Can Human Empathy be Taught?
Photo by Marcus Winkler
May is better speech and hearing month, the month we officially recognize Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs in the UK) and Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs in the US). While typically known as professionals who help those with physical or neurological language disorders, SLTs and SLPs also support children in their language development and guide both children and adults in social communication.
One key finding from a study of schools in the UK is that 1.9 million children (that’s 1 in 5 in England, Wales and Scotland) are experiencing communication challenges, the highest ever recorded thus far.[1] A primary school teacher said that communication difficulties were on the rise because children struggle with emotional dysregulation – “they can’t articulate their needs or how they feel”.
Can we help children manage their emotions and learn relational empathy? The answer might be couched in the larger conversation of how we learn human empathy and whether there is a critical period for learning feelings like there is a critical period for learning language. Can we actually learn to feel the way we learn language, and can we learn to feel our own and others’ emotions as an adult if we never practiced feeling them as a child?
The generally accepted but still contested idea about the critical period for language is that, to learn a language to what we used to call “native” proficiency (read, sounds like a local), you would need to learn that language before puberty.[2] The similarly debated critical period for learning about feelings is said to come much earlier, at around two to three years old. Based on these developmental findings, I would have been imprinted with a Japanese orientation to feelings since I was already four years old when I first moved out of Japan to New York City. I was reminded of how I had been imprinted with Japanese feelings when my friend and Professor of Applied Linguistics, Kyoko Takashi Wilkerson resent me an article we once shared in our graduate school days. The article was about empathy training facilitated by Japanese mothers and delivered to their children.
In her article, “The acquisition of communicative style in Japanese”, Patricia Clancy discusses how Japanese mothers teach their pre-K nursery aged children communication by modelling sociolinguistic patterns of dialogue like questions and response, but also social skills (which she more aptly calls conformity skills) and cultural values like empathy. Clancy demonstrates that mothers model empathy by talking from another perspective rather than instructing a child to perform or avoid a particular behaviour because it is good or bad.
For example, when a child is frustrated and banging on a door, instead of saying, “Don’t bang the door,” a mother might say something like, “Loud banging hurts my ears,” or even, “It might hurt the door if you bang it.” By encouraging a child to appreciate feelings from another perspective (be they people or things), a mother can teach the importance of empathy and understanding from another’s viewpoint.
In Clancy’s study, another mother guesses an older sibling’s feelings out loud when the younger sibling keeps serving her food. “I think she’s saying she doesn’t want anymore,” she says, and by standing in for the sibling who hasn’t said anything, the mother lets the younger sibling know that you can learn what other people want and don’t want even if they haven’t spoken out loud.
It's a compelling thought that empathy can be casually facilitated around friends and family just by listening and guessing the feelings of others. Understanding others’ feelings is also a positive public health contribution because by practicing simple acts of empathy each of us can help reduce the strain on SLTs and SLPs, currently suffering from a 25% shortfall of professionals. Listening empathetically can be preventative medicine.
Caregivers all over the world have shown that empathy can be taught and learned, and families that come in all shapes and forms today have demonstrated too that empathy can be learned long beyond the so-called critical period.
Thank you SLT and SLP professionals – May you enjoy many celebrations for all the great things you do for human communication this month!
#slt #listening #teachingempathy
[1] For the full report from Speech and Language UK on Listening to Unheard Children read here.
[2] The debate is about whether this deadline is actually hard fast, as neurobiologists will tell us that there are as many different brains as there are people. My mother, for example, though a late bloomer, learned her first English in Kentucky at 19 (pretty much after puberty) and if anything, had a South Midland accent in her American English, and not a foreign Japanese accent as one might have expected her to have.