Embodied empathy
September 24th, 2009 by Mary
Natural History magazine has published an article by Frans de Waal that is excerpted from his recent book, The Age of Empathy. He discusses the bodily basis for feelings of empathy, from shared laughter, shared yawns, and other forms of physical synchrony across a variety of species. (The sequence of images of a yawning primate had me yawning too.) His focus is on the often instinctive and unconscious way that our bodies synch up with those of others, providing the basis for more conscious thoughts and feeling related to empathy.
