How To Understand Empathy – EQ
I will explain how to understand empathy (EQ), and how you can understand it.
In this day and age where it's popular to use disinformation to gain followers like "emotional intelligence", it's important to know the known facts about humans.
You will finally understand what empathy is and how it works in humans. But you will also learn what it's not. You will be able to understand who is autistic and who is dark tetrad and why.
As a hiring manager, you'll be able to tailor your questions and test your candidate during the interview to verify levels of empathy. That will increase your worth as a manager because you'll be able to discern who is what and why.
You can also do it on your current staff, partner, or children.
It will also give you an understanding of why dark tetrad personalities behave a certain way and why normal people get angry when the person in front of them gets angry.
Unfortunately, most people don't learn the basics about empathy, thus rendering them incapable of seeing it for what it is and confusing themselves and others.
The explanation and facts about empathy are scattered
It's important to know what empathy is, and what part of the brain, eyes, and side of the face does what.
Description and facts about what empathy is hard to find.
You'll have to read many scientific papers, like a mini personal meta-analysis, to learn how it works.
Some of the reasons are:
It is hard to find the science that explains it.
People have an incorrect understanding of what it is.
Populist terms such as Emotional Intelligence parasitize empathy.
Most people don't even understand the difference between empathy and sympathy.
I will teach you what it is so that you can evaluate others and yourself.
Here's how step by step:
Step 1: Cognitive empathy
Empathy is firstly made up of cognitive empathy.
It's identifying which emotion a person in front of you displays consciously.
Cognitive empathy is your right eye looking for muscle movements around another person's mouth and processing it in your left conscious, dogmatic, and narcissistic hemisphere.
This hemisphere copies the mouth movement of other people as you look at them.
That's faked and consciously displayed on the right side of your face.
You can do it deliberately since your left hemisphere is your dogmatic, inauthentic, manipulating, and lying consciousness.
Your mirror neurons do this consciously.
Step 2: True empathy or affective empathy
Affective empathy, true empathy, is mirror neurons "mimicking" the eye muscles in the one you're looking at.
It's your left eye doing this.
The information is then processed in your right subconscious hemisphere by mirror neurons.
Those mirror neurons are not copying.
Instead, they are trying to mimic the same eye muscle movement as what the left eye is seeing.
When your eye muscles contract and relax they send a signal to your body triggering an emotion that should resemble the one of the person you are looking at.
The only way you pick a partner or candidate for a job that utilizes their full potential of empathy at work and in the relationship is decided by their ability to relax in combination with levels of mirror neurons in the right hemisphere.
This is because the right subconscious hemisphere is only accessible when you're relaxed.
You know this to be true because when you're on the brink of falling asleep, you solve most of your problems.
The same goes for true or affective empathy.
If not relaxed, your left dogmatic and narcissist hemisphere will take over and copy the emotions of others instead of mimicking the emotion.
You can see this clearly in another person when he or she is faced with a person he or she dislikes. They fake a happy-to-see-you emotion, smiling only using their mouth.
Understanding this single thing will make you set up team-building exercises or listening sessions with your partner in a socially empathetic way to get the most out of it.
When someone needs you to be there for them.
Make sure you're relaxed to be truly empathetic.
Step 3: Normal vs mental pathologies in empathy
When you have working cognitive and affective empathy, you are a normal social individual.
Autistic and dark tetrad individuals (anti-social personality disorders) score under 30 on the EQ test.
It's a free test you can take to verify your levels of empathy.
Autistic individuals are low in cognitive empathy but have normal levels of true empathy.
They only lack the trigger mechanism to start empathy in the right hemisphere.
Dark tetrad types are low in affective empathy due to brain damage or genetics from parents from birth also known as psychopaths, or their brain gets rerouted during childhood (sociopaths) due to:
Parental physical abuse
Lack of parenting with no rules or delayed gratification.
Sexual abuse
Difference between psychopaths and sociopaths in the brain:
Psychopaths have:
Damaged left hemisphere making them low in aggression.
Damage in the right frontal lobe renders them without impulse control.
Damage to the mirror neurons in the right hemisphere renders them incapable of true empathy.
Sociopaths have:
High aggression like narcissists
Inactive right frontal lobe due to not being taught delayed gratification as a child or physical abuse.
Low affective empathy due to a dominant left narcissistic and dogmatic hemisphere.
Step 4: What most get wrong with empathy
If you are a normal human being and the person in front of you is upset.
Your true empathy will force you to mimic being upset.
You think you have control over this, but in reality, you don't since this happens to you subconsciously.
The same goes for the emotion of:
Sadness
Aggression
Happiness
Scared
Anxiety
Contempt
Surprised
Normal people become what they see depending on their level of empathy.
Individuals with mental pathologies do not become what they look at.
They only copy the emotion with their mouth.
Copying is done on the right side of your face.
Authentic emotions are displayed on the left side of your face.
Empathy is not intelligent, it's only some of your brain cells copying or mimicking other people's facial muscles.
Nothing more–nothing less.
IQ is your working memory in your right hemisphere but is not empathy.
G–G in your DNA gives you higher empathy–Europeans
In 2017, a group of researchers from China published a paper on one of the 28 versions of OXTR(oxytocin) receptor rs53576.
They found that people with a G-G combination in the helix (DNA) have higher empathy and that this genetic mockup differed worldwide.
They concluded that the lowest region in empathy was Asia and that Europeans are the highest in empathy.
In between are Africans.
This seems to be due to Asians being collectivists, meaning they put the collective first and not the individual.
People in Europe are individualistic and cherish the accomplishments of the individual over the group.
In order to form social bonds in individualistic countries there needs to be a feedback loop that connects individualistic people.
Empathy seems to be a biological mechanism that transfers the understanding of the emotions of others through the mirror neurons, in the right hemisphere, to inform others about the impact their actions create.
But empathy is not the only thing OXTR rs53576 is responsible for.
It also protects children from developing harmful antisocial personalities due to a poor childhood where physical and sexual abuse is found.
The children with rs53576 in their DNA seem to be just fine as adults after living through horrific childhoods.
Conclusion
Empathy is cognitive and affective empathy.
Cognitive empathy is conscious and copies the person's mouth you're watching.
You can control cognitive empathy.
It's displayed on the right side of your face.
True and affective empathy is subconscious and mimics the person's eye muscles you're watching.
You can't control true empathy.
It's displayed on the left side of your face.
Dark tetra personalities:
Psychopaths, including sociopaths
Narcissists
Machiavellians
Sadists (Narcissists 57%, 37% Psychopaths, and 32% Machiavellians)
Have extremely low true empathy but still have working cognitive empathy.
Autistic people have low cognitive empathy but normal true empathy.
More resources
“The Master and his Emissary” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist
“The Matter With Things” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist
“Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions” by Jaak Pankseep
“Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain” by David Eagleman
“The Nature of the Beast: How Emotions Guide Us” by David J. Anderson
“Emotions Revealed” by Paul Ekman
“Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage” by Paul Ekman
“Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition” by American Psychiatric Association
“The Parasitic Mind” by Gad Saad