By Nick Wadhams from Time. "In the history of foreign aid, it looked pretty harmless: a young Florida businessman decided to collect a million shirts and send them to poor people in Africa. Jason Sadler just wanted to help. He thought he'd start with all the leftover T-shirts from his advertising...

By Maia Szalavitz from Time. "Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person's...

By Rachel Rettner from msnbc . Other people's good deeds inspire the rest of us, study suggests. "The warm and fuzzy feelings you may experience after watching others perform virtuous deeds may in turn lead you to act altruistically as well, according to a new study based on the results of two...

by Geoff Pursinger from The Tigard Times "Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener stood before a group of more than 2,000 students at Tigard High School, Jan. 11, delivering a message of tolerance and forgiveness at the school’s annual Human Rights Assembly. Wiener, 83, spoke about his early life growing...

by Michael Torrice from Science "Some people can read your face and know you've had a bad day. Others seem oblivious. Now, researchers have pinpointed a genetic explanation for why some people are better empathizers than others. Empathy is crucial for our everyday social interactions. Neuroscientists...

by Natalie Angier from NYT "As the festival of mandatory gratitude looms into view, allow me to offer a few suggestions on what, exactly, you should be thankful for... Above all, be thankful for your brain’s supply of oxytocin, the small, celebrated peptide hormone that, by the looks of it, helps...

By Jerome Groopman "Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student...

The "Reproducing Virtues" series has a new podcast on the place for the virtue of trust within economics. The series is described below: "In a few breathtaking months, we've culturally moved from seeing Wall Street as an icon of thriving civil society to discussing its workings with...

A recent article in Science News discusses a study about the psychological mechanisms mediating the relationship between pain and empathy. "In 1985, Monday Night Football fans looked on as Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann was sacked. The collision was so forceful that it snapped Theismann...

By Liisa Myyrya, Soile Juujaumlrvi and Kaija Pesso The aim of this study was to clarify the relationships between empathy variables, personal values and moral reasoning. The impact of empathic concern, perspective taking and personal values measured by the Portrait Value Questionnaire on moral schemas...

By Eva E. A. Skoe This study examined the link between care-based moral reasoning and three different aspects of empathy—perspective taking, sympathy and personal distress. Participants were 30 female and 28 male students, ranging in age from 20 to 42 years. As expected, results showed that perspective...

by François Grenier and Andreas Lüthi " A study in this issue reports that mice can be fear conditioned through observation of other mice receiving aversive stimuli and identifies some of the brain regions involved in this observational fear learning. Do mice have empathy? This question may elicit...

By Oliver Putz Recent advances in evolutionary biology and ethology suggest that humans are not the only species capable of empathy and possibly morality, suggesting that the concept of the imago Dei could be extended to accommodate moral species other than our own. Read the article . Image from Flickr...

By J.D. Trout "The Empathy Gap is, with the author's words, a "story of the American freedom", as seen from the point of view of psychology of behavior and decision-making. With a friendly style of discoursing and down-to-earth examples the author explains why, what we think as freedom...

Abstract: In this paper, we will examine and untangle a conflict mainly between a developmental psychologist, Martin Hoffman and a social psychologist, Daniel Batson. According to Hoffman, empathic distress, a vicarious feeling through empathy, is transformed into an altruistic motivation. Batson and...

This article considers psychological disorders in the light of several virtues and vices. Abstract : The authors investigated the associations between attachment, empathy, rumination, forgiveness, and depressive symptoms via the framework of attachment theory. Participants (N = 221; 141 F and 80 M) completed...

Abstract: Our ability to have an experience of another's pain is characteristic of empathy . Using functional imaging, we assessed brain activity while volunteers experienced a painful stimulus and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal indicating that their loved one—present in...