Facilitating Empathy

16 Pages·2008·0.11 MB·English

european psychotherapy
European Psychotherapy/Vol. 7 No. 1. 2007
Jeanne C. Watson
OISE / University of Toronto
Facilitating Empathy
ABSTRACT
For decades, empathy has been viewed as an integral aspect of psychotherapy.
Psychoanalytic, humanistic, and cognitive-behavior theorists have all emphasized the role
of therapeutic empathy in facilitating change in psychotherapy. Most theorists have
focused primarily on the function and expression of empathy, with some schools seeing it
as a facilitative condition and others as a more essential ingredient of change. However,
less emphasis has been placed on what novice and experienced therapists can do to
enhance their empathic skills. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience have begun
to provide us with more insights into the nature of empathy and its various component
processes. These insights suggest ways of refining understanding of the construct so that
therapists’ empathic capacities to facilitate clients’ changes in psychotherapy can be devel-
oped and enhanced.
Humanistic therapists see empathy as a vital ingredient in psychotherapy (BARRETT-LENNARD,
1993; BOHART & GREENBERG,1997; BOZARTH, 2001; ELLIOTT, WATSON, GOLDMAN & GREENBERG,
2004; GREENBERG & WATSON, 2005; RASKIN, 2001; ROGERS, 1965; WARNER, 2001). Empathy is
seen as one of the essential therapeutic conditions including acceptance, positive regard, and
congruence to promote healing in the therapeutic encounter. ROGERS(1965) saw empathy as
both an emotional and a cognitive process. He defined empathy as the ability to perceive accu-
rately the internal frames of reference of others in terms of their meanings and emotional
components as if one were the other but without ever losing the ‘as if” condition. Empathy is
the ability to see the world through the eyes of another so as to sense their hurt and pain and
to perceive the source of their feelings in the same way as they do. According to ROGERS
(1965) empathy was the attempt to actively experience with clients the feelings to which they
give expression, and to try to get under their skin. It is an attempt to live the attitudes expressed,
instead of observing them, so as to catch the nuances and changing flow, and to absorb the
meanings and attitudes of the other (ROGERS, 1951). Rogers was careful to distinguish identi-
fication from empathy, seeing the former as indicating a loss of boundaries when another’s
view of reality is adopted. He suggested that the provision of empathy in psychotherapy
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allowed clients the opportunity to explore and reflect on themselves, thereby facilitating self-
directed change.
BARRETT-LENNARD(1993) described therapeutic empathy as a cyclical process characterized by
three phases: empathic resonation, empathic communication, and the resulting received/per-
ceived empathy. According to this view therapists need to first, resonate to their clients’ expe-
riences, using their own bodies and inner experience to understand how their clients’ feel
about their experiences and what they mean to them; second, therapists’ must communicate
their understanding to their clients; and third, clients have to receive their therapists’ empathy
so that they are aware of being understood. BARRETT-LENNARD (1993) conceived of empathy
as an active process whereby therapists come to know the full and changing awareness of
another person, and actively seek to receive the other’s communication and meaning.
KOHUT(1977) saw empathy as important to the goals of psychoanalysis. He defined empathy
as ‘vicarious introspection’, or more simply, as one person’s attempt to experience the inner life
of another while simultaneously retaining the stance of an objective observer” (KOHUT, 1977;
p. 175). He defined empathy as “… the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of
another person … an ability to experience what another person experiences, though usually
and appropriately to an attenuated degree” (In KHAN, 2002 p 102). Kohut distinguished empa-
thy from compassion or sympathy as he saw empathy as a precondition for the other two
states believing that we first need to know what the other is experiencing before we can be
sympathetic or compassionate.
The functions of empathy
Emotion-focused therapists (EFT) view empathy as essential to clients’ intrapersonal and inter-
personal changes in therapy (ELLIOTT ET AL., 2003; GREENBERG, RICE, & ELLIOTT, 1993; GREEN-
BERG & ELLIOTT 1997, VANAERSCHOT, 1990; WATSON, 2001). These theorists observe that as a
result of clients’ experiencing empathy they develop empathy towards themselves and others
According to Barrett-Lennard self-empathy “… involves a form of empathy turned inward, as
the articulate ‘I-self’ devotes special listening attention to the wider underlying ‘organic’ self”
(BARRETT-LENNARD, 1997; p. 108). He proposed that progress in therapy is related to changes
in the way individuals relate to themselves, their experiences and to others that reflect a more
open stance towards experience. The capacity for self-empathy is the basis for empathy
towards others, in so far as, “the person who is at home with the subjective stirrings of his or
her own inner being tends to be sensitive to the inner felt world of others and is not afraid of
responding from this awareness” (BARRETT-LENNARD, 1997; p. 111).
WATSON(2001) identified three functions of empathy. The firstfunction is to facilitate the devel-
opment and maintenance of a positive therapeutic relationship. Empathy helps the develop-
ment and maintenance of a positive therapeutic relationship by allowing therapists to appre-
hend and understand their clients’ objectives in therapy and enables therapists to forge agree-
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ment with their clients on the tasks and goals of therapy. Feeling heard and empathically under-
stood also helps people feel safe and unthreatened in an interpersonal context which in turn
allows them to focus on themselves and explore their inner worlds. It is through self exploration
that clients acquire self-knowledge and understanding that enables them to change (ROGERS,
1965).
The second function of empathy is to facilitate affect regulation. The communication of
empathic understanding of another person’s inner world is immediately experienced as sooth-
ing by the other (FOSHA, 2001; WATSON2001). The feeling of being understood with the knowl-
edge that the other grasps the emotional significance and meaning of their experience provides
clients with an immediate sense of relief. To the extent that their distress or inner experience
has been apprehended there is no longer the need to struggle to express it or to communi-
cate it so that it can be heard and responded to. The capacity to resonate and experience
another’s inner emotional world and reflect that understanding back provides a model of
important affect regulating abilities and begins to assist clients in regulating their own affective
experience.
The foundational skills of emotional intelligence and competence including awareness, label-
ing, modulation, and expression of emotional experience in self-enhancing ways are facilitated
by therapists’ empathic listening and communication. Through empathic listening therapists
help clients become aware of and label their inner experience. As clients become aware of and
label their emotional experience, they are modulating their experience through processing it in
the pre-frontal cortex (GREENBERG & WATSON, 2006). This processing reduces its intensity and
provides an opportunity for clients to reflect on their experience in a more controlled fashion.
Further modulation of emotional experience can occur as clients reflect on experience and con-
sider ways of optimally expressing it that are self-enhancing as opposed to self-destructive and
negating.
The thirdfunction of empathy is to facilitate deconstruction of clients’ world views and internal
assumptive frameworks. By deliberately and empathically reflecting back to clients their felt
meanings and internal world views therapists are bringing clients’ assumptive frameworks into
view. This allows clients and therapists to attend to the values, assumptions, and beliefs that
clients use to make sense of their worlds and organize their experience. This enables clients to
access their tacit knowledge and see how they apply and use it to understand different situa-
tions. Once their tacit knowledge and assumptions are visible and clearly articulated they can
be subjected to scrutiny, re-evaluated, modified or maintained and used more consciously. This
deconstructive function of empathy, identified by a number of humanistic scholars, is seen as
important in facilitating change (WATSON, GOLDMAN & VANAERSCHOT, 1998).
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Facilitating Therapists’ empathy
Emotion-focused practitioners have focused on the moment to moment empathic respon-
siveness of therapists as they track clients’ inner, subjective, and affective experience. Emotion
focused therapists focus on fostering clients’ emotional processing in the session as therapists
help clients attend to and become aware of their emotional experience and then begin to label
and differentiate it in words (ELLIOTT ET AL., 2004; GREENBERG ET AL., 1993; KLEIN, MATHIEU-
COUGHLAN & KIESLER, 1986).
Client markers have been identified to assist therapists in being optimally empathic in the ses-
sion. These markers are specific client statements that alert EFT therapists when to use differ-
ent types of empathic responses or when to propose other therapeutic tasks like exploring
problematic reactions, dialoguing with a significant other, or engaging in two-chair work. The
markers that have been identified include the expression of painful, immediately experienced
feelings in the session; analytical descriptions of self and situations; and expressions of com-
plaint and critical evaluations and assumptions (WATSON 2001).
At times when clients are actively experiencing painful or intense feelings in a session and are
processing their reactions to events it is often best for therapists to remain responsively attuned
and provide empathic understanding and validation of clients’ experience. It is important at
these times to recognize clients’ vulnerability and try to support them as they reveal painful and
new aspects of their experience. During times when clients are processing painful and intense
experiences, therapists might offer tentative conjectures to help clients articulate their experi-
ence more clearly. Empathic conjectures are attempts to support and help clients’ probe the
edges of their experience so that they can fully differentiate their reactions and access the
nuances of their feelings and perceptions. In this way clients can arrive at the new meanings
of situations and grasp new perspectives or ways of thinking about their experience. If clients
are focused on exploring their experience, therapists can support and work with them to dif-
ferentiate it more clearly using empathic exploration responses.
When clients are analytical and distant from their experience, therapists need to work harder to
help clients access their inner experience and tune into their more covert emotional reactions
and feelings about events. At these times empathic understanding responses may not be help-
ful as they can keep both participants from grasping clients’ deeper feelings and experience of
events. When clients are being analytical and seem distant from their experience, it can help if
therapists try to evoke clients’ experiences by using idiosyncratic language, pictures, and images
of situations and events. Graphic descriptions can evoke clients’ reactions and feelings to
events within the session so that both clients and therapists can begin to get a sense of what
it felt like to be in specific situations. Graphic descriptions also enable therapists to tentatively
conjecture and offer clients suggestions of what it might have felt like to be in problematic
situations.
When clients are complaining or seem stuck therapists can try to refocus their clients to try to
help them access and see other aspects of their experience that they may be overlooking.
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Alternatively emotion-focused therapists might make observations about how their clients are
processing their experience and ask them what they are trying to do or accomplish or what
they are aware of in terms of their bodies as they speak. It is often useful to help clients
become aware of how they are processing their emotional experience to lay the framework of
more specific tasks and goals in therapy (ELLIOT ET AL., 2004; GREENBERG & WATSON, 2005).
Recently case formulation has been emphasized as EFT theorists adapt their approach to brief
therapy and make their treatment approach more explicit. This has required that EFT therapists
adopt a more meta perspective of how clients function as a result of their life experiences and
the role that early learning and childhood environments play in contributing to clients’ ways of
regulating affect as well as the development of negative ways of interacting with the self and
others, for example, expressing blaming and critical behaviours either to self or others (ELLIOTT
ET AL., 2004; GREENBERG & WATSON, 2006). To develop case formulations it is necessary to
develop an understanding of how different situations or experiences might have contributed to
particular responses and emotion schemes to help clients’ process their experiences and
reflect on their responses and emotion schemes to develop new ways of being and feeling
that are more satisfactory in the present. For example, clients may form an emotion scheme
that they need to sacrifice self in order to maintain contact with others or they may feel so
ashamed about needing connection, they act so independent that they are unable to reach out
and feel safe with others in intimate relationships.
Therapists’ subjective experience of empathy
Psychotherapy research has focused on whether and how empathy affects client change in
psychotherapy. Less attention has been paid to the process of how therapists are empathic or
the process of empathic resonance. To obtain a better understanding of therapists’ empathic
process, GREENBERG AND RUSHANSKI-ROSENBERG (2002) investigated expert therapists’ subjec-
tive experience of empathy in one session of psychotherapy. This revealed a number of impor-
tant processes that therapists engaged in as they tried to respond empathically to their clients’
experience during a session, including actively trying to understand, actively imagining their
clients’ stories, sensing their clients’ experience, thinking about their clients’ experience, feeling
their clients’ experience, experiencing responsive bodily reactions, and drawing on their own
personal experience.
The therapists reported actively deciding to be empathic and giving careful thought to the
things their clients’ were saying to try to distill the essence or the nuances of their thoughts and
feelings. This is a cognitive process as therapists think their way into their client’s worlds.
Therapists attempted to infer from clients’ stories what they might be feeling or thinking. This
is one way that therapists develop empathic conjectures. During the process of trying to be
empathic therapists often feel as if they are actively searching to find a key or to get the right
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sense of what their clients are experiencing. When they hit the mark, often therapists reported
that they experienced a sense of excitement and elation.
In the process of trying to actively understand clients’ experience, therapists described them-
selves as absorbed and listening intently to try to reflect their clients’ subjective worldview. As
they listened intently expert therapists spoke about listening to clients’ core feelings, trying to
synthesize the meaning in clients’ words, and trying to ‘taste’ their clients’ feelings. Therapists
spoke about trying to sense their clients’ experience by attending to clients’ body language.
These therapists attended not only to clients’ verbal utterances but to their body posture, voice,
and facial expression to obtain clues or intuit a sense of what their clients might be feeling
inside. Sometimes therapists were able to sense what clients are feeling by thinking about their
stories and the meaning of events in a more general way. At other times therapists used the
images that came up for them as a result of clients’ stories to sense what they might be feel-
ing in specific situations or more generally.
The therapists spoke about actively imagining their clients’ stories. They found it helpful when
clients used images to portray their experience. Often they would attend to clients’ body lan-
guage and try to translate what they were seeing into an image to try to get a sense of what
clients’ were experiencing. It is as if therapists play movies of their clients’ narratives and try to
observe them in their worlds in a graphic, vivid fashion. Therapists reported that images would
provoke other images in a spiraling fashion as they actively engaged to understand and
empathize with their clients’ experience.
To achieve an inner sense of clients’ experience, therapists spoke about drawing on their own
experiences to build a progressive understanding of their clients. Therapists drew on their store
of general knowledge to better understand and appreciate their clients’ experience. They found
that their clients’ stories would evoke personal memories of similar feelings or similar experi-
ences. These memories would in turn evoke images that the therapists could draw on to dis-
till the essence of their clients’ experiences to conjecture what they might be feeling.
The therapists also made use of their own bodily reactions and knowledge of specific bodily
reactions to try to interpret of gauge what their clients might be feeling. The therapists observed
that sometimes they would react to their clients’ stories with body movements. They reported
sometimes moving back in their chair if they experienced something as intense and frighten-
ing for the client or feeling an ache in their chest when clients spoke about loss. The therapists
often experienced bodily reactions in response to or in anticipation of clients reporting painful
experiences. When they became aware of their own bodily reactions they would try to trans-
late them into words to try to reflect and capture their clients’ subjective experiences.
The therapists observed that they used their feelings as a guide to what their clients might be
experiencing. They admitted to feeling a little of the feeling that their clients might be experi-
encing. However they acknowledged that their experience was very much muted and that they
were aware that what they were feeling was the clients’ experience and not their own. Thus
they were not debilitated by the feelings or overwhelmed by them. At times the therapists were
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aware that they shared the clients’ feelings, for example they might both feel helpless or defeat-
ed when their clients felt they were not making progress.
When they were trying to be empathic the therapists spoke about experiencing complemen-
tary feelings of compassion and nurturance for their clients’ pain. These therapists spoke of
feeling tenderness for their clients. They were touched by their clients’ stories and felt a desire
to protect them. They also reported feeling acceptance of their clients’ experiences and feel-
ings and expressed a willingness to explore their clients’ experiences even if at times when it
might seem difficult or painful. The therapists saw these processes as automatic and out of
their conscious control. They were not aware of deliberately imagining or developing images or
attending to their bodily felt experience rather this seemed to happen spontaneously and nat-
urally as they listened to the flow of clients’ stories.
Empathy and neuroscience
Recent findings from cognitive neuroscience would seem to indicate that the ways in which
empathy has been conceptualized by humanistic and psychoanalytic writers bears some
resemblance to the cognitive affective processes that are activated when people experience
empathy for others. Neuroscientists define empathy as a “… complex form of psychological
inference that enables us to understand the personal experiences of another person through
cognitive, evaluative and affective processes” (DANZIGER, 2006). Story tellers, film makers, musi-
cians, and advertisers have known and capitalized on our innate capacity to resonate to the
feelings of others for a long time, however for the first time we are able to map the physio-
logical correlates of the processes of empathy, describe its neuronal architecture and specify
empathy circuits in the brain (RANKIN ET AL., 2006; FERRARI, GALLESE, RIZZOLATTI & FOGASSI,
2003). The technology that has allowed us to image the brain and identify different areas of
activation during different activities has created an important window that is beginning to illu-
minate the links between psychological theories, experiential knowledge, empathic under-
standing, and physical processes. One of the major findings from brain mapping is mirror neu-
rons, the discovery of which was heralded as one of the most exciting recent discoveries in
neuroscience.
Neuroscience research on the physiological correlates of empathy provides support for thera-
pists’ subjective experience of trying to be empathic in a session and suggests ways in which
therapists can heighten and enhance their empathic skills. Therapists can engage in a number
of cognitive-affective processes to maximize their empathic capacity with their clients. First,
therapists can use visualization techniques, and actively imagine the experiences, and events
in their clients’ lives; second, therapists can pay close attention to their bodies to discern the
feelings or sensations that are being activated; third, therapists can listen very carefully to the
details and context of clients’ life experiences; fourth, therapists can strive to decenter from
their own experience and perspective to take on the perspective of the other; fifth, therapists
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can cultivate self-awareness and self-reflection; and six, therapists can learn to correctly iden-
tify other people’s emotions from their narratives and non-verbal behaviour. By mastering
and attending to these specific processes more consciously, therapists may be better able
to express and optimally use their empathic understanding within a session. We will review
each of these processes in turn and review some of the neurological research that supports
them.
Visualization. The important role that visualization plays in the empathic process comes from
research that shows that mirror neurons fire when we observe others performing different
actions which allows us to mimic their intentions, sensations, and emotions (FERRARI, 2003;
RIZOLLATI, 2005; GALESE, 2005). DECETY AND JACKSON (2004) observed that deliberate acts of
imagination produce stronger responses in the neuronal empathy circuit than observation
alone. Thus therapists can heighten their understanding of another person’s state is by active-
ly visualizing the details of the story they are being told. By trying to develop mental images of
different situations, it is likely that therapists will be able to amplify their responses which will
provide them with a better sense of what is happening for clients than passively listening to
their narratives.
Mimicry. As recorders of actions, mirror neurons are also seen as the precursors of mimicry.
They not only allow us to receive and decode the actions and intentions of others but can facil-
itate communication with others to the extent that automatically mimicking the actions of oth-
ers indicates that we have seen them and can follow their stories (WILSON & KNOBLICH, 2005).
The firing of mirror neurons when people see actions performed stimulates similar physiolog-
ical processes in the observer providing them with a similar sense of the experience as the
doer. Therapists who attend to their own covert experience of imitating their clients’ actions can
gain a better sense of what their clients might be experiencing. This information can then be
fed back to clients in order to communicate empathy with their experience and facilitate its
symbolization in words.
Another way therapists can use the automatic capacity to mimic others to help feel themselves
into their clients’ experience is to imitate their clients more overtly in the session and ask them
what they are communicating with their actions. More overt imitation can heighten clients’
awareness of their emotions and assist them and their therapists to find the words to express
and label their subjective states more clearly (ELLIOTT ET AL., 2003; KENNEDY-MOORE & WATSON,
1999). Alternatively by attending to the covert processes of imitation that are stimulated by
visualizing others actions or imagining oneself in the place of another, therapists can extrapo-
late from their own experience to tentatively offer empathic conjectures to their clients about
their emotional experiencing.
To the extent that analogous states are reproduced in observers and they are alert to what is
happening in the bodies of others, then the body is an important source of information to
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understand how different experiences impact others. Therapists can use their knowledge of
their own bodies to imagine what it must be like to be in different situations and experience
certain things as they listen to their clients’ narratives. This will help them feel themselves into
their clients’ worlds. WILSON (2001) suggested that, as a result of the activation of motor mir-
ror neurons, we are able to use the implicit knowledge of our own bodies to track other’s
actions. He proposed a perceptual emulator model whereby activation of motor neurons
through observation, visualization, or listening results not only in the activation of mirror neu-
rons but also enables the prediction of others’ actions.
Context. Research indicates that neural circuits are not automatically activated but respond
selectively depending on the context (WILSON, 2001). Iaccobani and his colleagues have
shown that mirror neurons fire differentially depending on the situation in which actions are
embedded (IACCOBANI, MOLNAR-SZAKACS, GALLESE, BUCCION, MAZZIOTTA & RIZOLATTI, 2005).
These researchers showed participants three different videos of a hand picking up a tea cup.
In the first video, the tea cup was set on a table next to a tea pot and a plate of cookies indi-
cating that a tea party was in progress; in the second video, the tea cup was sitting on a table
that was messy and scattered with crumbs; and in the third video, the tea cup was sitting on
a table without any other props or objects around it. The mirror neurons of participants shown
these pictures responded more strongly to the tea cup in the context of a tea party than they
did to the scene without any other cues with respect to context. This suggests that people inter-
pret and understand others actions in terms of the contexts in which they occur.
If therapists are to be maximally empathic it is important for them to have a sense of their
clients’ current and past contexts and life histories in order to build an adequate understand-
ing of what is emotionally significant for them and to gain an understanding of what motivates
their actions. Humanistic therapists have tended to emphasize moment- to-moment respond-
ing in the session and have placed less emphasis on obtaining full accounts of clients’ life his-
tories. At times clients’ attempts to tell their stories may be viewed as counterproductive in psy-
chotherapy as this activity might distract clients’ from their emotional processing. This view con-
trasts with that of analytic theorists, who emphasize the need for historical detail.
Thus, given the importance of context for our brains to respond empathically to different situ-
ations it is likely that to be maximally empathic therapists require a very good sense of the spe-
cific situations their clients have found themselves in and that have contributed to their feeling
and acting the way that they have. EFT therapists have been aware that the manner in which
clients tell their stories is an important marker of their emotional processing in a session
(ELLIOTT ET AL., 2004; WATSON & BOHART, 2001). EFT therapists listen to whether their clients
are giving rehearsed descriptions of scenes or are rambling in the session. At these times EFT
therapists try to help clients get more in touch with their emotional processing. One way they
do this is by asking clients to give more detailed, specific, and vivid accounts of situations.
These descriptions provide therapists with an inside view of their clients’ worlds that enable
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them to conjecture and develop a better sense of what their clients are feeling so that they can
offer this to their clients to help them get them more in touch with their emotions.
Ironically, getting an inside view and a clear sense of clients’ narratives may be as important for
therapists’ processing in the session as it is for clients. With detailed, vivid, and clear stories ther-
apists are more likely to be able to be empathic to their clients experience and gain a better
understanding of their worldview. Therapists can ask clients for the details to get a better sense
of context or they might suggest systematic evocative unfolding to help clients “play a movie of
a scene” (RICE AND SAPERIA, 1984; WATSON & RENNIE 1994; WATSON & GREENBERG 1996). EFT
authors have recognized the importance of obtaining clients’ life histories and identifying emo-
tionally live and salient events and situations in clients’ stories to facilitate case formulation as
well as understanding of the emotional significance of specific events and why clients feel and
act the way they do (WATSON, GOLDMAN & GREENBERG, 2007). Psychoanalytic theorists have
always emphasized the importance of the quality of clients’ life histories to provide a meta-
understanding of clients’ functioning and have placed less emphasis on being responsive to
clients’ moment to moment process in the session (BUCCI, 1984; KHAN, 2004; KOHUT, 1977).
Decentering.Researchers investigating individuals’ responses to others in pain have observed
that responses can either be self-oriented or other oriented, with responses varying along a
continuum of personal agitation at the state of another to fully understanding the others’ expe-
rience. JACKSON, MELTZOFFANDDECETY(2006) suggest that human beings’ default mode is ego-
centric; however the expression of empathy towards others requires the capacity to decenter.
Merging can result in emotional contagion where people experience and express distress at
another’s distress but do not fully comprehend the experience of the other. In order to fully
comprehend another’s experience it is important to remain differentiated although studies
have shown that even when agitated the brain is able to distinguish personal pain from the
pain of others. Studies of individuals’ responses to other peoples pain indicates that different
areas of the brain respond depending on whether the individual is the subject or observer of
painful experiences (JACKSON ET AL., 2006).
GAZZOLA ET AL.(2006) found that those individual’s who had higher scores on perspective tak-
ing showed greater activation of their auditory mirror neuron systems when they heard, saw,
or imagined someone performing a specific act. Interestingly other sub-scales of the empathy
measure including empathic concern, the capacity to fantasize, and personal distress did not
correlate with the activation of mirror neurons. Instead empathic concern was correlated with
insula activation. This would suggest that it is important to distinguish the cognitive and emo-
tional aspects of empathy. Cognitive empathy and getting a sense of how another person is
feeling or what they are experiencing may be linked to the capacity to take the perspective of
another and is likely different from concern or feeling distress at another’s pain. Moreover it
appears that a personal experience of pain is not necessarily required for perceiving and feel-
ing empathy for others’ pain (DANZIGER, 2006). The activation of specific neural networks
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