I watched "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere" and was moved by its ending. A son understands his father's errors and abusive ways and, from these insights, can forgive him. What Bruce Springsteen has taught listeners over 40 years is how to reflect, gain empathy and understand.

At its core, Springsteen teaches social perspective-taking skills, the ability to understand other people, including their struggles and why and how they make their decisions. Social perspective taking is the cognitive component of empathy, the ability to understand another person's emotional state, distinct from simply feeling an emotion for them.

As an adolescent who also had an emotionally distant father, Springsteen's songs taught me to have empathy for my father. My dad was not as abusive as Douglas Springsteen, but he was completely emotionally distant and, just like Springsteen's father, could never say the words "I love you" — instead, he would give a slight head nod and share a glass of buttermilk with me.

A prominent theme that Bruce Springsteen has outlined in interviews over many years is that one of the purposes of his music is to create a life space for reflection, hoping that the individual and societal consequences will be greater compassion, empathy, understanding and care. In a 2010 NBC interview, Springsteen told Brian Williams that, at its core,........

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