The best practices for good and radical deep listeners, according to the TED Talks reviewed in the previous section, include attitudes and behaviors associated with empathy. Pursing the idea of empathy further, I review scholarly literature on empathy. This led to resources with diverse perspectives on listening with empathy. I summarize several of these perspectives while noting the implications for listening to others, but first I conceptualize empathic listening.

Conceptualizing Empathic Listening

Tom Bruneau’s conceptual and theoretical review of the literature on empathy and listening^[1] includes empathy as, object identification (feeling into the other and losing sense of self), intimation (mirroring), psychological (perception and inference making), subject-object interplay (identifying, taking in, and “checking out” an experience), role taking, and cycling (stepping out of self, into the other, back to self, and back to the other). This summarizes the literature on empathic listening through 1989 and represents the disciplinary perspectives of Psychology, Communication, and Sociology.

Cognitive Active Empathic Listening

Over a decade after Bruneau’s comprehensive review of the empathy literature, Graham Bodie and associates^[2] developed the concept of “active empathic listening” as sensing, processing, and responding to others. Active empathic listening is a cognitive perspective of listening and does not directly refer to empathic listening as an emotionally felt activity.^[3] Researchers correlate active emphatic listening with a variety of topics, including personality traits, listening styles, social media, morality, and sex differences. Overall, the research demonstrates that the empirical categories of cognitive sensing, processing, and responding are the most important components of empathic listening. In addition to the cognitive perspective to empathic listening, there is an affective component of empathic listening.

Affective Empathic Listening

Philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich purportedly said, “The first duty of love is to listen.”^[4] This quote sets the tone of an essay on affective listening by Kory Floyd. According to Floyd, we all need love, and affection is one way to meet that need. Affection is something we feel, and affective communication is something we do. Empathic listening is part of the affection dynamic and includes nonverbal immediacy (e.g., smiling, warm vocal tones, open posture), feelings, validation as positive regard, and demonstrating that the other person is important by the listeners gift of time, attention, and energy. These affective qualities of listening, when integrated with the cognitive perspective of listening, broaden our understanding of empathy.

Five Types of Empathy

Daniel Siegel’s typology of interpersonal empathy^[5] includes both affective and cognitive qualities, as well as additional qualities compatible with empathic listening. Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiological perspective of human relationships^[6] includes five types of empathy that inform an understanding of empathic listening. Empathic resonance is feeling what another feels (affective empathy). Empathic perspective-taking is imagining oneself in the other person’s position (cognitive empathy). Cognitive empathy is an elaboration of perspective-taking with the added component of understanding (also part of cognitive empathy). Empathic concern is receiving another’s suffering and imagining what one could do to relieve the suffering. Then, if possible, carry out that action (affective, cognitive, and the new component of compassionate action). Empathic joy is experiencing the excitement and happiness of another’s good fortune (affective empathy). Together, these five types of empathy integrate the me (individualized self) with we (the co-created interpersonal relationship with another) into MWE (the extension of self to all other relationships, including humans and the natural world).^[7] MWE is a broader, richer, and more inclusive way of understanding empathic listening. The integrated MWE idea is compatible with the expansive perspective of listening to the SONG of life.

Neuroscience of Empathy

The ability to “see inside the brain” through functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) began in the early 1990s. Therefore, pre-1990 literature on empathy could only imagine what the neuroscience of listening might look like in the brain. Recent FMRI research of individuals telling and listening to stories while having their brains scanned provides evidence that, “. . . speakers [brain] activity is spatially and temporally coupled with listener’s activity . . . listeners brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay . . .”^[8] To translate, the memories and ideas in the speaker’s brain couple (show similar brain patterns) with the brain of the listener in statistically significant ways. Comparing variations in the speaker’s story (e.g., playing the story backwards, scrambling the words, and quoting the story) enable researchers to determine that deeper brain coupling (below the surface of the brain) is associated with a stronger empathic connection between speaker and listener.

Further, Marco Iacoboni’s fifteen years of neuroscience research on mirror neurons^[9] provides empirical evidence that observers (listeners) can detect the intentions and goals of a speaker. This is also called the “Theory of the Mind” which posits that we “read” the minds of others (understand what they think and feel) through a special collection of cells in the brain called mirror neurons. In short, humans are biologically equipped with mirror neurons that enable empathic connection with others.

In addition to empathy as brain coupling between speaker and listener, facilitated by the activation of mirror neurons, William Miller and associates discovered the brain’s “empathy circuit.”^[10] Miller discovered that frontotemperal dementia disease (loss of capacity to empathize and care about others) is associated with a specific part of the brain. Employing reverse logic, Miller deduced that this part of the brain must also be where the empathy circuits are located. In a series of studies, Miller found connections among various parts of the brain that display a cascade of events initiated by the autonomic nervous system that he dubbed, “the empathy circuit.” He found that the empathy circuit impacts facial expression, heartbeat, breathing, and muscle tension-movement. Miller’s research empirically demonstrates the brain circuitry for empathy, and by extension, the brain circuitry for empathic listening.^[11] The foundational insights from the neuroscience of empathy become practical in the following empathic listening practice.

Empathic Listening in Nonviolent Communication

Nonviolent communication is a dance of observing without evaluating, identifying and expressing feelings and needs, making positive clear requests, and empathizing with others in ways that makes life more wonderful.^[12] Empathy is described by Rosenberg as riding the waves of energy that another person creates.^[13] In empathy, the listener connects with the energy of another like a surfer pops up on their surfboard and rides the wave into the shore. Specifically, the listener identifies the feelings and needs of the other’s energy, checking their accuracy through a question like, “Are you feeling …(guess the feeling), because you are needing…(guess the need).” This feedback demonstrates that the other person’s feelings and needs are important to the listener, and that the listener is seeking clarity and understanding. Once an empathic heart-to-heart connection is established^[14] (by accurately identifying the feelings and needs of both participants), Rosenberg predicts that most conflicts can be resolved within a short time.^[15] The effectiveness of Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication of empathy is supported by some empirical research.

Carme Juncadella provides a systematic review of research on nonviolent communication and empathy.^[16] All thirteen studies found were conducted in educational workshops varying from five to forty hours in length. In terms of measuring empathy, nine of the thirteen studies showed positive results for “. . . empathy scales measuring different aspects of empathy [e.g., emotional empathy, perspective taking, and empathic concern]. . .”^[17] This review provides some empirical support for Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication method of empathy in educational workshop settings. I explore two additional resources for enhancing our understanding and ability to empathize with others’ feeling and needs.

Atlas of Emotions as an Aid to Empathic Listening

Imagine brainstorming positive emotions for ninety seconds (writing the emotions on paper or typing them onto a screen). Then, brainstorm negative emotions for an additional ninety seconds. Which list would contain more emotions–the positive or the negative list? I’ve informally conducted this experiment for three different college classes for more than ten years and, for nearly all students, the negative list of emotions is substantially longer than the positive list. Why are students more readily able to recall negative than positive emotions? Psychologists refer to the human tendency to focus on negative emotions more than positive emotions as the “negativity bias.”^[18] Moreover, for brainstorming both positive and negative emotions, students generally finish writing before time is called. This suggests that their emotional vocabulary is somewhat limited.

The ability to perceive, evaluate, express, and control our emotions is called “emotional intelligence,” and empathy is part of the emotional intelligence complex.^[19] The ability to identify emotions in others begins with identifying emotions within ourselves. Building a rich and broad emotional vocabulary^[20] enhances our ability to listen to others empathically. One way to begin cultivating a rich and broad emotional vocabulary is through the Atlas of Emotions:^[21]

. . . an interactive tool that builds your vocabulary of emotions . . . [allowing one to] describe how you are feeling and why . . . to gain greater control over what triggers your emotions and how you respond.”^[22]

The process of utilizing the Atlas of Emotions begins by identifying a trigger (the stimulus the precipitated the emotion) for the primary emotional experience on a timeline. The quality of the emotion is located on an intensity continuum that displays a range of emotions (e.g., the intensity for anger ranges from annoyance to fury). Next, a range of responses associated with the emotion is visually displayed (e.g., for anger, responses range from suppressing to actively undermining). Lastly, several resources are provided, from downloadable talks to documents, to assist in emotional management. In short, the Atlas of Emotions allows an individual to identify, understand, and appropriately respond to their emotions.

Hypothetically, processing emotions with the aid of the Atlas of Emotions should increase the ability to empathically listen to the emotions of oneself and others. Testing the efficacy of this hypothesis awaits future research. The process of accurately identifying the emotions of others with the aid of the Atlas of Emotions is the first part of Rosenberg’s method of empathic listening. The second part of Rosenberg’s method of empathic listening begins with identifying the needs of others.

Human Needs Matrix as an Aid to Empathic Listening

Standing in the mud in a small Peruvian village, Manfred Max-Neef, an economist from Berkeley, experienced an epiphany that changed the direction of his life.^[23] A small man, jobless, hungry, with five children, and a sick grandmother at home, stood across the muddy lane looking at him. With all his economic theories and data, Max-Neef felt dumfounded. He had nothing economically meaningful to say to this Peruvian villager. This epiphany marked the beginning of developing a new language of connecting with the needs of others called Barefoot Economics.^[24] His contention is that the wealth of a nation should be measured by its ability to meet human needs and not by economic measures like the Gross National Product.^[25]

Max-Neef created the Human Needs Scale to measure basic human needs.^[26] The Human Needs Scale is a matrix of human needs (the y-axis) crossed by need “satisfiers” (the x-axis) of being, having, doing, and interacting. The addition of satisfiers in the matrix of needs is a more complete and accurate picture of the function of human needs than the often cited Maslowian hierarchy of needs.^[27] The human needs matrix represents all of Maslow’s original needs and includes additional needs for the purpose of diagnosis, planning, assessment, and evaluation of groups.^[28]

For the nonviolent communication empathic listener, the human needs matrix is useful for identifying needs in oneself and in others. Once needs are identified, empathic questions are used to assess the accuracy of the needs. Having accurately identified the needs of the other person, the nonviolent communication process negotiates strategies to meet those needs in the form of clear, positive, and action-oriented requests.^[29]

Having considered multiple types of empathy, some of the neuroscience of empathy, and the nonviolent application of empathy by identifying feelings and needs, I briefly consider digital-mediated forms of listening to others in the next section.