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I tend to be a pretty empathetic sort.  In high school my parents used to always criticize me because I was forever taking the side of the forgotten (or bullied) kid and they wanted me in the popular crowd.  Guess they saw how that turned out. But now a new study is saying that walking a mile in another's shoes may wind up being hazardous to your health, according to newswise.com. Huh? A University of Buffalo researcher says it's how we arrive at empathy that counts. When it comes to empathy, the idiom that suggests “walking a mile in their shoes” turns out to be problematic advice, according to new research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. “That’s because there are two routes to empathy and one of them is more personally distressing and upsetting than the other,” says Michael Poulin, an associate professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Psychology and co-author of the study led by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Anneke...

This probably won't surprise too many of us.  But women are more empathetic than most, but not all, men. A fascinating new study has revealed that men and women attracted to men are more empathetic than men and women attracted to women, according to a new study from the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa. “People attracted to a particular gender, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, have common social tools, and thus exhibit the same level of empathy,” says Professor Simone Shamay-Tsoory of the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa who conducted the study, according to newswise.com. Sociologists claim that empathy plays an important role in the development of human society in that it contributes to peoples’ understanding of others and causes them to take the latter’s feelings into account. Behavioral and brain studies show that activities related to empathy are regulated differently in men and women, based on preferences tha...