North Seattle Community College
Embracing a Complex Future, Winter 2011


Empathy: "Empathy is the imaginary participation in another person’s experience,
including emotional and intellectual dimensions, by imagining his or her perspective
(not by assuming the person’s position)" (Bennett, J).

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Simulating Age 85, With Lessons on Offering Care

Kirk Irwin for The New York Times

Kim Burns, right, and colleagues at Westminster Thurber devised a driving route while wearing glasses that blurred their vision.

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New York Times
JOHN LELAND

Published: August 3, 2008

COLUMBUS, Ohio — What does it feel like to be old in America? At the Westminster Thurber Retirement Community here, Heather Ramirez summed it up in two words. “Painful, she said. Frustrating.”

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Mrs. Ramirez is only 33, but on a recent morning she was taking part in a three-hour training program called Xtreme Aging, designed to simulate the diminished abilities associated with old age.

Along with 15 colleagues and a reporter, Mrs. Ramirez, a social worker at the facility, put on distorting glasses to blur her vision; stuffed cotton balls in her ears to reduce her hearing, and in her nose to dampen her sense of smell; and put on latex gloves with adhesive bands around the knuckles to impede her manual dexterity. Everyone put kernels of corn in their shoes to approximate the aches that come from losing fatty tissue.

They had become, in other words, virtual members of the 5.3 million Americans age 85 and older, the nation’s fastest-growing age group-- the people the staff at the facility work with every day. What a drag it is getting old, even if it’s just make-believe.

As the population in the developing world ages, simulation programs like Xtreme Aging have become a regular part of many nursing or medical school curriculums, and have crept into the corporate world, where knowing what it is like to be elderly increasingly means better understanding one’s customers or even employees how to design signs or instrument panels, how to make devices more usable.

With the baby boomers edging into their 60s, engineers at Ford and other car companies have designed elaborate age suits that restrict movement and blur vision to approximate the effects of aging.

“I must say, you look lovely, said Vicki Rosebrook, executive director of the Macklin Intergenerational Institute in Findlay, Ohio, which developed Xtreme Aging as a sensitivity training program for schools, churches, workplaces and other groups that have contact with the elderly.

Then Dr. Rosebrook put the group through a series of routine tasks, including buttoning a shirt, finding a number in a telephone book, dialing a cellphone and folding and unfolding a map. The result was a domestic obstacle course.

Some tasks were difficult, some impossible. The type in the telephone book appeared microscopic, the buttons on the cellphone even smaller. And forget about refolding a map or handling coins from a zippered wallet. Dr. Rosebrook told the group an anecdote about being in a department store behind a slow-moving older woman, when an impatient customer behind her called the woman a Q-Tip head.”

“The next time you’re in line at the grocery store and you’re thinking, ‘You old geezer, hurry up, just think about how this felt, she said.

Dr. Rosebrook, 55, said she started Xtreme Aging three years ago after a teenage clerk at a hotel joked about her husband being a member of AARP. “We all started sharing experiences and realizing things that we perceived as discrimination, she said. She said she hoped to provide more training in the corporate world: at hotels or theme parks, at department stores or customer service centers. “But there’s a lot of denial out there, Dr. Rosebrook said. “They don’t see a need. We can’t even get AARP.”

The Macklin institute and Westminster Thurber both subscribe to a model of care for older people called the Eden Alternative, designed to reduce the isolation, boredom, loneliness and helplessness that plague old age. At Macklin, older residents spend days with children; at Westminster Thurber, administrators are experimenting with a small communal house for people with dementia.

Xtreme Aging is meant to foster sensitivity both inside and outside facilities, Dr. Rosebrook said. “You people already get it, she told the group, adding that her most memorable training sessions had been with children or factory workers. “They related to it emotionally, she said. “They said, That could be my mother, or That could be my grandma.’ ”

To approximate the state of people entering a nursing home, she asked each participant to write down five favorite possessions, five cherished freedoms and three loved ones on Post-it notes. Then one-by-one she asked members of the group to part with a possession, a freedom or a person: a car here, a husband there, freedom of travel next until all that anyone had left were two possessions.

“You guys just aged to the point of going into a nursing home, she said, as participants made the last hard choice, invariably giving up contact with their children. “What did you give up? All your loved ones. All your privileges. And at most nursing homes you only get to bring two possessions.”She asked, “How did that make you feel? Hands went up. “Lost.”“Like I want to die.”“Like I failed.”

The Cultivation of Empathy: A Skill in Multicultural Communication and Competency

Purposes of empathy are:

· To show that you care about the other person
· To foster meaningful, helpful, close relationships
· To learn more about other people
· To direct communication towards important emotional topics
· To let the other person know he/she is accepted as he/she is, therefore encouraging him/her to share more if desired
· To reduce your irritation with others because you understand them better.
· To reduce prejudice and eradicate negative assumptions, with the emphasis on the word "assumptions"

The practice of empathy is difficult. Each person learns empathy to a degree as a matter of growing up and living in the world, but how do we really practice empathy?

Practicing the Skill of Empathy1

The first is the ability to read non-verbal communications, particularly facial expressions. Paul Ekman, Ph.D. (http://www.paulekman.com/ ) has been studying facial expressions across cultures for about 25 years. He has worked to categorize facial expressions and has established some interesting facts. For example some facial expressions are cross cultural, like an expression of disgust or contempt.

In learning empathy, we need to note that facial expressions play across our face as fast as 1/25th second, which is about 2 and 1/2 times as fast as one can blink their eyes. At that speed, expressions are processed subconsciously, rather than consciously. The good news is that because of our mirror neurons, we sense what the our conversational partner is experiencing and then we can ask if we are accurate in our perception, which is an incredibly important part of the trust building experience.

Oftentimes, just the act of listening attentively will help the other individual relax, because most of the time, what others want to have heard is their feeling about the current situation, and when they perceive they are being listened to, they relax.

Another important part of the skill of empathy is learning how to relax. You can use the following breathing exercise as a way to relax:


1. Focus on the area of your chest around your heart. (Switch from the external to the internal).

2. Breathe through your heart 10 times, and remember a positive fun time. Try to re-experience it fully.

3. Ask your heart, which has a brain of its own, and can learn and make decisions independently of your other brain, how to handle this situation less stressfully in the future.

Empathy Requires Attention to Subtle Details

According to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi,Ph.D., author of the book Flow, humans can process sensory data, in other words visual data like the subtle changes in expressions and changes in tone of voice in packets of data including up to 7 bits of data, and the shortest amount of time between packets is 1/18th second. When you listen carefully, you can watch another who is feeling upset calm down, simply because someone is listening.

1. First, you have to make a commitment to listen, which means I neither agree nor disagree, I just listen.

2. Then, you begin to repeat their words to myself, with the intention of repeating a summarization back to them, which I do every so often. By repeating their words to yourself, you am keeping yourself from preparing a retort.

3. Having made a reflection back to your speaker, you ask if you have heard them accurately, and wait for their response. If they say no, you simply ask them to repeat the message until they say yes, you have heard me accurately.

4. In your summarization statement, you may include an observation about the emotions you are seeing.

When you commit to paying attention to expressions and the emotional message in them and listening for the story line and emotions in the story line, you have gone a long way towards being empathic.

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1Adapted from: http://www.articlesbase.com/fitness-articles/teach-empathy-1932532.html

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