.

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  11. A2 - Woohoo! And no. :P

    Scraps - I hear that...

    Chana - I think that makes a lot of sense; I think it also applies to non-abused, though I could hear the abused being more attuned. The second paragraph makes excellent sense: Thanks!

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