The Congress was preceded by the traditional Educational Day which included three presentations. The first was a presentation entitled Empathy and theproso-dal brain: Integrating cognitive and affective perspectives in human and animal models of empathy, given by Douglas Watt, who reviewed the controversies around differentiating concepts such as sympathy, compassion and empathy. Watt explained that the first two terms sometimes are thought to refer to the process of "feeling for" someone, implicating an affective concern, while empathy is sometimes defined as "feeling with" someone, experiencing an affective resonance with another one's affect. However, he cautioned those who might make a hard principled distinction between "feeling with" versus "feeling for" in terms of whether these distinctions truly reference meaningful and natural kinds in the real world, or simply reflect semantic hairsplitting. Additionally, he argued that opening one's self to another's affect ("feeling with") may be virtually impossible in the context of any real lack of affective concern about the other's suffering ("feeling for") - further challenging any hard distinction between compassion or sympathy, and empathy.
展开▼
