12 Top Radio Shows on Empathy

By Lou Agosta on May 28, 2016

Here are twelve (12) top radio shows on empathy. Lou Agosta interviews thought leaders in the community about work they are doing that expands empathy. Note: interviews are

Paka, the cat, admires the book, A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, Recovery

edited to delete the commercials. Biographical information about the speaker and interviewer are included. Click on the hot link to launch the show:

Empathy: What it is and why it matters: A Conversation with David Howe: Talk with Dave Howe, author, Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters. This is the book that I wish I had written. Dave provides a compelling account of what empathy is about and how it plays in individual experience and in the community. Find out how and why empathy is intrinsically restorative of human wholeness – and thus how empathy heals. Dave does a great job and I am privileged to have had a dialogue with him.

10 Top Tips and Techniques for Expanding Your Empathy: The secret to empathy training is to remove the obstacles to empathy. Denial, resignation, cynicism, shame, judging, and so on, get in the way of being fully present with another human being – that is, being empathic. When one removes the obstacles, empathy naturally unfolds. When one removes the obstacles, empathy naturally develops, comes forth, and becomes present in the relationship. People are naturally empathic, and unless one must intervenes with practices that promote domination, manipulation, or devaluation, empathy shows up. Listen (click above) to the show itself for more details.

5 More Tips and Techniques for Expanding Your Empathy: Empathy is like oxygen for the soul (according to a famous statement by Heinz Kohut). So if you are experiencing a shortness of breath in your relationships, career, or commitments, maybe you need expanded empathy. In empathy one person is quite simply in the presence of another human being. Empathy is supposedly like apple pie and motherhood. What’s not to like? Yet being empathic can be confronting and anxiety inspiring because one has to dispense with evaluations, filters, diagnostic labels, and egocentrism and be with the other person as a way of being. Empathy arouses subtle and pervasive resistances. A Rumor of Empathy engages such resistances to overcome them. People are naturally empathic and given half a chance empathy will come forth, but it is inhibited by limited natural endowment, individual deprivations, and organizational conformity. Classic interventions can themselves represent resistances to empathy, such as the unexamined life; over-medication, and the application of devaluing diagnostic labels to expressions of suffering. Agosta explores how empathy is distinguished as a unified multidimensional clinical engagement, encompassing receptivity, understanding, interpretation and narrative. When all the resistances have been engaged, defenses analyzed, diagnostic categories applied, prescriptions written, and interpretive circles spun out, in empathy one is quite simply in the presence of another human being.

A Rumor of Empathy in Neuropsychology: A rumor of empathy in neuropsychology? Join Lou for a conversation with Joe Palombo, Founding Dean of the Institute for Clinical Social Work and Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Psychoanalytic Social Work. Joe’s work specializes in connecting the dots between neural science, dynamic psychotherapy, and learning disorders. The rumor of empathy is no rumor in the case of Joe Palombo, Founding Dean of the Institute for Clinical Social Work and Dean of the Joe Palombo Center for Neuroscience and Psychoanalytic Social Work, Chicago.

Listening to Killers: A Conversation With James Garbarino: A high bar for empathy? James Garbarino presents lessons learned from his twenty plus years as a psychological expert witness in murder cases. Understanding the victims of violent crimes and the survivors is relatively easy for any decent human being. It is easy to include the survivors in the circle of caring of the community. However, what about understanding the killer? A high bar for empathy. Indeed.

Affectiva Software Engages Facial Emotions – and Empathy!? – Chief Scientist, Daniel McDuff, at Affectiva [Software] discusses automating the recognition of human facial emotions using Affectiva’s Affdex system The system automates the Facial Action Coding Scheme developed by Paul Ekman (in eight years of research). While Affectiva is committed to respecting and maintaining personal privacy, the implications of this technology for privacy are engaged and discussed. Applications in advertising [where Affectiva has a strong presence], marketing, and law enforcement are considered. This is an amazing technological and social development – not to be missed!

Galileo’s Middle Finger: Speaking Truth to Power – and Power Talks Back! Alice Dreger starts out as a graduate student exploring the condition known as “hermaphroditism,” people born with sex organs that are ambiguous as to male or female, now called “intersex.” In reading the text books studied by her medical student husband, she discovers the interventions performed to “normalize” people sexually into the two canonical categories of male or female. The parents usually follow the recommendations of the physician-surgeon who are articulating a supposed community standard that one’s genitals should unambiguously be either male or female. Dreger discovers that many of the people whose genitals were surgically transformed were subsequently lied to about their natal [birth] sex by well-intentioned doctors and well-intentioned parents following the well-intentioned doctor’s guidance. Thus, the road to hell. Find out what happens when Dreger’s research surfaces evidence that does not align perfectly with the interpretation of a social justice agenda.This is a powerful and disturbing work. Alice Dreger, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, delivers a compelling narrative. A penis smaller than a person’s adult thumb or clitorises larger than one little finger, according to (some) conventional wisdom, have got to go. I am not making this up. The standard procedure was to surgically “delete” the offending member and surgically construct [some version of] the female genitals. This will, of course, resonate with Freudians everywhere as something motivated at the deepest levels of the unconscious. Not so Freudian is the proposition that if sex assignment from male to female and the raising of the infant as one rather than the other sex is the consequence, so be it. (Dreger is not interested in Freud in this text – that is my hobby.) Be prepared to get your mind blown!

Now for something completely different: Alien Love: Empathy With Aliens: Join me for a radio conversation with futurist and writer Stan Schatt about empathy, fiction, technology, and the future. Dr. Stan Schatt has led several careers including futurist and executive for many of the world’s leading technology market research firms, police department administrator, network manager, sales manager, autopsy assistant, software trainer, Telecommunications Department Chairman, and English professor. He taught at Tokyo University as a Fulbright exchange professor. His non-fiction includes books on such diverse topics as strategies for changing careers for green industry jobs, studies of Michael Connelly and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and college textbooks covering network and data communications technology, telecommunications, and computer programming. Schatt writes novels that cover a number of different genres. He is co-author of a tween adventure (Journey to a Different Dimension), an Amazon bestseller. He also authored Egypt Rising, a YA novel focusing on a teen’s experience in Egypt at the time of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. This novel contains paranormal elements including a secret buried under the Sphinx. Schatt turned to mysteries and wrote The paranormal mystery Silent Partner, a book about sexual identity. Pen-L Publishing will release its sequel, A Bullet for the Ghost Whisperer, in November 2015. Booktrope published Alien Love, a science fiction novel that Schatt likens to a cross between Casablanca and Star Wars in April 2015. Schatt also has published Extraterrestrial First Contact, a non-fiction study of the impact of first contact between humanity and alien races.

How Things Were Done in Odessa: A Conversation with Jonathan Brent about Isaac Babel and Yivo: Join me for a conversation with Jonathan Brent, Executive Director of Yivo [the Yiddish archives in Manhattan] about the work of Isaac Babel and how things were done in Odessa with replay shortly thereafter. “A Rumor of Empathy in Odessa” is a reference to the celebrated story by Isaac Babel, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” a humorous and tragic tale of the Yiddish mafia [try getting your head around that!]. In 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania), by key European intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to record the history and pioneer in the critical study of the language, literature and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. From its inception, YIVO was deeply concerned that the language and culture of East European Jewry were undergoing radical change in a rapidly modernizing world. YIVO’s founders were tireless in collecting the documents and archival records of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe, years before anyone could have predicted the devastation that would befall them. In 1940, YIVO moved its permanent headquarters to New York City, becoming the only pre-Holocaust institution to transfer its mission to the United States from Europe.

Emerging Adulthood at Drs Jesse Viner and Dale Monroe-Cook: Radio Empathy Show Summary: Join Lou Agosta and his special guests Drs. Jesse Viner and Dale Monroe-Cook for an engaging conversation about the emotional, psychological, and human challenges of emerging adulthood. Drs. Viner and Monroe-Cook address these issues with their clients as Medical Director and VP for Clinical Operations at YellowBrick, a national treatment center specializing in working with troubled emerging adults. The rumor of empathy at Yellowbrick is no rumor. Empathy LIVES by Drs Viner, Monroe-Cook and the colleagues and associates (an entire team) at Yellowbrick: Everything You Wanted to Know About Emerging Adulthood but Were Afraid to Ask: Addiction, Learning Challenges, Failure to Launch, and Helicopter Parents

How to know if you are in an abusive relationship: Three women a day die as the result of domestic violence [DV] (nnedv.org). Join me for an “on the air” conversation with Radhika Sharma, education coordinator at Apha Ghar (Our Home, ApnaGhar.org) on the VoiceAmerica Empowerment Internet radio channel (click here to listen to show) on May 6, 2015 with replay available shortly thereafter on what you can do about it. This is what I learned in a 40-hour training on how to combat domestic violence delivered by the community organization Apna Ghar. “Apna Ghar” is Hindu / Urdu meaning “Our Home”. (See http://www.ApnaGhar.org.) The rumor of empathy at Apna Ghar is no rumor – empathy LIVES at Apna Ghar and the work being there.

12 Shows in one round-trip: summary and index of the “Rumor of Empathy” shows: In case you were wondering which of the shows on A Rumor of Empathy is of interest to you most, then this is a good place to start. This show is a summary of the past twelve shows on empathy and the conversation in each about expanding empathy in the community. This provides a summary of index of the body of work on empathy in the entire series of radio shows. (1) Hear David Howe discuss his book What is Empathy and Why It Matters. (2) Learn from James Garbarino about Listening to Killers: Lessons Learned From My 20 Years as a Psychological Expert Witness in Murder Cases. Key term: Listening. (3) Hear about how empathy is tracking software innovation as Affectiva Software implement’s Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding Scheme. (4) Get your mind blown in the work of Alice Dreger on what happens to social justice when empathy collides with political advocacy in his book Galileo’s Middle Finger. (5) Discuss empathy with Androids in Stan Schatt’s book Alien Love (Schatt is a futurist, technology guru, and writer). (6) Join music composer, teacher, and activist Mischa Zupko in a conversation about empathy in classic (and all kinds of) music. (7) Learn about the challenges of emerging adulthood with Drs Jesse Viner and Dale Monroe-Cook, principals at the Yellow Brick Program, a residential treatment center for emerging adults. (8) Engage with empathy and neuroscience in a conversation with Joe Palombo, Founding Director and Dean of the Joe Palombo Center for Neuroscience at the Institute for Clinical Social Work. (9) Find out about the joys of all things Yiddish in a wide-ranging conversation with Jonathan Brent Executive Director of YIVO – Institute for Yiddish [and Jewish] Research. (10) Human rights and empathy are engaged in a conversation with philosopher-novelist Michael Boylan in which he discusses the relevance of fiction in morals. Empathy is oxygen for the soul. Feeling short of breath? Maybe one needs expanded empathy. Get some here! (c) Lou Agosta and the Chicago Empathy Project

A Rumor of Empathy in Modern Music: A Conversation With Composer Mischa Zupko: Join me for a conversation with music teacher, educator, composer Mischa Zupko. Empathy is all about listening, and what better way to take one’s listening up a level or two than to engage in listening to music? In a wide ranging conversation, we will consider how to take our listening in new directions and get a good stretch of our comfort zone, meeting. Music stimulates us to intense emotions, both high and low. Music sets the mood in movies. It stimulates buying behavior in ads. It relieves depression. It gets people dancing. Music can stimulate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move. Stroke patients can sing words that they cannot otherwise say. Music is therapeutic. Music is a powerful force for bringing people together into community. Come together with this program!