Neuroscience and Forming Empathy in Children and Their Worshiping Communities

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Notes

Charles Nelson, Michelle de Haan, and Kathleen Thomas write that “[i]t is important to understand the experiences don't just happen to the brain; rather, experience is the product of an ongoing, reciprocal interaction between the environment and the brain” (in Neuroscience of Cognitive Development: The Role of Experience and the Developing Brain [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006], 30, emph. added).

Nelson, de Haan, and Thomas, 39, 33.

William Benzon, Beethoven's Anvil (New York: Basic, 2001), 55, emph. added.

John Russon, Human Experience (Albany, NY: SUNY University Press, 2003), 46, 47, emph. added.

Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea (Nicomachean Ethics), trans. W. Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 9, ed. R. Hutchins (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), Book I, chapter 1, 1103a14-26 (p. 248). Emph. added.

Rollin McCraty and Doc Childre, “The Grateful Heart: The Psychophysiology of Gratitude,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 241.

McCraty and Childre, 242, emph. added. At this point I should clarify that while the difference between feeling and emotion is not necessarily relevant to this project, I will use the term emotion as a discrete mental state and feeling as a more pervasive affective state. Emotions, on one hand, have a clear beginning and an end, while feelings spill beyond the mind and are complexly related—and interrelated—throughout the body. For a further explanation, please see Christopher Rodkey, The Synaptic Gospel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012) 1–2, 7–8.

Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, The Mystical Mind (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 26, 89.

Walter Freeman, “Happiness Doesn't Come in Bottles,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, no. 1 (1997): 70.

Robert Panzarella, “The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Peak Experiences,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 20, no. 1 (1980): 75–77. Interestingly, visual experience accounts more for “renewal ecstasy”—38%, opposed to 14% for musical experience (75)—and music is associated more strongly for the “fusion-emotional ecstasy”—27%, as opposed to 17% for visual experience (77).

Barbara Fredrickson, “Gratitude, Like Other Positive Emotions, Broadens and Builds,” The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. R. Emmons and M. McCullough (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 153, 155.

Fredrickson, 152, 151, citing Pamela Samuels and David Lester, “A Preliminary Investigation of Emotions Experienced toward God by Catholic Nuns and Priests,” Psychology Reports 56 (1985): 706.

Dan McAdams and Jack Bauer, “Gratitude in Modern Life,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. R. Emmons and M. McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86.

Ibid. McAdams and Bauer continue on this point: “[T]he individual who is capable of gratitude, who is blessed with the propensity to engage with others in gracious ways, may find that his or her standing in the group is ultimately enhanced, contributing ultimately to inclusive fitness. Put simply, the capacity to experience and express gratitude in groups may give an individual an adaptive advantage, positioning him or her well for survival and reproductive opportunities in life. Gratitude may be grouped, therefore, in the same family as kin selection and reciprocated altruism-evolved adaptations that have proven so useful for fitness in group living that they have become, more or less, foundational features of human nature” (86).

Fredrickson, 157.

Ibid., 157, citing Jennifer George, “Leader Positive Mood and Group Performance,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25, no. 9 (1995): 778–94.

Elizabeth Felts and Anthony Robinson, New Occasions Teach New Duties: A Renewed Vision of the Teaching Church (Cleveland, OH: UCC Division of Education, 1994), 46–47.

Paul Ricoeur and André LaCocque, Thinking Biblically, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1998); and Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof in Freud's Psychoanalytic Writings,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 25 (1977): 835–71; Stern 15.

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Christopher Demuth Rodkey

Christopher Demuth Rodkey is pastor of St. Paul's United Church of Christ in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, and teaches philosophy at Penn State York and comparative theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Synaptic Gospel and blogs for An und fur sich (http://itself.wordpressw.com).