shun
the complexity of understanding others as the evolutionary origin of empathy and emotional contagion
fabrizio mafessoni, michael lachmann 2019
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41835-5
standard theoretical models of the origins of empathy tend to focus on scenarios in which coordination or cooperation are favored.
Mafessoni, and his co-author Michael Lachmann, a theoretical biologist and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, explored the possibility that the cognitive processes underlying a broad range of empathetic responses -- including emotional contagion, contagious yawning, and pathologies like echopraxia (compulsive repetition of others' movements) and echolalia (compulsive repetition of others' speech) -- could evolve in the absence of kin selection or any other mechanism directly favoring cooperation or coordination.
Mafessoni and Lachmann posited that animals, including humans, can engage in the act of simulating the minds of others. We cannot read other minds -- they are like black boxes to us. But, as Lachmann explains, all agents share almost identical "black boxes" with members of their species, and "they are constantly running simulations of what other minds might be doing." This ongoing as-actor simulation is not necessarily geared toward cooperation: it's just something humans and animals do spontaneously.
An example of this process is represented by mirror neurons: it has been known for some time that the same neurons engaged in planning a hand movement are also used when observing the hand movement of others. Mafessoni and Lachmann wondered what the consequences would be if they were to extend that process of understanding to any social interaction.
When they modeled outcomes rooted in cognitive simulation, they found that actors engaged in as-actor simulation produce a variety of systems typically explained in terms of cooperation or kin-selection. They also found that an observer can occasionally coordinate with an actor even when this outcome is not advantageous. Their model suggests that empathetic systems do not evolve solely because agents are disposed to cooperation and kin-selection. They also evolve because animals simulate others to envision their actions. According to Mafessoni, "the very origin of empathy may lie in the need to understand other individuals."
For Lachmann, their findings "completely change how we think about humans and animals." Their model is grounded in a single, cognitive mechanism that unifies a broad set of phenomena under one explanation. It therefore has theoretical import for a wide range of fields, including cognitive psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, complex systems, and evolutionary biology. Its power stems from both its unifying clarity and its theoretical interest in the limits of cooperation as an explanatory frame.
abstract Contagious yawning, emotional contagion and empathy are characterized by the activation of similar neurophysiological states or responses in an observed individual and an observer. For example, it is hard to keep one’s mouth closed when imagining someone yawning, or not feeling distressed while observing other individuals perceiving pain. The evolutionary origin of these widespread phenomena is unclear, since a direct benefit is not always apparent. We explore a game theoretical model for the evolution of mind-reading strategies, used to predict and respond to others’ behavior. In particular we explore the evolutionary scenarios favoring simulative strategies, which recruit overlapping neural circuits when performing as well as when observing a specific behavior. We show that these mechanisms are advantageous in complex environments, by allowing an observer to use information about its own behavior to interpret that of others. However, without inhibition of the recruited neural circuits, the observer would perform the corresponding downstream action, rather than produce the appropriate social response. We identify evolutionary trade-offs that could hinder this inhibition, leading to emotional contagion as a by-product of mind-reading. The interaction of this model with kinship is complex. We show that empathy likely evolved in a scenario where kin- and other indirect benefits co-opt strategies originally evolved for mind-reading, and that this model explains observed patterns of emotional contagion with kin or group members.
evolution of empathetic moral evaluation
arunas l radzvilavicius et al. 2019
doi.org/10.7554/elife.44269
How we form these moral assessments of others has a lot to do with cultural and social norms, as well as our capacity for empathy, the extent to which we can take on the perspective of another person.
In a new analysis, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania investigate cooperation with an evolutionary approach. Using game-theory-driven models, they show that a capacity for empathy fosters cooperation, according to senior author Joshua Plotkin, an evolutionary biologist. The models also show that the extent to which empathy promotes cooperation depends on a given society's system for moral evaluation.
"Having not just the capacity but the willingness to take into account someone else's perspective when forming moral judgments tends to promote cooperation," says Plotkin.
What's more, the group's analysis points to a heartening conclusion. All else being equal, empathy tends to spread throughout a population under most scenarios.
"We asked, 'can empathy evolve?'" explains Arunas Radzvilavicius, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher who works with Plotkin. "What if individuals start copying the empathetic way of observing each other's interactions? And we saw that empathy soared through the population."
Plotkin and Radzvilavicius coauthored the study, published today in eLife, with Alexander Stewart, an assistant professor at the University of Houston.
Plenty of scientists have probed the question of why individuals cooperate through indirect reciprocity, a scenario in which one person helps another not because of a direct quid pro quo but because they know that person to be "good." But the Penn group gave the study a nuance that others had not explored. Whereas other studies have assumed that reputations are universally known, Plotkin, Radzvilavicius, and Stewart realized this did not realistically describe human society, where individuals may differ in their opinion of others' reputations.
"In large, modern societies, people disagree a lot about each other's moral reputations," Plotkin says.
The researchers incorporated this variation in opinions into their models, which imagine someone choosing either to donate or not to donate to a second person based on that individual's reputation. The researchers found that cooperation was less likely to be sustained when people disagree about each other's reputations.
That's when they decided to incorporate empathy, or theory of mind, which, in the context of the study, entails the ability to understand the perspective of another person.
Doing so allowed cooperation to win out over more selfish strategies.
"It makes a lot of sense," Plotkin says. "If I don't account for your point of view, there will be many occasions when I judge you harshly when I really shouldn't because, from your perspective, you were doing the right thing."
To further explore the impact of empathy on cooperation, the researchers looked at a variety of frameworks, or social norms, that people might use to assign a reputation to another person based on their behavior. For example, most frameworks label someone "good" if they reward a fellow "good" individual, but social norms differ in how they judge interactions with a person deemed bad. While the "stern judging" norm labels "good" anyone who punishes a bad actor, the "simple standing" norm does not require this punitive approach: A "good" person can reward a bad one.
Plotkin, Radzvilavicius, and Stewart discovered again that capacity for empathy mattered. When populations were empathetic, stern judging was the best at promoting cooperation. But when a group was less willing to take on the perspective of another, other norms maximized rates of cooperation.
This result prompted the team to ask another evolutionary question -- whether empathy itself can evolve and become stable in a population. And under most scenarios, the answer was yes.
"Starting with a population where no one is empathetic, with people judging each other based on their own perspective, we saw that eventually individuals will copy the behavior of those who judge empathetically," says Plotkin. "Empathy will spread, and cooperation can emerge."
This was the case even when the researchers accounted for a degree of errors, noise, and misperception in their models.
The findings open up a new area of research for both evolutionary theory and empirical studies into how societies behave.
"Empathy is completely foreign to game theory," Radzvilavicius say. "In a way this is finding a new niche for research to progress to in the future, accounting for theory of mind."
Looking ahead, the Penn team hopes to pursue such questions, perhaps by pitting different social norms against one another and eventually by testing their ideas against observations from real people, either through experiments they design or through data collected from social media.
"It's obvious that in social media people are acutely aware of their public persona and reputation and curate it carefully," Plotkin says. "It would be fascinating to analyze these evolutionary dynamics as they play out in online interactions."
abstract Social norms can promote cooperation by assigning reputations to individuals based on their past actions. A good reputation indicates that an individual is likely to reciprocate. A large body of research has established norms of moral assessment that promote cooperation, assuming reputations are objective. But without a centralized institution to provide objective evaluation, opinions about an individual's reputation may differ across a population. In this setting we study the role of empathy-the capacity to form moral evaluations from another person's perspective. We show that empathy tends to foster cooperation by reducing the rate of unjustified defection. The norms of moral evaluation previously considered most socially beneficial depend on high levels of empathy, whereas different norms maximize social welfare in populations incapable of empathy. Finally, we show that empathy itself can evolve through social contagion. We conclude that a capacity for empathy is a key component for sustaining cooperation in societies.
people who grew up with sh*t parents: please don’t fret, you actually have a social intelligence leg up that you just aren’t aware of yet
reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/hgxiio/people_who_grew_up_with_sht_parents_please_dont/
how emotions are made: the secret life of the brain
lisa feldman barrett 2017 9780544129962
the emotional life of the brain: how its unique patterns affect the way you think, feel, and live—and how you can change them
richard davidson, sharon begley 2012 9781101560570
disease dynamics in a stochastic network game: a little empathy goes a long way in averting outbreaks
ceyhun eksin, jeff s. shamma, joshua s. weitz 2017
doi.org/10.1038/srep44122
impact of violent crime on risk aversion: evidence from the mexican drug war
ryan brown et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00788
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Colorado Denver used longitudinal survey data taken before and after the onset of the Mexican war on drugs to find a causal link between the fear of violence and its impact on the risk-taking attitudes of individuals living in affected communities.
Previous research on risk preferences has relied on data gathered only after a violent event, and found insecure environments made residents either more risk tolerant or had no effect at all.
But this new study, "Impact of Violent Crime on Risk Aversion: Evidence from the Mexican Drug War," published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, found the opposite is true. By also using data collected before the rise in crime, it found that fear had a profound effect on the residents, leading them to express more cautious attitudes toward risk. This change has the potential to have a widespread and long-lasting impact on the economy, as risk tolerance is associated with opening a business, investing in education and migrating to greater opportunities.
"We wondered if risk attitudes determined the environment in which someone lives, or if the environment determined their risk attitudes," said Ryan Brown, assistant professor of economics in CU Denver's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "When you're only looking at people after an event, some have moved away, others stop answering their door or won't fill out your survey. This was our chance to study people before and after an event that caught everyone unaware. If you don't look across time to see the whole picture, you're going to miss a lot of that."
Brown and his team found the whole picture in the Mexican Family Life Survey, a longitudinal survey of more than 35,000 people living in more than 8,400 households in 16 states across the country. The initial survey, conducted in 2002, explored how people's economic behavior changed over time. To assess risk attitudes, the survey asked respondents to choose between hypothetical gambles with different payoffs, in which options that offered a higher expected payoff also involved greater risk.
The first follow-up was conducted from 2005 to 2006, a time of relatively stable levels of violent crime. The second follow-up was conducted after a major escalation in violence, from 2009 to 2012, shortly after President Felipe Calderón declared a war on drugs in 2006. The policy change splintered cartels, and homicide rates across the country soared. As a result, some communities that were never exposed to drug violence were overwhelmed.
The researchers discovered that an increase of one homicide per 10,000 people increased the likelihood of being in the longitudinal study's most risk-averse category by 5 percent. Uniquely, the researchers provided evidence that this relationship was predominately caused by an increase in feelings of fear.
"We understood why being in an insecure environment would change your risk preferences, but until now, we didn't know the mechanisms behind it," said Brown. "This study allows us to rule out the policy mechanism; that improving access to health care, the economic environment or mental health will make a difference.
Instead, we're left with a much more difficult question: How do you fix fear?"
abstract Whereas attitudes towards risk play an important role in many decisions over the life-course, factors that affect those attitudes are not fully understood. Using longitudinal survey data collected in Mexico before and during the Mexican war on drugs, we investigate how risk attitudes change with variation in insecurity and uncertainty brought on by unprecedented changes in local-area violent crime. Exploiting the fact that the timing, virulence and spatial distribution of changes in violent crime were unanticipated, we establish there is a rise in risk aversion spread across the entire local population as local-area violent crime increases.
from painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain
dominik mischkowski et al. 2016
doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw057
the role of touch in regulating inter-partner physiological coupling during empathy for pain
pavel goldstein, irit weissman-fogel, simone g. shamay-tsoory 2017
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03627-7
political issues, evidence, and citizen engagement: the case of unequal access to affordable health care
yanna krupnikov, adam seth levine 2019
doi.org/10.1086/701722
what makes people care about social and economic problems they may not necessarily face in their daily lives, and whether that concern is a function of how the problems are described.
The team looked at several types of evidence showing that a problem exists. For example, statistics can describe the magnitude of the problem or they can be phrased in percentage terms -- such as the percentage of people facing a problem. They designed a series of studies to test which type of evidence increased people's engagement, either by making a donation, paying attention to an email or stating a concern.
The research was conducted in collaboration with a nonprofit in Ithaca, New York, that strives to increase access to affordable health care, including funding for a free clinic.
In the studies, likely new donors received solicitations by mail, members of the organization received a solicitation email, and study participants unaffiliated with the organization took a survey gauging their interest in access to affordable health care.
The messaging used in solicitations included combinations of high percentages, low percentages, case studies and raw numbers to describe the magnitude of the uninsured who can't afford health care.
For example, the potential donors received either a standard letter, one saying 57 percent of uninsured people couldn't afford the care they need, or one describing how a real uninsured person benefited from the nonprofit's services.
Across the board, the percentage-based evidence and human interest evidence tended to drive engagement, but talking about the overall magnitude of the problem didn't.
"When you talk about the millions of children who are starving, or the millions of refugees who are seeking out a better life, it fails to have this emotional connection that tends to then motivate people to pay more attention and to become engaged," Levine said.
The study offers a model of what a meaningful collaboration between researchers and practitioners can look like.
"Pull at people's emotional heartstrings," Levine said. "You can do it with certain forms of statistical evidence. You can do it with sympathetic case studies. And that will move behavior and move attitudes."
abstract Some social and economic problems do not gain broad awareness. Yet others become prominent (and perhaps are alleviated) in part because they successfully engage the wider citizenry. In this paper, we investigate how the evidence used to describe problems affects public engagement. Using disparities in access to affordable health care—a focal aspect of economic inequality in the United States—as our main issue, we conduct a series of field and survey experiments showing how some forms of evidence reduce attitudinal and behavioral engagement while other forms increase them. Our results challenge common arguments about political communication and behavior, while also shedding new light on a central question in the study of politics: What determines when citizens become concerned about a social problem?
a theory of jerks and other philosophical misadventures
eric schwitzgebel 2019 unread
Mengzian extension:
1 I care about person y and want to treat that person according to principle p.
2 Person x, though perhaps more distant, is relevantly similar.
3 Thus, I will treat person x according to principle p.
Mengzian extension starts from the assumption that you are already concerned about nearby others, and takes the challenge to be extending that concern beyond a narrow circle. The Golden Rule works differently – and so too the common advice to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes. In contrast with Mengzian extension, Golden Rule/others’ shoes advice assumes self-interest as the starting point, and implicitly treats overcoming egoistic selfishness as the main cognitive and moral challenge.
“do unto others as they would have us do unto them”
hazel rose markus 2017
in know this 2017 9780062562074
the psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence
brett q. ford et al. 2017
doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157
feeling hangry? when hunger is conceptualized as emotion
jennifer k. maccormack, kristen a. lindquist 2018
doi.org/10.1037/emo0000422
associations of child emotion recognition with interparental conflict and shy child temperament traits
alice c. schermerhorn 2018
doi.org/10.1177/0265407518762606
social transmission and buffering of synaptic changes after stress
toni-lee sterley et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1038/s41593-017-0044-6
the fast track to a life well lived is feeling grateful
david desteno 2019
aeon.co/ideas/the-fast-track-to-a-life-well-lived-is-feeling-grateful
the grateful don’t cheat: gratitude as a fount of virtue
david desteno et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1177/0956797619848351
building long-term empathy: a large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking
fernanda herrera et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204494
As part of the research, Herrera, along with Stanford psychology scholar Jamil Zaki, Bailenson and psychology graduate student Erika Weisz, conducted two two-month-long studies with more than 560 participants, age 15 to 88 and representing at least eight ethnic backgrounds. Researcher Elise Ogle was also a co-author on the paper.
During the research, some participants were shown “Becoming Homeless,” a seven-minute VR experience developed by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
In “Becoming Homeless,” a narrator guides participants through several interactive VR scenarios that would happen if they lost their jobs. In one scene, the participant has to look around an apartment to select items to sell in order to pay the rent. In another scene, the participant finds shelter on a public bus and has to protect belongings from being stolen by a stranger.
The researchers found that participants who underwent “Becoming Homeless” were more likely to have enduring positive attitudes toward the homeless than people who did other tasks, such as reading a narrative or interacting with a two-dimensional version of the scenario on a desktop computer. The same people were also more likely to sign a petition in support of affordable housing, according to the research.
“Taking the perspective of others in VR produces more empathy and prosocial behaviors in people immediately after going through the experience and over time in comparison to just imagining what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes,” Herrera said. “And that is an exciting finding.”
Measuring empathy over time
Empathy, the ability to share and understand someone else’s emotions, is a critical part of meaningful social interactions, according to scholars. It has been shown to increase people’s understanding of one another and to motivate positive social behaviors, such as donating, volunteering or cooperating with others.
“We tend to think of empathy as something you either have or don’t have,” said Zaki, an assistant professor of psychology and a co-author of the paper. “But lots of studies have demonstrated that empathy isn’t just a trait. It’s something you can work on and turn up or down in different situations.”
The studies’ results showed that participants in the “Becoming Homeless” condition were significantly more likely to agree with statements like “Our society does not do enough to help homeless people.” They were also more likely to say that they personally cared “very much” about the plight of homeless people. The research also showed that their empathetic attitudes toward the homeless endured.
In addition, according to the first study, 82 percent of participants in the VR condition signed a petition supporting affordable housing versus 67 percent of the people who read a narrative that asked them to imagine becoming homeless.
In the second study, 85 percent in the VR condition signed the petition in comparison to 63 percent who read the narrative. Of participants who went through the two-dimensional version of the VR experience, 66 percent signed the petition.
“What’s special about this research is that it gives us longitudinal evidence that VR changes attitudes and behaviors of people in a positive way,” Bailenson said.
More research ahead
Not all empathy exercises that introduce perspectives of different groups produce positive effects, the researchers said. For example, previous research has shown that when people are asked to take the perspective of their competitors, they become less empathetic toward them.
Similarly, the format of a VR experience also matters when considering how it might alter people’s attitudes, Herrera said.
Herrera, Bailenson and other researchers are working on other studies to figure out the nuances of VR’s effects on people.
But for now, Herrera and her team are excited about the evidence that they have gathered in their new study.
“Long after our studies were complete, some research participants emailed me to reflect on how they started becoming more involved in the issue afterward. One of them befriended a homeless person in their community and wrote me again once that person found a home,” Herrera said. “It was really inspiring to see that positive, lasting impact.”
abstract Virtual Reality (VR) has been increasingly referred to as the “ultimate empathy machine” since it allows users to experience any situation from any point of view. However, empirical evidence supporting the claim that VR is a more effective method of eliciting empathy than traditional perspective-taking is limited. Two experiments were conducted in order to compare the short and long-term effects of a traditional perspective-taking task and a VR perspective-taking task (Study 1), and to explore the role of technological immersion when it comes to different types of mediated perspective-taking tasks (Study 2). Results of Study 1 show that over the course of eight weeks participants in both conditions reported feeling empathetic and connected to the homeless at similar rates, however, participants who became homeless in VR had more positive, longer-lasting attitudes toward the homeless and signed a petition supporting the homeless at a significantly higher rate than participants who performed a traditional perspective-taking task. Study 2 compared three different types of perspective-taking tasks with different levels of immersion (traditional vs. desktop computer vs. VR) and a control condition (where participants received fact-driven information about the homeless). Results show that participants who performed any type of perspective-taking task reported feeling more empathetic and connected to the homeless than the participants who only received information. Replicating the results from Study 1, there was no difference in self-report measures for any of the perspective-taking conditions, however, a significantly higher number of participants in the VR condition signed a petition supporting affordable housing for the homeless compared to the traditional and less immersive conditions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
“we wait”—the impact of character responsiveness and self embodiment on presence and interest in an immersive news experience
anthony steed et al. 2018
doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00112
look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5
endemic in humans
not understanding the appropriate action given a set of circumstances?
reason people treat autism as a disorder is because they cannot admit to themselves that everyone is autistic? when people don’t understand the appropriate actions they must take to mitigate climate change, or peak oil…
severity of asd symptoms and their correlation with the presence of copy number variations and exposure to first trimester ultrasound
sara jane webb et al. 2016
doi.org/10.1002/aur.1690
low-dose suramin in autism spectrum disorder: a small, phase i/ii, randomized clinical trial
robert naviaux et al. 2017
doi.org/10.1002/acn3.424
altered responses to social chemosignals in autism spectrum disorder
yaara endevelt-shapira et al. 2017
doi.org/10.1038/s41593-017-0024-x
role of vta dopamine neurons and neuroligin 3 in sociability traits related to nonfamiliar conspecific interaction
sebastiano bariselli et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05382-3
association of maternal insecticide levels with autism in offspring from a national birth cohort
alan s. brown et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17101129
predicting empathy from resting state brain connectivity: a multivariate approach
leonardo christov-moore et al. 2020
doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2020.00003
Traditionally, empathy is assessed through the use of questionnaires and psychological assessments. The findings of this study offer an alternative to people who may have difficulty filling out questionnaires, such as people with severe mental illness or autism, said senior author Dr. Marco Iacoboni, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
“Assessing empathy is often the hardest in the populations that need it most,” Iacoboni said. “Empathy is a cornerstone of mental health and well-being. It promotes social and cooperative behavior through our concern for others. It also helps us to infer and predict the internal feelings, behavior and intentions of others.”
Iacoboni has long studied empathy in humans. His previous studies have involved testing empathy in people presented with moral dilemmas or watching someone in pain.
For the current study, published in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, researchers recruited 58 male and female participants ages 18 to 35.
Resting brain activity data were collected using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, a noninvasive technique for measuring and mapping brain activity through small changes in blood flow. Participants were told to let their minds wander while keeping their eyes still, by looking at a fixation cross on a black screen.
Afterward, the participants completed questionnaires designed to measure empathy. They rated how statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” described them on a five-point scale from “not well” to “very well.”
Researchers wanted to measure how accurately they could predict the participants’ empathic disposition, characterized as the willingness and ability to understand another’s situation, by analyzing the brain scans.
The predictions were made by looking into resting activity in specific brain networks that earlier studies demonstrated are important for empathy. Researchers used a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning, which can pick up subtle patterns in data that more traditional data analyses might not.
“We found that even when not engaged directly in a task that involves empathy, brain activity within these networks can reveal people’s empathic disposition,” Iacoboni said. “The beauty of the study is that the MRIs helped us predict the results of each participant’s questionnaire.”
The findings could help health care professionals better assess empathy in people with autism or schizophrenia, who may have difficulties filling out questionnaires or expressing emotion.
“People with these conditions are thought to lack empathy,” he said. “But if we can demonstrate that their brains have the capability for empathy, we can work to improve it through training and the use of other therapies.”
Furthermore, said lead author Leonardo Christov-Moore, a postdoctoral fellow currently at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, this technique may be expanded to improve treatment as well as diagnosis.
“The predictive power of machine learning algorithms like this one, when applied to brain data, can also help us predict how well a given patient will respond to a given intervention, helping us tailor optimal therapeutic strategies from the get-go.”
The study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that brains at rest are as active as brains engaged in a task, and that brain networks in the resting brain may interact in a similar fashion as when they are engaged in a task.
Iacoboni said future, larger studies may help identify other regions of the brain associated with empathy.
abstract Recent task fMRI studies suggest that individual differences in trait empathy and empathic concern are mediated by patterns of connectivity between self-other resonance and top-down control networks that are stable across task demands. An untested implication of this hypothesis is that these stable patterns of connectivity should be visible even in the absence of empathy tasks. Using machine learning, we demonstrate that patterns of resting state fMRI connectivity (i.e. the degree of synchronous BOLD activity across multiple cortical areas in the absence of explicit task demands) of resonance and control networks predict trait empathic concern (n = 58). Empathic concern was also predicted by connectivity patterns within the somatomotor network. These findings further support the role of resonance-control network interactions and of somatomotor function in our vicariously driven concern for others. Furthermore, a practical implication of these results is that it is possible to assess empathic predispositions in individuals without needing to perform conventional empathy assessments.
schadenfreude deconstructed and reconstructed: a tripartite motivational model
shensheng wang et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2018.09.002
•Research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology sheds light on Schadenfreude.
•We propose a novel tripartite taxonomy of Schadenfreude: Aggression, rivalry, and justice.
•The process of dehumanization may lie at the core of Schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude is the distinctive pleasure people derive from others’ misfortune. Research over the past three decades points to the multifaceted nature of Schadenfreude rooted in humans’ concerns for social justice, self-evaluation, and social identity. Less is known, however, regarding how the differing facets of Schadenfreude are interrelated and take shape in response to these concerns. To address these questions, we review extant theories in social psychology and draw upon evidence from developmental, personality, and clinical research literature to propose a novel, tripartite, taxonomy of Schadenfreude embedded in a motivational model. Our model posits that Schadenfreude comprises three separable but interrelated subforms (aggression, rivalry, and justice), which display different developmental trajectories and personality correlates. This model further posits that dehumanization plays a central role in both eliciting Schadenfreude and integrating its various facets. In closing, we point to fruitful directions for future research motivated by this novel account of Schadenfreude.
empathy is hard work: people choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs
c. daryl cameron et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1037/xge0000595
"There is a common assumption that people stifle feelings of empathy because they could be depressing or costly, such as making donations to charity," said lead researcher C. Daryl Cameron, PhD. "But we found that people primarily just don't want to make the mental effort to feel empathy toward others, even when it involves feeling positive emotions."
The study, which was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, included 11 experiments with more than 1,200 participants. Cameron led a team of researchers at Penn State University, where he is an assistant professor of psychology, and the University of Toronto.
The researchers designed an "Empathy Selection Task" to test whether cognitive costs, or mental effort, could deter empathy. Over a series of trials, the researchers used two decks of cards that each featured grim photos of child refugees. For one deck, participants were told just to describe physical characteristics of the person on the card. For the other deck, they were told to try to feel empathy for the person in the photo and think about what that person was feeling. Participants were told to choose freely from either deck in each trial.
In some additional experiments, the researchers used decks that featured images of sad or smiling people. When given the choice of choosing between decks, participants consistently picked the decks that didn't require feeling empathy, even for the photos of happy people.
"We saw a strong preference to avoid empathy even when someone else was expressing joy," Cameron said.
Across all of the experiments, participants on average chose the empathy deck 35% of the time, showing a strong preference for the deck that didn't require empathy.
There also weren't any financial costs for feeling empathy in the study because no one was asked to donate time or money to support child refugees or anyone else featured in the photos.
In survey questions after each experiment, most participants reported that empathy felt more cognitively challenging, saying it required more effort and that they felt less good at it than they did at describing the physical characteristics of other people. Participants who reported that feeling empathy was mentally demanding or made them feel insecure, irritated or distressed were more likely to have avoided the empathy deck during the experiments.
Can people be encouraged to feel empathy if they think they are good at it? In two experiments, half of the participants were told that they were better than 95% of others on the empathy deck and 50% better for the objective physical characteristics deck, while the other group was told the opposite. Participants who were told they were good at feeling empathy were more likely to select cards from the empathy deck and report that empathy required less mental effort.
The cognitive costs of empathy could cause people to avoid it, but it may be possible to increase empathy by encouraging people that they can do it well, Cameron said.
"If we can shift people's motivations toward engaging in empathy, then that could be good news for society as a whole," Cameron said. "It could encourage people to reach out to groups who need help, such as immigrants, refugees and the victims of natural disasters."
abstract Empathy is considered a virtue, yet it fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: When given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here, we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We developed the empathy selection task, which uses free choices to assess the desire to empathize. Participants make a series of binary choices, selecting situations that lead them to engage in empathy or an alternative course of action. In each of 11 studies (N = 1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as more effortful and aversive and less efficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting that cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others’ feelings, people act as if it is not worth the effort.
the power of kindness: why empathy is essential in everyday life
brian goldman 2018
take pride: why the deadliest sin holds the secret to human success
jessica tracy 2016
into the magic shop: a neurosurgeon’s quest to discover the mysteries of the brain and the secrets of the heart
james doty 2016
the kindness cure: how the science of compassion can heal your heart and your world
tara cousineau 2018
the emotional brain: the mysterious underpinnings of emotional life
joseph ledoux 2015
jane on the brain: exploring the science of social intelligence with jane austen
wendy jones 2017
emotional rollercoaster: a journey through the science of feelings
claudia hammond 2006
descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain
antonio damasio 2005
the feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness
antónio r. damásio 1999
dodging energy vampires: an empath’s guide to evading relationships that drain you and restoring your health and power
christiane northrup 2018
the culture code: an ingenious way to understand why people around the world live and buy as they do
clotaire rapaille 2006
social empathy: the art of understanding others
elizabeth segal 2018
no hard feelings: the secret power of embracing emotions at work
liz fosslien, mollie west duffy 2019
emotional success: the power of gratitude, compassion, and pride
david desteno 2018
a history of feelings
rob boddice 2019
the history of emotions
rob boddice 2020
i know this to be true: jacinda ardern, interview and photography
geoff blackwell 2020 unread
in an environment where most other people care too little, for an empath it becomes a huge burden to care. to avoid burning out, we must care less, or rather, in a different way, otherwise the stress of being unable to care–as–we–wish–to will destroy our health.
in such an uncaring environment, without support, we may be the only ones that can look after our own health, so we must make sure to do that, as otherwise we will lose the ability to act as our health declines.
for example, if our partner does not or cannot care enough, then we must devote time to caring for our own wellbeing, as the level of caring that each partner would provide to the other, in a balanced relationship, is not adequately present in this relationship to maintain our health.
if that means that we cannot give as much caring as we would like at present, we must console ourselves by thinking of the longer term, that this makes it possible to give caring over a longer time as we will stay alive longer.
I like to think of myself as open, but in fact it is just that relative to my peers I have a relatively open set point — if we were comparing to people a hundred years from now, I might not seem so open. for example, I don't do drugs (including most intoxicants like alcohol, or even tea, coffee or most processed sugar — all of these are accepted my almost all of my peers)
the point is, I do have a set point, a set of habits that seem non–negotiable, as almost all people do (I haven't met a person that disproves this theory, but they may exist somewhere).
fundamental attribution error
situationism vs dispositionism
we believe, without evidence, that our “innate dispositions” are more influential than the environmental conditions we face
the study about the “good Samaritans” who were time pressured
“there but for the grace of god go i”
dispositionism
assume that we would behave differently even if placed in another's shoes as we have innate differences within us that determine how we act
i’ve always wondered why some people would laugh at the suffering of others. what makes them different from me? what in their fate or life experiences lead them to laugh while others weep?
what series of traumas made them lose their ability to feel another person’s suffering — or perhaps, what series of traumas honed my ability to do so?