Empathy is considered a key factor in excellent performance in the field of professional communication (Fuller, et al., 2018). Despite this, training empathy competence is not a current focus for many professional programs. This may be because there is no known model of empathy competence applied to professional communication contexts. Furthermore, how exactly empathy plays a role in the success or failure of communication projects is not known.
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How do you train creativity, empathy and collaboration in a virtual world? In this talk I will take you through Connected Creativity in VR – an educational project in which students meet each other as avatars in VRChat and learn beyond the screen. You will discover how artistic assignments, playful interaction and reflection in a virtual space lead to deep human learning. Expect inspiration, practical examples and concrete ideas to make your education more creative and sensory – even digitally.
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Empathy competence is considered a key aspect of excellent performancein communication professions. But we lack an overview of the specificknowledge, attitudes, and skills required to develop such competence inprofessional communication. Through interviews with 35 seasoned communication professionals, this article explores the role and nature ofempathy competence in professional interactions. The analysis resulted in aframework that details the skills, knowledge, and attitudinal aspects ofempathy; distinguishes five actions through which empathy manifests itself;and sketches relationships of empathy with several auxiliary factors. Theframework can be used for professional development, recruitment, and thedesign of communication education programs.
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Empathy is an important competence for communication professionals. This article investigates two aspects of empathy in an educational setting: the validity of self versus other assessments and the manifestation of empathy in communicative behaviors. Communication students were given a mediating role in discussions with two clients and their empathy was measured using self-ratings and client assessments. Videos of highest- and lowest-rated students were analyzed to identify empathy-related behaviors. No correlation was found between self-rated empathy and clients’ assessments. Several verbal and nonverbal behaviors corresponded to empathy: body language, an other-orientation in asking questions, paraphrasing, and a solution orientation.
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Socially aware persuasive games that use immersive technologies often appeal to empathy, prompting users to feel and understand the struggles of another. However, the often sought-after standing in another's shoes' experience, in which users virtually inhabit another in distress, may complicate other-oriented empathy. Following a Research through Design approach, we designed for other-oriented empathy - focusing on a partaker-perspective and diegetic reflection - which resulted in Permanent; a virtual reality game designed to foster empathy towards evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. We deployed Permanent 'in the wild' and carried out a qualitative study with 78 participants in the Netherlands and Japan to capture user experiences. Content Analysis of the data showed a predominance of other-oriented empathy across countries, and in our Thematic Analysis, we identified the themes of 'Spatial, Other, and Self -Awareness', 'Personal Accounts', 'Ambivalence', and 'Transdiegetic Items', resulting in design insights for fostering other-oriented empathy through virtual reality.
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Higher education, as a catalyst for social progress and talent development, holds a unique position to foster mutual learning across sectors, disciplines, life-spheres and communities. By nurturing critical thinking and creativity, education can empower students to drive and take societal and environmental responsibility. Empathic co-design emerges as a crucial approach for navigating complexity and establishing change. Exposure to diverse perspectives encourages individuals, particularly students, to expand their empathy by challenging their preconceptions, fostering understanding, and promoting a deeper sense of interconnectedness with others. Recognizing the significance of empathy in educational co-design contexts and beyond, this paper introduces the Empathy Compass. Through two case studies on the societal impact of Ecstasy production and use, we demonstrate the Compass's utility in tracking students’ empathic awareness. The practice-oriented, three-dimensional tool highlights specific mindsets, activities and methodologies within each quadrant, its intersections and the ‘we-space’. The Empathy Compass emerges as a valuable tool for higher education, supporting the stimulation, facilitation and assessment of empathic awareness in multi-stakeholder collaboration. Om het arikel te kunnen lezen moet het aangekocht worden: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZT7WHUWNC5C3CTTZ7REH/full?target=10.1080/07294360.2025.2510670#abstract
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Persuasive games exist for a wide variety of objectives, from marketing, to healthcare and activism. Some of the more socially-aware ones cast players as members of disenfranchised minorities, such as migrants, prompting them to 'see what they see'. In parallel, a growing number of designers has recently started to leverage immersive technologies to enable the public to temporarily inhabit another person, to 'sense what they sense'. From these two converging perspectives, we hypothesize a still-uncharted space of opportunities at the crossroads of games, empathy, persuasion, and immersion. Following a Research through Design approach, we explored this space by designing A Breathtaking Journey, an embodied and multisensory mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee's journey. A qualitative study was conducted with a grounded theory/open coding methodology to tease out empathy-arousing characteristics, and to chart this novel game design space. As we elaborate on our analysis, we provide insights on empathic mixed-reality experiences, and conclude with offering three design opportunities: visceral engagement, reflective moments and affective appeals, to spur future research and design.
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Historical empathy can be helpful when learning history. However, we do not know what students do when completing an empathy-task or how they perceive this type of task. In the explorative study presented in this article, we recognized different types of empathy-tasks, we saw students showing cognitive as well as affective elements in their responses on an empathy task, and we learned that students think that empathy-tasks are mainly useful to remember facts. Students also mentioned comparing the past with the present and imagining other people’s lives as goals of empathy-tasks.
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Although empathy is an essential aspect of co-design, the design community lacks a systematic overview of the key dimensions and elements that foster empathy in design. This paper introduces an empathic formation compass, based on a comparison of existing relevant frameworks. Empathic formation is defined here as the formative process of becoming an empathic design professional who knows which attitude, skills and knowledge are applicable in a co-design process. The empathic formation compass provides designers with a vocabulary that helps them understand what kind of key dimensions and elements influence empathic formation in co-design and how that informs designers’ role and design decisions. In addition, the empathic formation compass aims to support reflection and to evaluate co-design projects beyond the mere reliance on methods. In this way, empathic design can be made into a conscious activity in which designers regulate and include their own feelings and experiences (first-person perspective), and decrease empathic bias. We identify four important intersecting dimensions that empathy is comprised of in design and describe their dynamic relations. The first two opposing dimensions are denoted by empathy and differentiate between cognitive design processes and affective design experiences, and between self-and other orientation. The other two dimensions are defined by design research and differentiate between an expert and a participatory mindset, and research-and design-led techniques. The empathic formation compass strengthens and enriches our earlier work on mixed perspectives with these specific dimensions and describes the factors that foster empathy in design from a more contextual position. We expect the empathic formation compass—combined with the mixed perspectives framework—to enhance future research by bringing about a deeper understanding of designers’ empathic and collaborative design practice.
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Immersive journalism (IJ) is often assumed to be inherently emotion-inducing. Through using inclusive technology, interaction possibilities and immersive narratives, the audience should ideally experience what feels like to be in a certain situation. However, for the most part we do not know to which extent and in what form IJ influences the experience of emotions. We wanted to investigate, whether, and if so, which characteristics of IJ are related to the experience of emotions, and which role the personality trait empathy tendency plays in this respect. This is important, as the evaluation of IJ often relies on the emotion-inducing assumption thereof. Four different experiments comparing one immersive journalistic characteristic (level of inclusion, interaction possibilities, immersive narratives) to the respective non-immersive counterpart were conducted. Results indicate that while the level of inclusion and interaction possibility increase the intensity of the experience, the immersive narrative influences the valence dimension of emotions. Additionally, empathy tendency is found to be a relevant moderator for these effects. Conclusions are threefold. First, the narrative form of IJ is key; second, the analysis of IJ needs to go beyond the level of inclusion; third, including emotions when assessing IJ is fundamental to understand its impact.
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