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Positioned at the heart of psychology's theory and practice, as well as at the core of the so-called feminist ethic of care, empathy is nevertheless a matter of ambivalence for feminist psychology. This paper describes two symptoms of a failure of advanced Western-style democracies to get empathy right in terms of gender justice: the first is described here as the phenomenon of 'empathism'; the second as the 'female empathy tax'. Difference feminists (in psychology and elsewhere) have advocated a politics of recognition directed towards the celebration of the superiority of female and maternal empathy. Intended to enhance women's status, this is likely to backfire from the point of view of sexual equality unless complemented by a politics of affective redistribution between the sexes. Relinquishing the feminist attachment to the lopsided 'feminization' of empathy, in favour of its 'androgynization' as a fundamental human capacity, allows for the formulation of a post-patriarchal account of empathy.

This dissertation examines how a set of postmodern contemporary novels by women, queer, and writers of color in North and South America reframe the parameters of narrative empathy in order to revise what constitutes as an ethical human rights novel. This project is part of a growing scholarly discourse connecting the evolution of the novel in the Americas with changing conceptions of human rights as connected to racial, ethnic, and gender identity in the Americas. The writers discussed reconfigure the relationship between reader and victim within the human rights narrative genre. This reconfiguration is founded on a critical reconstruction of the problematic use of sentimental empathy in the nineteenth-century rights novel. Since this former brand of sympathy joined the burgeoning discourse of rights in the Americas to the representation of racialized or gendered corporeal suffering, the reader's understanding of personhood in the nineteenth century was ethically misguided and predicated on the victim's indignity. Chapter One details how Octavia Butler's Kindred critically rewrites nineteenth-century foundational nation-building texts. This chapter exposes the dangers of narrative voyeurism masking itself as empathy and instead points to an empathy devoid of identification through bodily suffering. Chapter Two looks at Sylvia Iparraguirre's Tierra del Fuego in order to deconstruct and revise both the colonial travel narrative and the South American nation-building genre. This chapter maps an alternative foundation for narrative empathy by fostering legal and temporal visibility for the indigenous subject and land. Chapter Three examines how Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña engages with nineteenth-century melodrama to define empathy as abject corporeality. This chapter defines empathy through psychological proximity and touch, demonstrating how the novel reforms political and gender identity at the cusp of Argentina's Dirty War. Chapter Four turns to an examination of Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Here empathy is defined through the reader's understanding of how nineteenth- century legal practices devastatingly defined land, voice, bodies, and citizenship in the United States. Chapter Five discusses Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez through its documentation of hemispheric genocide. This chapter shows how aesthetics can ethically capture empathy through silences and voids, documenting indigenous historical and bodily trauma. Human rights law and legal policy shapes and is shaped by the formal qualities of the novel and other art forms. The hemispheric human rights novel (1970-2009) uses narrative empathy to develop a closely interconnected relationship between law and literature. This, in turn, revises the relationship between the reader, the victim and national history by teaching readers how to ethically engage with the bodies and minds of the victims presented. First, the revision of the nineteenth-century melodrama and sentimentalism particular to the hemispheric context enables readers to witness the formal construction of an aesthetic model which uses absence and corporeal abjection in order to represent human rights abuses. And secondly, the use of legal documents and national history formally within the novelistic space allows readers to access literature vis-à-vis the national-legal space. Ultimately, as the reader beings participating in this process of decoding, their new responsibilities for the ethical reading practices demanded by the human rights novel are laid out, transforming the reader into an ethical witness.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of contributors -- Preface -- 1 Measuring empathy using the Basic Empathy Scale -- Part I The Basic Empathy Scale and parenting -- 2 The Basic Empathy Scale: psychometric properties and contributions to the understanding of antisocial behaviour -- 3 Parents' empathy and child attachment security: a brief review -- 4 Parenting style and empathy in youth: a three-level meta-analysis -- Part II Empathy and offending -- 5 Contextual correlates of empathy -- 6 Empathy, convictions, and self-reported offending of males and females in the Cambridge study in delinquent development -- 7 Empathy and reoffending in a UK probation sample -- 8 Empathy and psychopathy: how are they related in men and women? -- 9 Correlates of affective and cognitive empathy among incarcerated male and female youth offenders -- 10 The relationship between empathy, clinical problems, and reoffending in a sample of Canadian male offenders -- 11 Enhancing empathy amongst mentally disordered offenders with music therapy -- Part III Aggression and bullying -- 12 Cognitive empathy as a moderator in the relation between negative emotionality traits and schoolchildren's aggressive behaviours -- 13 Low cognitive empathy and its relationship to relational, online, and physical aggression in young adults in Australia -- 14 Empathy in Polish and Spanish children and adolescents: validation of the Basic Empathy Scale and its relation to bullying, cyberbullying, and other antisocial behaviours -- 15 Risk factors for cyberbullying: the mediating role of empathy in adolescents in Italy in a one-year follow-up study -- 16 A retrospective examination of bullying victimisation during high school: exploring narcissism deficits and empathy.

Is empathy a remedy for prejudice? This short paper argues it has a large role to play. It explores the authors' observations as a Humanities teacher engaging Grade 8 Australian students between the ages of 12 and 14 in a study of the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. As students empathised with Aboriginal (Indigenous Australian) children forcibly removed from their families under Australian government policy in the twentieth century, they questioned the negative things they themselves had come to believe about Indigenous Australians.

An educator finds empathy is key to conntecting students with each other and with their instructors.

carolyn j. dean is Professor of History at Brown University. She is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "Empathy,Suffering, and Indifference after the Holocaust."

In order for social interactions in general, and empathic understanding in particular to be carried out optimally, an adjustment of the common representations is necessary. If projecting the traits of the self upon others does not require the storage of knowledge about them, empathic understanding necessarily presupposes the inclusion of the catacteristics of others in the personal self. However, empathy means no complete overlap or confusion of one's emotions with others, so mental flexibility becomes an important aspect of empathy. The individual needs to calibrate his own perspective, which is activated by interaction with the other, or even by his mere imagination. This calibration involves the involvement of executive functions that are mediated by the prefrontal cortex