Care includes but is broader than empathy, and is a top 10 element of Integrative Listening. This study identifies a variety of emotions that motivate care, such as love, compassion, and generosity. Other research by law professor Clark Cunningham has found that what clients want from their lawyer is in large part to be cared about. Empathy is one facet of care, but lawyers do not always have empathy for every client. While empathy can be learned, and it can it be applied to most clients, the client still needs to feel cared for even if their lawyer doesn’t feel empathy for the client. Other ways to demonstrate care include compassion, concern, and simple acts of expressed kindness.
“Care” is also a top level listening construct in Integrative Listening because it is likely one of the 7 (or so) basic, or primary, emotions, and is a driving issue in the development of healthy attachment. For further information, Dr. Jaak Panksepp explicates care as a core emotions, and Dr. Patricia Crittenden explicates care-giving and care-needing as essential aspects of child and adult attachment behavior.
What Emotions Motivate Care?, Elena Pulcini, Emotion Review, January 21, 2016, http://emr.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/23/1754073915615429?papetoc
Abstract
The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies (care out of love, care work, and care of the distant other), I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care (such as love, compassion, and generosity). I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action.