Empathy Cultivation through (Pro)Social Media: A Counter to Compassion Fatigue

While a sizable body of literature suggests that repeated exposure to images of suffering may provoke compassion fatigue and news avoidance in audiences, this paper examines whether a different kind of representation can allow viewers to connect with the subjects of media coverage, cultivating empathy for them. The hope is that understanding the emotional impact of the way people are represented in news stories will help journalists better serve the public’s need for what Schudson called “social empathy”, “stories that—often in a human-interest vein—inform citizens about neighbors and groups they may not know or understand” and create a space where audiences can express positive emotions about their fellow citizens. This paper considers the reactions of followers of the “Humans of New York” (HONY) social media feed to the subjects of the feed’s posts, who are not portrayed as tragic victims, but humanized through portrayals of commonplace concerns, such as family, career, and romantic relationships. Comments on more than 8000 HONY posts over a year were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count program. Results indicate that comments on HONY are overwhelmingly positive and socially oriented, suggesting that this type of representation may be effective in countering compassion fatigue and allowing for better social connection.

Interpersonal and Intersubjective Alienation in Social Stigmatization and Depression

The subjective experience of social stigma has been widely researched in terms of discrimination, rejection, isolation, etc. These are commonly understood within the traditional individualistic framework of affective experience and sociality, which fails to address the transformative effects of social stigma on how one experiences the social realm and the own self in general. Phenomenology and recent work on the relationality of affective experience acknowledge the central role interpersonal interactions play in subjectivity and offer a suitable approach towards addressing the complexity of the subjective experience of social stigma. Focussing on autobiographical accounts, I propose that the experience of social stigmatization is characterized by an affective atmosphere of interpersonal alienation. Its counterpart, an atmosphere of belonging, is closely related to social empathy, which is eroded by prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes. The breakdown of social empathy establishes a peculiar form of relationless relationality that radically transforms one’s subjectivity. The transformation of subjectivity is structurally similar to disturbances of intersubjectivity in psychopathological conditions such as depression and feelings of disconnectedness, loneliness, and even shame are common in both cases.

Kecerdasan Spiritual Santri Melalui Puasa

The purpose of this study was to determine the spiritual intelligence of students through fasting. This type of research is qualitative. The approach chosen by the author is phenomenology. Determination of data sources in this study according to the information obtained in the form of words and documents that are presented and described as they are and examined in order to find meaning. The researcher acts directly as an instrument and as a data collector from the results of observations, interviews and documentation. The results of this study are students who carry out Ramadan fasting at the Ummul Quro Al-Islami Islamic boarding school feel a different spiritual spirit from the previous months. Santri are more enthusiastic in reading the Qur'an, more enthusiastic in praying in congregation, getting up at night for tahajjud prayer, sharing food sincerely, especially when breaking the fast, patiently waiting for the Maghrib call to prayer, feeling supervised by Allah in fasting so that they are more honest with themselves. and there are still many positive values ​​that are felt. As for some of the wisdom of fasting as follows; fasting makes a person able to gain degrees of piety, fasting increases faith, fasting can train one's sincerity, fasting gives peace of mind, fasting trains a person to always feel the presence of Allah, fasting trains patience, fasting educates someone to have high social empathy, fasting educates someone to have a soul big, and fasting trains honesty.

Analysis of Human Behavior by Mining Textual Data: Current Research Topics and Analytical Techniques

The goal of this study was to conduct a literature review of current approaches and techniques for identifying, understanding, and predicting human behaviors through mining a variety of sources of textual data with a focus on enabling classification of psychological behaviors regarding emotion, cognition, and social empathy. This review was performed using keyword searches in ISI Web of Science, Engineering Village Compendex, ProQuest Dissertations, and Google Scholar. Our findings show that, despite recent advancements in predicting human behaviors based on unstructured textual data, significant developments in data analytics systems for identification, determination of interrelationships, and prediction of human cognitive, emotional and social behaviors remain lacking.