Category: Empathy

Perspective taking helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

We can spontaneously form images of the world from another person’s perspective, research finds.

This allows us to virtually see things from another person’s perspective in an instant.

The new study shows our brains can change our perspective without doing any ‘mental rotation’.

Mental rotation is our ability to manipulate objects in our minds and, cognitively, it is hard work.

Ms Eleanor Ward, the study’s first author, explains that sometimes we don’t need to do this mental rotation:

“Imagine you’re in a car and you see a pedestrian crossing the road, and a bus is travelling at speed towards the crossing.

Suddenly you realize the driver hasn’t seen the pedestrian and could hit them, so you beep your horn.

How did you make this split-second decision?

Our study suggests you automatically put yourself in the bus driver’s shoes and saw the scene through their eyes.”

The results come from a study in which 203 people had to judge whether letters had been rotated or not.

Below is an example:

All the Rs on the top row are the ‘same’ R rotated.

The Rs on the bottom row are all mirror-image Rs and are also the ‘same’ R.

The Rs on the top row are not the same as the Rs on the bottom row.

The results of the study showed that people were much quicker to spot whether the letters matched when they took someone else’s perspective.

In other words, they didn’t have to mentally rotate the images — they ‘saw’ the image through the other person’s eyes.

Dr Patric Bach, study co-author, said:

“Perspective taking is an important part of social cognition.

It helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

It is important for many everyday activities in which we need interact with other people.

It helps us to empathize with them, or to work out what they are thinking.

Our study provides new insights that people can do this because they very quickly and spontaneously form a mental image of how the world looks to another person.

As soon as we have such a mental image, it is easy to put ourselves in the other person’s place and to predict how they will behave.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Ward et al., 2019).

The pill is taken by 100 million people around the world.

The oral contraceptive pill, which is taken by roughly one-third of US women, damages the ability to empathise, research finds.

Women taking the pill do 10% worse at reading facial emotions than women who are not taking it.

While the pill has no effect on reading simple emotions, it reduces the ability to read complex emotions, the scientists have found.

Dr Alexander Lischke, study co-author, said:

“More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but remarkably little is known about their effects on emotion, cognition and behavior.

“However, coincidental findings suggest that oral contraceptives impair the ability to recognize emotional expressions of others, which could affect the way users initiate and maintain intimate relationships.”

For the study, 42 users of the contraceptive pill were compared with 53 non-users.

All were given a special emotional recognition task.

The test was designed to pick up subtle differences, Dr Lischke explained:

“If oral contraceptives caused dramatic impairments in women’s emotion recognition, we would have probably noticed this in our everyday interactions with our partners.

We assumed that these impairments would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test women’s emotion recognition with a task that was sensitive enough to detect such impairments.

We, thus, used a very challenging emotion recognition task that required the recognition of complex emotional expressions from the eye region of faces.”

The results showed that the oral contraceptive had no effect on reading simple facial expressions.

However, on more complex facial expression, women taking the pill did 10% worse.

Dr Lischke said:

“Whereas the groups were equally good at recognizing easy expressions, the OCP users were less likely to correctly identify difficult expressions.”

Dr Lischke explained why the results makes sense:

“Cyclic variations of estrogen and progesterone levels are known to affect women’s emotion recognition, and influence activity and connections in associated brain regions.

Since oral contraceptives work by suppressing estrogen and progesterone levels, it makes sense that oral contraceptives also affect women’s emotion recognition.

However, the exact mechanism underlying oral contraceptive induced changes in women’s emotion recognition remains to be elucidated.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience (Pahnke et al., 2019).

Over-the-counter painkillers change how you think, dull the emotions and dial down empathy.

Popular painkillers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen reduce people’s empathy, dull their emotions and change how people process information.

Acetaminophen is an ingredient in over 600 different medications, including being the main constituent of Tylenol.

A new scientific review of studies suggests over-the-counter pain medication could be having all sorts of psychological effects that consumers do not expect.

Not only do they block people’s physical pain, they also block emotions.

The authors of the study, published in the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, write:

“In many ways, the reviewed findings are alarming.

Consumers assume that when they take an over-the-counter pain medication, it will relieve their physical symptoms, but they do not anticipate broader psychological effects.”

Taking over-the-counter painkillers changed how people’s brains processed information, how they experienced emotions and reacted to emotional events, the authors found.

When women take ibuprofen and acetaminophen — commonly known as Tylenol in the US and paracetamol elsewhere — it reduces the hurt caused by painful events, such as being betrayed.

The reverse pattern was seen in men: they actually felt more emotional hurt after taking these painkillers.

Both men and women showed less empathy after taking acetaminophen (Tylenol).

Other studies also showed this dulling of emotions in different ways.

People respond more moderately to unpleasant photographs after taking these painkillers — suggesting reduced sensitivity.

People taking acetaminophen also made more errors while trying to process information.

These studies suggest regulators may need to re-examine these drugs.

Among people who are depressed or who have trouble feeling positive emotions, these sorts of painkillers could be having negative effects.

The study is to be published in the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Ratner et al., 2018).

How clothing affects the empathy that other people feel towards us.

Wearing less revealing and more comfortable clothing makes other people feel more empathy towards you, new research finds.

However, when women in the study wore a short dress, heels and heavy make-up, it reduced how much empathy others felt towards them.

The same was true whether it was a man or woman observing the other woman.

When wearing comfortable trousers, a jersey, ballet flats and light make-up, others felt more empathy towards them.

The results are likely because revealing more skin tends to make people see us more as a sexual object, rather than a person.

Dr Giorgia Silani, who led the study, said:

“The results suggests that the underlying mechanism may be a reduced activation of the brain’s empathy network.”

Sexual objectification also robs a person of their apparent ability to plan their actions and have a moral sense in the eye of the beholder.

The results come from a study in which 41 people (half women) watched a video designed to test empathic reactions.

Brain scans measured how they reacted to the sexualised and non-sexualised target.

Dr Silani concluded:

 “This reduction in empathic feelings towards sexually objectified women was accompanied by reduced activity in empathy related brain areas.

This suggests that observers experienced a reduced capacity to share the sexualized women’s emotions”

The study was published in the journal Cortex (Cogoni et al., 2018).