Week 8: Compassion

A serene illustration depicting diverse people showing compassion, interconnected with nature and showcasing empathy, warmth, and understanding in their expressions.

The Compassion Quiz

Discover the depths of your understanding of compassion through our insightful quiz! This assessment will challenge your knowledge on various aspects of compassion, empathy, and their evolutionary significance.

Test your awareness with questions on:

Empathic distress and its implications
The roots of compassion in human behavior
Religious influences on compassionate practices
Barriers to compassion

11 Questions3 MinutesCreated by CaringHeart232

If a person is experiencing empathic distress, it is likely they are experiencing which of the following? Check all that apply.

A concern about their own discomfort, rather than the suffering of another person.

A strong sense of having the resources to cope with the suffering they encounter.

A strong desire to withdraw and avoid the situation.

Negative affect and a sense of being overwhelmed.

For bell hooks, the problem of internalized oppression expresses itself primarily in what way?

The internalized mechanisms of socio-economic advancement.

The compassionate liberation of a social reality.

The negative self-image and low self-esteem that oppressed groups accept as part of their identity, even though it is imposed on them.

Oppression as occurring only inside of social systems, rather than between them.

How does the tendency toward compassion in humans make sense in terms of the Cooperation Thesis? Check all that apply.

Human infants are especially vulnerable, and compassionate humans will be more likely to take care of them.

Compassionate humans will restrict cooperative groups in a way that excludes the vulnerable.

Humans in a group with many compassionate individuals will cooperate better because they will trust each other to help when help is needed.

Compassion is a form of hierarchically distributed cognition that is necessary for all cooperation.

Which form of empathy is most operative in compassion?

This is a trick question -- empathy is irrelevant to compassion.

An intersocietal parietal empathy that emerges only in cooperation.

A purely cognitive empathy that knows, but does not resonate with, the feeling of another person.

An empathy that actually simulates or represents the pain of the other person in one's own mind/brain.

Why would compassion help one get out of empathic distress?

Compassion requires action, and the feeling of acting (even mentally) eliminates the feeling of helplessness that can come with empathic distress.

All of these answers are correct.

Compassion requires remaining calm without any intention to do something, and since empathic distress comes from trying to help, compassion eliminates it.

Compassion is rooted in a sense of helplessness and surrender, and this counteracts the sense of agency in empathic distress.

What are some evolutionary advantages of compassion?

It enhances trust among cooperators.

It enhances in-group bias.

It supports vulnerable offspring.

It makes potential mates look attractive.

Which of these is true about compassion?

Compassion includes a sense of needing to respond to another's suffering, even if the only way we can respond is mental.

Compassion always occurs without any distinction between people that we are familiar with and other people

We experience harm to an in-group member as in some ways harm to ourselves.

Compassion is always positive because it never motivate violence toward an out-group.

Which of these applies to the hypothetical notion of "Innate Compassion"?

Humans come into the world with a predisposition for compassion toward any other human, regardless of group identification.

Humans must learn to have compassion toward out-group members.

Children must learn to suppress their compassion for out-group members.

Sustaining a non-compassionate attitude toward out-group members requires cognitive effort.

Religious traditions strongly tend to encourage the development of compassion. Which features are common to religion practice in general and compassion in particular?

Self-maximization (i.e., that the goal of human life is to have maximal power).

Self-transcendence (i.e., the sense that the meaning of life transcends one's own individual identity).

A denial of pain (i.e., the recognition that pain and suffering are not important).

A universal humanity (i.e., that we are, in some sense, "all in the same boat").

Which of these would tend to block the emergence of compassion in a person?

A sense that there is nothing at all that can be done to help a suffering person.

A tendency to be concerned with others' pain even at the expense of one's own concerns.

A strong focus on one's own discomfort with another person's suffering.

The sense that the other person who is suffering is completely alien or foreign.

What are 3 elements of compassion?

Self kindness vs self judgement

Common humanity vs isolation

Mindfulness vs over-identification

Self identification vs empathy

Week 8: Compassion

The Compassion Quiz

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