Category: Empathy

Conflict all around the world is caused by a lack of understanding and empathy with other groups.

People around the world are frequently in conflict with each other due to a lack of empathy.

When people don’t understand each other’s feelings, they are more likely to fight — especially if they are from different races, countries or cultures.

However, just two positive experiences with people from another group is enough to boost empathy with them, recent research finds.

The scientists were surprised as people normally take longer to learn positive associations than negative.

In the research, Swiss people were paired with those of Balkan descent.

People from the Balkans are seen as problematic immigrants by some in Switzerland.

The Swiss person expected to receive a painful electric shock to the back of the hand.

But they were apparently saved from this ordeal by someone with a typically Balkan name.

The Swiss person then observed someone else receiving a painful shock while their brain was scanned.

The brain response showed similar empathy with the other person whether they were Swiss or Balkan if they had had a positive experience with a Balkan beforehand.

Otherwise the Swiss people showed much less empathy when they saw the Balkan in pain.

Dr Grit Hein, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“These results reveal that positive experiences with a stranger are transferred to other members of this group and increase the empathy for them.”

The more positive interactions the Swiss people had with someone from the Balkans, the greater their empathic response towards them.

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Hein et al., 2015).

Brain illustration image from Shutterstock

Every week almost one-quarter of Americans use this drug.

Acetaminophen — commonly known as Tylenol in the US and paracetamol elsewhere — reduces people’s empathy for the pain of others, new research finds.

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

The ubiquitous painkiller does not just kill pain, it also kills our fellow-feeling.

Dr Dominik Mischkowski, the study’s first author, said:

“These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen.

Acetaminophen can reduce empathy as well as serve as a painkiller.”

Previous research has also found that the drug can reduce the positive emotions of those taking it.

Dr Baldwin Way, a study co-author, said:

“We don’t know why acetaminophen is having these effects, but it is concerning.

Empathy is important.

If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse’s feelings.”

The research was carried out on 80 college students.

Half were given a dose of 1,000mg of acetaminophen and the other half a placebo.

They then read a series of stories about people who had been hurt and were asked to rate their pain.

The results showed that those who had taken the acetaminophen consistently gave lower pain ratings for the people in the story.

The researchers carried out a couple of other variations to test people’s’ empathy for physical and social pain.

Dr Way explained the results of the experiment on social pain:

“In this case, the participants had the chance to empathize with the suffering of someone who they thought was going through a socially painful experience.

Still, those who took acetaminophen showed a reduction in empathy.

They weren’t as concerned about the rejected person’s hurt feelings.”

The researchers are now moving on to ibuprofen to see if the findings are the same.

The study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Mischkowski et al., 2016).

Make others empathise more with this really strange method.

Having people touch rough sandpaper makes them more empathetic, a new study finds.

Being in a small amount of discomfort helps people empathise with others in pain.

Other ways of putting people in a small amount of discomfort may also work in a similar way.

The study was looking at ways to increase donations to charity.

Dr Chen Wang, the study’s first author, said:

“We found that when people were experiencing mild discomfort as a result of touching a rough surface, they were more aware of discomfort in their immediate environment.

They could better empathize with individuals who were suffering.”

Dr Wang said:

“Often smaller charities invest a lot of money in advertising to build awareness, but our data suggests that introducing haptic roughness into outreach materials could be an innovative and cost-effective approach.”

The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (Wang et al., 2016).

Hug image from Shutterstock

Rational brains are physically different from emotional brains.

Two different types of empathy can be seen operating in the brain, a new study finds.

The two types are emotional empathy and rational empathy.

Emotional empathy is when you feel someone else’s emotions yourself.

Rational empathy is when you try to understand someone else’s emotions intellectually.

Mr Robert Eres, who led the study, said:

“People who are high on affective [or emotional] empathy are often those who get quite fearful when watching a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene.

Those who have high cognitive empathy are those who are more rational, for example a clinical psychologist counselling a client.”

The brains of people who respond rationally to emotions are different from those who respond emotionally, the study found.

The study examined whether people with more brain cells in certain areas respond in different ways to emotional stimuli.

Researchers found that people with higher gray matter density in the insula — an area important for the emotions — displayed more emotional empathy.

Those showing more rational empathy had higher gray matter density in the midcingulate cortex.

Mr Eres said:

“Every day people use empathy with, and without, their knowledge to navigate the social world.

We use it for communication, to build relationships, and consolidate our understanding of others.

In the future we want to investigate causation by testing whether training people on empathy related tasks can lead to changes in these brain structures and investigate if damage to these brain structures, as a result of a stroke for example, can lead to empathy impairments.”

The study’s authors conclude:

“Taken together, these results provide validation for empathy being a multi-component construct, suggesting that affective and cognitive empathy are differentially represented in brain morphometry as well as providing convergent evidence for empathy being represented by different neural and structural correlates.”

The study was published in the journal Neuroimage (Eres et al., 2015).

Brain illustration image from Shutterstock

Jewish people asked to watch the pain of neo-Nazis in brain imaging study.

The part of the brain that is involved in empathising with the pain of others is more highly activated by seeing the suffering of hateful people than those we like, a recent study finds.

While we might imagine we would empathise more with the suffering of those we like, we may focus on the hateful person’s pain because we need to monitor our enemies carefully.

Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, who led the study, said:

“When you watch an action movie and the bad guy appears to be defeated, the moment of his demise draws our focus intensely.

We watch him closely to see whether he’s really down for the count, because it’s critical for predicting his potential for retribution in the future.”

The brain imaging study examined how the brain’s ‘pain matrix’ reacts to seeing people’s suffering (Fox et al., 2013).

The ‘pain matrix’ refers to a network of structures in the brain — including the insula cortex and the anterior cingulate — which activate when we see another person suffer.

It is thought that the pain matrix relates to how we empathise with others.

For the study, the researchers specifically chose Jewish participants and showed them videos of anti-Semitic individuals in pain, as well as videos of non-racist, more likeable individuals in pain.

Their brains were scanned using fMRI to measure the activity of the pain matrix.

The results revealed that the Jewish participants’ pain matrices were activated more when they saw the anti-Semitic individuals in pain.

At the same time, however, the reward centres of the brain were more active for participants when they saw the anti-Semites in pain.

This suggests they were probably experiencing a little schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the pain of others).

The study’s authors conclude:

“These results highlight a deep and disquieting aspect of the human experience […]

…we see evidence supporting the notion that viewing threatening, hateful people in pain elicits elevated attention to the person in pain in addition to an element of pleasure which keeps your friend’s pain close, but your enemy’s closer.”

Image credit: Alex Abian

Surprise difference between men and women baffles researchers.

When men are stressed they become more self-centred and less able to read the emotions and intentions of others, while under stress women become less self-centred.

The effects of stress on women are a surprise finding from a new study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. (Tomova et al., 2014)

The researchers set out with the idea that stress would make everyone more self-centred since, when stressed, we don’t have the cognitive resources to think about others.

One of the study’s authors, Claus Lamm explains:

“Our starting hypothesis was that stressed individuals tend to become more egocentric. Taking a self-centred perspective in fact reduces the emotional/cognitive load. We therefore expected that in the experimental conditions people would be less empathic.”

They were surprised that the results only held true for men, not women, who actually became less self-centred under stress.

Participants in the experiment were put under stress in a variety of ways, including being asked to speak in public and by doing math tests.

Afterwards, they were given tests of how self-centred they were at that moment.

They had to:

• judge other people’s emotions,
• think from another person’s perspective,
• and try to imitate certain movements.

Another of the study’s authors, Giorgia Silani, explained the results:

“What we observed was that stress worsens the performance of men in all three types of tasks. The opposite is true for women.”

The explanation for the effect is unknown, but Silani continued:

“At a psychosocial level, women may have internalized the experience that they receive more external support when they are able to interact better with others.

This means that the more they need help — and are thus stressed — the more they apply social strategies.

At a physiological level, the gender difference might be accounted for by the oxytocin system.

Oxytocin is a hormone connected with social behaviours and a previous study found that in conditions of stress women had higher physiological levels of oxytocin than men.”

Image credit: giveawayboy

I want to tell you a story about two neurochemicals…

Storytelling has remarkable effects on our brain and on our behaviour.

In a series of experiments in his lab, Paul Zak has shown that when watching a short, sad story about a father and son, two interesting neurochemicals are produced:

1. Cortisol–which people feel as distress and encourages them to pay attention to the story.
2. Oxytocin–which promotes connection and care and encourages people to feel empathy.

After experiencing the story, people who produced the most oxytocin were the most likely to give money to others they couldn’t see.

The molecule seemed to make them more generous (Zak et al., 2007).

This video explains the research and how it connects to a 150-year-old theory of storytelling:

Stories without key elements–including a climax and denouement–do not engage the brain in the same way. Indeed people ignore them.

Oxytocin doesn’t just make us more generous, though, it’s effects can be harnessed for less noble purposes.

According to Zak, oxytocin may also help explain some people’s susceptibility to advertising.

In one study, participants given a whiff of oxytocin gave more money to charities after seeing public service announcements than those not exposed to the chemical.

Zak said:

“Our results show why puppies and babies are in toilet paper commercials. This research suggests that advertisers use images that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and hence increase sales.”