Personality Factors Empathy

Personality Factors: EmpathyCorrelation between Empathy and Success in Language LearningEmpathy as another important affective factor in ESL/EFL context is a multifactorial concept that has its origin in the Greek word empathius, meaning understanding others by entering their world (Broidy 2005). Brown (1994: 143) defines it as "the process of reaching beyond the self and understanding and feeling what another person understands or feeling".Also, Buck/Ginburg (1997) considers empathy as a biologically-based and communicative process. However, Duan/Hill (1996) summarize the history of empathy as 1) primarily an affective phenomenon, referring to the immediate experiences of emotions of another person; 2) primarily a cognitive construct, referring to the intellectual understanding of another's experience or perspective-taking; 3) a combination of cognitive and emotional components; or 4) either cognitive or affective depending on the situation. Therefore, empathy can be seen as a complex multifactorial concept, for which language can play a significant role because, as Brown (1994: 143) states, "language is primary means of empathizing". However, like emotional intelligence and foreign language anxiety, the review of literature on empathy fail empirical studies on how to improve this affective factor in an EFL context.The human being is social animal, and the chief mechanism for maintaining the bonds of society is language. Transaction is the process of reaching out beyond the self to others. A variety of transactional variables comes to bear on SLL: imitation, modeling, identification, empathy, extroversion, aggression, and so on.In common terminology, empathy is the process of “putting yourself into someone else’s shoes,”of reaching beyond the self and understanding and feeling what another person is understanding or feeling. In more sophisticated terms, empathy is described as the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another on order to understand him or her better.Guiora defined empathy as “a process of comprehending in which a temporary fusion of self-object boundaries permits an immediate emotional apprehension of the affective experience of another.” Hogan defined empathy as “relatively discrete social phenomenon recognizable in the experience of laymen and psychologists alike.”Psychologists agree with Guiora’s definition above and add that there are two necessary aspects to the development of empathy: first, an awareness and knowledge one’s own feelings, and second, identification with another person. In other words, you cannot fully empathize or know someone else until you adequately know yourself.Oral communication is a case in which, it is easier to achieve empathic communication since there is immediate feedback from the hearer. Written communication requires a special kind of empathy in which the writer must communicate ideas by means of a very clear empathic intuition and judgment of the reader’s state of mind and structure of knowledge.So in the SLL situation the problem empathy becomes acute. Not only must speaker identify cognitive and affective sets in the hearer, but they must do so in a language in which they are insecure. The hearers discover that their own states of thought are misinterpreted by a native speaker, and the result is that linguistic, cognitive, and affective information easily passes “in one ear and out the other.”Naiman , Stern, included an empathy measure in their battery of tests used to try to discover characteristics of the “good language learner”, but found no significant correlation between empathy and language success as measured by tests. However, their finding was not unexpected since they found field independence to positively correlated with language success; FI/FD has been shown to correlate highly with empathy.If indeed a degree of empathy is predictive of success in language learning, it would be invaluable to discover how one could capitalize on that possibility in language teaching.Despite the lack of empirical evidence, the review of literature theoretically supports the connection between emotional knowledge and empathy by relating them to literary fictions. For instance, Ghosn (2001) states that literature, including short stories, plays, novels and poems, has the potential to foster emotional well-being by providing vicarious emotional experience that shape brain circuits for empathy. Also, Miall (2005) states that the feeling obtained in literary excepts appears to enable a reader to frame a particular meaning, to register it for the time being as a possible component of the story and draw, if necessary, on the prior knowledge when a feeling matches an occurrence from the reader's memory. This emphasis on emotional knowledge is the reference to the role of situational and reflective empathy which could be a skill or component of EQ.ReferencesH.D.Brown, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, 3rd edition.P143-145. Ali Rouhani, An Investigation into Emotional Intelligence, Foreign Language Anxiety and Empathy through a Cognitive-Affective Course in an EFL Context.。