The Nature and Practice of Compassion: Integrating Western and Eastern Positive Psychologies (original) (raw)
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Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in the study of meditation and its health benefits, attention now broadening beyond simple relaxation techniques to other forms of meditation that involve the cultivation of positive mental states and emotions such as compassion. The scientific study of compassion suggests that compassion may be of crucial importance for our individual physical and psychological health. Moreover, because compassion relates fundamentally to how we as human beings relate to one another, its cultivation entails an ethical dimension that may be just as important as the medical and psychological dimension. In this article we supplement the emerging scientific literature on compassion by laying out a case for understanding compassion as a moral emotion intimately tied to the question of ethics and the cultivation of ethical sensibility. Second, we examine the individual and social benefits of compassion that support such a view. Thirdly, we describe in detail one method for the cultivation of compassion: Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT). We conclude by presenting current research programs employing CBCT and point to possible future directions in the study of compassion and its cultivation.
Springer Mindfulness Journal, 2023
Compassion science has been shaped and guided by Mahāyāna Buddhist conceptions of compassion, including the potential for compassion to be cultivated through contemplative practices and training. Despite these influences, important Buddhist perspectives and ideas about compassion are still underrepresented in the scientific literature. This Special Issue focuses on initiating a body of literature on skillful means, a foundational idea from Mahāyāna Buddhism pertaining to the enactment of compassion joined with wisdom. Arising from a seminal Think Tank centered around compassion and skillful means, scholars and trainers representing diverse perspectives were invited to contribute to a Special Issue introducing a variety of perspectives, insights, and approaches that may help to advance contemporary understanding, research, and training of compassion. This includes papers that examine skillful means within Buddhism and Christianity, empirical studies that draw on skillful means to motivate or frame tractable questions, theoretical papers that reflect on skillful means in relation to other topics in psychological science, and how common compassion practices may themselves serve as skillful means. Considered together, we believe the variety evident throughout this Special Issue highlights the potential of skillful means to serve as a broad and flexible concept that can inspire many new ideas and directions for the field.
Budapest International Research and Critics Institute (BIRCI-Journal): Humanities and Social Sciences
The concept of suffering is as old as human history. Efforts to reduce and eliminate suffering have been done in various ways. One of them is compassion, which is an effort to reduce and eliminate the suffering of others. The purpose of this study is to describe the manifestations of compassion that are present in daily life and to understand the process of how acts of compassion are born. A qualitative phenomenological approach was chosen using reflections on life experiences of 1066 participants (Men = 392, Women = 674, range of age 12-65 years) who lived in Jakarta, Indonesia. The results of the study revealed that he manifestations of compassion in daily life can be grouped into two major parts, namely tangible compassion and intangible compassion. Tangible compassion consists of financial support, material goods, helping behavior, and involvement in social activities. While intangible compassion consists of emotional support, companion support, informational support, spiritual ...
Introduction: The Moral Psychology of Compassion
At first sight, it is hard to imagine a full account of our moral and social lives that has nothing to say about compassion. The moral value of compassion is emphasized in many religious traditions; and many moral theorists have taken compassion to play a foundational role in our moral lives. Yet there is no agreed account of what compassion is. There is disagreement, too, about compassion's value – how, exactly, it might contribute to morally admirable or flourishing lives; what its limitations and dangers might be; and even whether it is important in our moral lives at all. Finally, assuming that compassion is morally valuable, we might wonder how it is to be cultivated. In this introduction, we shall sketch some of the background to these debates, before introducing the chapters that follow.
Integrating compassion to clinical care: a review of an emerging ‘Science’
Ceylon Journal of Medical Science, 2017
Sympathy, empathy and compassion are a family of connected mental states or emotions that relate to understanding and responding to another"s feelings. Compassion can be defined as a feeling that arises when witnessing another"s suffering, and motivates a desire to help. It differs from empathy, which is experiencing another"s feelings, and sympathy (a feeling of sorrow and concern to another"s pain or suffering). There is a public demand for health workers to demonstrate more compassion. This is reflected in compassion being stressed in mission statements of health institutions, and in the goals of regulatory organizations and medical councils. Increasingly, compassion and technical competence are both considered as integral elements of quality care. Despite their acknowledged importance in health care, empathy and compassion are rarely researched or taught explicitly. Measuring compassion is difficult and there is a need for psychometrically validated instruments. As a result, most research is on empathy. Empathy improves diagnostic accuracy, patient satisfaction, drug compliance, and lead to better outcomes (e.g. improved glycaemic control in patients with diabetes). Studies have found a rapid decline in empathy during the undergraduate medical course, believed to be due to poor role models, students experiencing harassments by senior staff, confronting clinical realities that counter student idealism, higher workload, and poor psychosocial support. Facing distressing situations with little support leads to empathic distress. The intensity of the latter is reduced by functioning as teams, listening to each other"s concerns non-judgementally, selfreflection to understand one"s own emotional reactions and cultivation of self-compassion. Skills of self-compassion and compassion towards others may be learnt through contemplative approaches and certain religious meditation techniques (e.g. "Metta" meditation in Buddhism). Sri Lanka could also draw on these indigenous cultural and religious practices and take a lead role globally in the emerging interdisciplinary "science" of compassion and health. Sympathy, empathy and compassion are conceptualized to be a family of connected mental states or emotions. They all relate to understanding and responding to another"s feelings. A simple, yet useful definition of compassion is that it is a feeling that arises in an individual who witnesses another"s suffering and is motivated to help [1]. There are other definitions especially in the context of compassion-based therapies in psychology. In INVITED REVIEW
ON COMPASSION_AN INTRODUCTION.pdf
Kyprianidou, Ε. (2019) (ed. & introduction). The Art of Compassion. Athens: Nissos Publications, 2019
Compassion is present in every day life and discussions; references to compassion and empathy appear often in the mass media, political campaigns and in a wide range of studies concerning medical care, education, justice, psychotherapy, ethics, art theories and more. This introduction examines the sentimental basis and nature of compassion and attempts to clarify the related notions of empathy, sympathy and pity.
A heuristic model of enactive compassion
Current Opinion in Supportive and Palliative Care, 2012
This article is an investigation of the possibility that compassion is not a discrete feature but an emergent and contingent process that is at its base enactive. Compassion must be primed through the cultivation of various factors. This article endeavors to identify interdependent components of compassion. This is particularly relevant for those in the end-of-life care professions, wherein compassion is an essential factor in the care of those suffering from a catastrophic illness or injury. The Halifax Model of Compassion is presented here as a new vision of compassion with particular relevance for the training of compassion in clinicians.