Exploring the primal roots of mental health
by Bruce Wilson
The Dalai Lama is often held up as an example of what human beings can be: kind, loving, compassionate, even in the face of adversity. One of the reasons he is so healthy is because he had a loving mother.
by Bruce Wilson
This morning, I received a tweet about a new book written by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist and psychiatrist who studies empathy. His book is Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty.
Baron-Cohen says that our view of cruel people as “evil” is misguided and rooted in obsolete, theological notions of morality. In an interview with the Guardian, he explains that people who are cruel have a low capacity for empathy because of genetic makeup and early childhood experiences. Cruel people tend to have had an insecure attachment in infancy, now recognized as a critical factor in the human development of empathy. Continue reading “Can empathy be learned?”