How practicing empathy skills can help you handle conflict during the ho...

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How practicing empathy skills can help you handle conflict during the holidays

PBS NewsHour

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2,377 views  Nov 28, 2024

Holiday gatherings can come with the invisible stress of potential arguments and conflict.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Tapping into empathy can help prepare you to face conflict head-on and diffuse a disagreement before it escalates.

The fact is, empathy, like basketball or drawing, is a skill you can practice.

“That is a fairly new take on empathy that we've been exploring over the last decade or so,” Karina Schumann, associate psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said.

Stanford University psychology professor Jamil Zaki says research shows that without empathy, people expect the “other person” - whether it’s someone they disagree with politically or otherwise - to have far more extreme views than they actually do.

A study led by Marina Weiler and others at the Division of Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia found that people who have out-of-body experiences can also increase empathy. The feeling of not being in your own body leads to the feeling of ego dissolution, or loss of self, and more connectedness with the universe or a “larger collective entity.”

This video was produced by Casey Kuhn and edited by Travis Daub, Julia Griffin, Erica Hendry and Yasmeen Alamiri. 

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