Listening to Others
4.4 Listening with Empathy
The best practices for good and radical deep listeners, according to the TED Talks reviewed in the previous section, include attitudes and behaviors associated with empathy. Pursing the idea of empathy further, I review scholarly literature on empathy. This led to resources with diverse perspectives on listening with empathy. I summarize several of these perspectives while noting the implications for listening to others, but first I conceptualize empathic listening.
Conceptualizing Empathic Listening
Tom Bruneau’s conceptual and theoretical review of the literature on empathy and listening[1] includes empathy as, object identification (feeling into the other and losing sense of self), intimation (mirroring), psychological (perception and inference making), subject-object interplay (identifying, taking in, and “checking out” an experience), role taking, and cycling (stepping out of self, into the other, back to self, and back to the other). This summarizes the literature on empathic listening through 1989 and represents the disciplinary perspectives of Psychology, Communication, and Sociology.
Cognitive Active Empathic Listening
Over a decade after Bruneau’s comprehensive review of the empathy literature, Graham Bodie and associates[2] developed the concept of “active empathic listening” as sensing, processing, and responding to others. Active empathic listening is a cognitive perspective of listening and does not directly refer to empathic listening as an emotionally felt activity.[3] Researchers correlate active emphatic listening with a variety of topics, including personality traits, listening styles, social media, morality, and sex differences. Overall, the research demonstrates that the empirical categories of cognitive sensing, processing, and responding are the most important components of empathic listening. In addition to the cognitive perspective to empathic listening, there is an affective component of empathic listening.
Affective Empathic Listening
Philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich purportedly said, “The first duty of love is to listen.”[4] This quote sets the tone of an essay on affective listening by Kory Floyd. According to Floyd, we all need love, and affection is one way to meet that need. Affection is something we feel, and affective communication is something we do. Empathic listening is part of the affection dynamic and includes nonverbal immediacy (e.g., smiling, warm vocal tones, open posture), feelings, validation as positive regard, and demonstrating that the other person is important by the listeners gift of time, attention, and energy. These affective qualities of listening, when integrated with the cognitive perspective of listening, broaden our understanding of empathy.
Five Types of Empathy
Daniel Siegel’s typology of interpersonal empathy[5] includes both affective and cognitive qualities, as well as additional qualities compatible with empathic listening. Siegel’