Okay, it's not my country per se; it's US. But it's the title of the news I'd just read.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/12/empathy.html#comments
And the aforementioned article :
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-me-care
What do you guys think?
I really do not like generalization studies like this because it puts a label on a large mass of people when the sample study was not as vast and wide as one would like to assume it was.
I do not believe that it is possible for any normally neurologically functioning human being to ignore or suppress their empathy for a sustained amount of time; it is possible indeed to mask it, but empathy is a human emotion that most of all humans I believe have, and have had for centuries. College students, and younger people in general are more inclined to hide their emotions for the benefit of fitting in socially, and some might have actually deceived themselves to think that they do not have empathy at all. It is much more valued in a lot of career fields for a person to be objective, scientific, and emotions have been severely downplayed when it comes to studying and work....those who have strong emotional reactions could be easily labeled as 'whiners' or 'overdramatic' and I think that the pressure to fit in is high among people of these ages.
But in reality there is only a small percentage of human beings who are incapable of feeling empathy, those with antisocial personality disorder have difficulties feeling many normal human emotions that have been tied to irregular neurological development and unusual homelife circumstances- nature vs nurture debate on the causes of antisocial personaliy disorder, but as for now the studies conclude that in the population thusfar there is only a small amount of them who seem to be unable to react with normal human emotions (including empathy).
Has the empathy rate gone down? I do not think that empathy ever declines or reels- actually I think it is always a consistent thing that can sometimes be masked by suppression of it, such as during times of war people will suppress any emotions, including empathy, they have for other countries, their loved ones, etc. just to survive and be able to do what they are supposed to do. They do not 'lose' any empathy, in fact they are still feeling it deep down under the layers of their mask but because of the circumstances their natural biological survival instincts have allowed them to push these strong emotions away until a time they can deal with them that would not be life-damaging/risking. As we can see with war veterans a lot of them who come back end up doing drugs or having various problems because of this masking of their emotions that they are later forced to deal with. This masking wouldn't be the same as a social masking just to fit in- because usually [though not always] fitting in isn't something that would entail life or death and therefore we see less cases of this happening in those circumstances.
The from person to person, some people being more empathetic than others I do not think, if we are talking about normally functioning human beings, even exists. I think that people may -expose- their empathy more often than others, some may be more quick to leap to that stage of showing it outwardly, and others may seem that they do not feel empathy at all, due to personal preferences they may even hide it. But I think it is always there, the same amount in everyone, and I think in general people feel empathy during the same events- when a human can see suffering they feel empathy. That's really what empathy is, it's the reaction to the suffering of self or others, a negative reaction because humans are averse to suffering- we do not want to suffer and we do not want to see others suffer- it creates this horrible sadness and pang of sharing sadness, likely to keep our species surviving as a whole because if one feels empathy and the suffering of another they are more likely to help the other and/or try to prevent suffering from themselves and others in the future.