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Youth mental health: Teaching (and learning) empathy

Professor Jamil Zaki

Youth mental health: Teaching (and learning) empathy

Professor Jamil Zaki discusses the roles of empathy and compassion in bettering our relationships with ourselves and others.

For most young people, one of the most important things on their minds is how they’re perceived by their peers. 

Though this focus can sometimes be seen as a negative distraction, Stanford psychology Professor Jamil Zaki says that the adults in their lives can use this preoccupation with the thoughts of others to help youth create a community centered around empathy, a skill that will in turn build their overall mental health.

“We find that social norms are a really powerful lever that we can pull if we want to encourage empathy, especially among young people,” said Zaki, who leads the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory and is faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences. 

A few years ago Zaki worked with middle school students in the Bay Area to ask them how they felt about empathy and its value in their lives. In private, students shared that it was useful and powerful — something they might not have said in public if they were unsure of how others felt.

“We then showed students’ responses to each other. And when students learned those social norms, compared to students who didn't, they were more motivated to empathize,” Zaki said. “And then when we came back to these classrooms a month later, those students who learned about the popularity of empathy were also more likely to be acting kindly towards their fellow seventh graders.”

Zaki joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss the power of empathy and how to cultivate it in young people. His research focuses on the neuroscience behind decision making, self regulation, social cognition, and perception, among other social and behavioral functions.

In the episode he also talks about self compassion, and how practicing it can have a positive effect on mental health and performance. 

“In fact, we find at Stanford that when students are not self compassionate, they have a harder time bouncing back if they get a bad grade,” Zaki said. “So not only is it hard to be self compassionate. We have a backwards notion in our culture of what self compassion even means.

“It’s, in essence, extending the same grace and kindness to ourselves as we would to somebody else we care about.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz, Denise Pope

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