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Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
This is worth watching in yourself, particularly if you are the sort who gets angry on behalf of a group. The same warmth that makes you loyal can make you quick to defend and quicker to dismiss. Widening the circle takes its own deliberate effort: one person outside your usual crowd, given the care you keep for your own.
We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another (Quran 49:13). Difference is given as a reason to come to know people, not a reason to rank them.
الحجرات
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقۡنَٰكُم مِّن ذَكَرࣲ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلۡنَٰكُمۡ شُعُوبࣰ ا وَقَبَآئِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ أَكۡرَمَكُمۡ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ أَتۡقَىٰكُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرࣱ
People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware
Qur’an 49:13read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a neuroimaging study, how strongly people felt envy while taking someone else's perspective was related to connectivity in one region of the frontal lobe. Stepping into another person's shoes does not always produce warmth, then. It can produce envy instead. That was an observational study of individual differences, so read it as a caution rather than a description of what happens to everyone.
McDonald B, Becker K, Meshi D, Heekeren HR, von Scheve C. (2020). Individual differences in envy experienced through perspective-taking involves functional connectivity of the superior frontal gyrus.. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Closeness is felt towards particular people, so it does not spread outwards by itself.
Find a photograph of someone caught unguarded, ashamed or frightened or relieved, and look at it for a while. Notice what happens in your chest and around your own eyes.
Arranging your face into a caring expression does not reliably produce the caring. Do not expect the feeling to turn up just because you set the mouth.
Closeness arrives much faster in a small group that keeps meeting than in a wide circle you see now and then. If you want to feel less alone, pick the small thing that repeats.