Alan Alda on building and monitoring empathy

(upbeat music) - The strange thing about empathy is as valuable as it is, we tend to lose it, it tends to evaporate. It's very easy to lose you're touch in making contact with other people. I see it happening to me, I see it happening to other people. So I thought is there something I can do on my own that would build empathy and keep my empathy thermometer at a high enough temperature? So I started experimenting on myself, I love to experiment on myself, and I thought, okay it has something to do with reading emotions, so why don't I, as I walk down the street, as I go into a restaurant, or talk to friends, why don't I try to figure out what they're feeling and maybe it would be really good if I name the feeling. And I was talking to a Psychologist about this and he said, "You came up with this by yourself?" And I said yeah and he said, "I'd like to study that." So he did a study where he had people doing this during the day for a week. He gave them a standard empathy test at the…