More from the Empathy and the Brain conference.

The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: Issues and Implications
Daniel Batson (University of Kansas)

“I came to empathy by the back door.” Interest in motivation for helping: whether, when we help others, it’s because we care about their welfare, or is it always in some way about ourselves? The old egoism/altrusim debate.

Depends what you mean by “altruism.” Helping? Costly helping? Self-sacrificial helping? Obviously humans do these things (on occasion).

• Altruism: A motivational state with the ultimate coal of increasing another’s welfare.
• Egosim: A motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing one’s own welfare.

Question is whether our motivation is ever, in any degree, altruistic? If you want to know when and where helping can be expected, and how effective it is likely to be, “helping” isn’t enough–we need to get at motives.

When we help the other, we benefit the other, but we also receive self-benefits (feeling good, avoiding feeling guilty, avoiding censure from others). In that sense, helping the other is an instrumental goal to the ultimate goal of helping oneself. Alternatively, helping oneself can be unintended consequences of the ultimate goal of helping others.

We rarely trust self-reports. We infer goals from observing behavior. But if we observe behavior with two or more possible ultimate goals, we can’t determine the true ultimate goal.

One likely source of altruism: empathic concern. What Decety & Carter have called sympathy. An other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need. Includes feeling sympathy, compassion, tenderness, and the like (i.e., feeling for the other, not like the other.

Seven other uses of “empathy”:

1. Knowing another’s thoughts and feelings (theory of mind)
2. Adopting the posture or matching the neural response of an observed other (the bogus “mirror neuron” idea)
3. Coming to feel as another feels (emotional contagion, or affective resonance, or emotional resonance–you have to “catch” this from another persion. Noticing the same tiger in the bush they saw isn’t “emotional contagion.” Also, it could simply be upsetting to me to see another upset.)
4. Feeling distress at witnessing another’s suffering (personal distress). (Distinct from feeling distress for another person.)
5. Imagining how one would think and feel in another’s place (“imagined self” perspective).
6. Imagining how another thinks and feels.
7. General disposition (trait) to feel for others.

Over 35 experiments have been conducted, testing the empathy-altruism hypothesis against plausible egoistic alternatives. Results have been strongly supportive. Question: How could empathy-induced altruism have evolved? Most plausible answer is not reciprocal altruism, but generalized parental nurturance.

Three assumptions of a nurturance explanation:

1. Humans have a need-oriented, emotion-based, and goal-directed parental instinct.
2. This human parental instinct can be generalized beyond progeny.  (Supported by our cognitive capacity for symbolic thought. Also, may be evolutionarily adaptive to have a broad sense of kinship–more individuals to care for offspring.) (Is oxytocin involved in care for pets? Both dog & human get oxytocin released in their interaction.)
3. Intensity of tender, empathic feeling varies with perceived relation… [slide changed too quickly]

Implications:

• Good news: Empathy-induced altruism can increase cooperation and care in conflict situations.
• Bad news: Empathy-induced altruism can lead people to act immorally. (If I care about another person, I may show partiality to them.)

The Strange (Recent) History of Empathic Cruelty
Allan Young (McGill University)

[An earlier version of this paper is available here.  It's hard to take notes when someone is reading a paper, so I'll just link to the online version rather than take detailed notes.]

Challenges to Clinical Empathy
Jodi Halpern (University of California at Berkeley)

How to neither overly identify nor overly distance yourself from patients.

Doctors self-report a long tradition of extreme emotional detachment. “Detachment” not in the Buddhist sense, but maybe we should be teaching doctors Buddhist meditation?  More on this later.

Taking Gross Anatomy (dissecting cadavers) traditionally teaches doctors to turn off their emotional reactions. Instead they develop “clinical empathy” to enable them to treat patients. But when doctors self-report using clinical empathy, patients uniformly report experiencing a lack of empathy.

Experience with a patient with Guillain-Barre Syndrome: robust older man suddenly disabled. He doesn’t want comforting; her empathy tells her he wants to be talked with in a businesslike tone. Doesn’t want to be infantilized.

Reading patients’ faces is not an effective type of clinical empathy. Patients want doctors to actually listen to what’s bothering them. [Query: how different is law practice from medical practice with respect to interactions with clients/patients?]

Non-verbal attunement: Patients test their doctors, sending out non-verbal signals to sense whether doctors are trustworthy and whether to open up to them. Detached, cognitive approach to empathy is ill-suited for clinical practice.

How are emotions informative about specific aspects of reality? This has been Halpern’s study. Cognitive view of emotions: emotions are always about something. How I see the world in any particular emotion gives rise to a web of associational thinking.

Audience question: does entrance into medical school, or how students are selected, self-select for lack of empathy?

Relations of Children’s Empathy-related Responding to Their Regulation and Social Functioning
Nancy Eisenberg (Arizona State University)

Empathy is often assumed to be a “moral” emotion, and to have a broad moral relevance. However, a 1982 meta-analysis by Underwood & Moore found no significant relationship between empathy & pro-social behavior such as cooperation & sharing.

Eisenberg argues that empathy-related reactions to play a crucial role in socioemotional & moral development, but earlier methodological models were flawed (based on self-reporting rather than physiological measures; also didn’t differentiate between sympathy & empathy).

Conceptually, useful to distinguish between empathy (an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition, and is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel) and sympathy (an emotional response stemming from the apprehension of another’s emotional state or condition, which is not the same as the other’s state or condition but consists of feelings of sorrow or concern for the other).

Sympathy should lead to altruism. Personal distress is an aversive state leading to avoidance of needy individuals.

Markers:

• Heart rate deceleration: marker of sympathetic concern
• Heart rate acceleration: marker of personal distress
• High skin conductance: marker of personal distress
• Also: facial distress, concerned attention, sadness, self-reported reactions

Validation studies: children & adults exhibited facial concerned attention (or empathic sadness) in sympathey-inducing contexts, and, to a lesser degree, facial distress in situations believed to elicit personal distress.  Also measured heart rate & skin conductance.

In general, markers of sympathy were positively related to prosocial behavior, & negatively related to markers of personal distress.

Sympathy/empathy may account for the emergence of a prosocial (altruistic) personality. Observed prosocial behaviors in 4-5 year olds:

• spontaneous (without a request)
• compliant (with request)
• sharing (giving up an object or space; higher cost)
• helping (low cost of assistance)

Only spontaneous sharing was related to references to others’ needs in prosocial moral reasoning. Requested prosocial behaviors were related to nonassertiveness & personal distress. Preschool spontaneous sharing related to costly donating or helping in preadolescence & adolescence; self-reported helping/prosociality in mid-adolescence & early adulthood; perspective taking in late adolescence & early adulthood; friend-reported sympathy in the 20s. Relatively few relations between other types of prosocial behavior & later prosocial responding.

Cognitive developmental theorists (e.g. Kohlberg) have claimed that cognition (e.g. perspective taking, abstract reasoning) relates to sympathy & moral reasoning.

Empathy is important in reduction of aggression (Feshbach). Deficits in empathy & remorse are common in individuals with antisocial personality disorders.  Recent results demonstrate relations of sympathy (and sometimes empathy) with moral reasoning, low levels of externalizing problems (e.g. aggression) and with socially appropriate and skilled behavior.

Is sympathy related to self-regulation? Hypothesized: empathic overarousal involving negative emotion -> aversive emotional state -> self-focused personal distress.  Individuals better able to maintain self-regulation exhibit sympathy; individuals less able to maintain self-regulation exhibit personal distress. Personal distress was negatively related to self-reported regulation and to friend-reported coping in college students & elderly.  Two possibilities: regulation may affect both sympathy and outcomes, or regulation may affect sympathy which affects outcomes.

Evidence shows genetics & environment both play a role in empathy & sympathy.

The Benefits and the Costs of Empathy: the Price of Being Human
Jean Decety (University of Chicago)

Empathy is the ability to share and understand the feelings of another. It involves at least a minimal distinction between self and other. Sympathy refers to feelings of concern for the welfare of others. Empathy is not unique to humans.

Perception of pain in others as a tool to investigate empathy. Pain has adaptive benefits: distinguishes harmful from non-harmful situations. Ubiquitous across cultures. Social nature of pain: expression provides a signal that elicits helping behavior in others. Healthy individuals are predisposed to find distress of others aversive and learn to avoid actions associated with this distress.

Love hurts. Subject is shown pictures of self, loved one, stranger (prime picture). After each prime, subject is shown a picture evoking pain (slicing a cucumber vs. cutting one’s finger). Increased brain activity after picture of self & loved one compared to picture of stranger.

Two different emotional responses to perceiving another  in need. Personal distress evokes egoistic motivation to reduce one’s own aversive arousal. Empathic concern evokes altruistic motivation to have the other’s need reduced.

Shared neural circuits between first-hand experience of pain and perception of pain in others.

Signal increase in the amygdala as a function of perspective-taking.

Language has a powerful effect in emotion regulation. When instructing an individual to take someone else’s perspective, subtle working changes can alter the flavor of the resulting empathic emotion, specifically by affecting the mix of empathic concern and personal distress. Perspective-taking strategy may keep feelings of personal distress at a minimum while still boosting empahtic concern.

Empathy can be too much of a good thing.  Can share too much the negative emotion of others.  Self regulation is important. Attending to others in pain is associated with an aversive response in the observer, underpinned by neural circuits involved in the perception of threat and danger. Anxiety & personal distress are usually associate with aversive, not prosocial behavior. Flight, fight, or freeze responses are adaptive responses to dangerous situations. Doctors and nurses, for example, have to learn to regulate their empathy. Could not take responsibility for the lives of their patients if they were fully aware of their life or death situations. Frees up processing capacities to be of assistance.

Folk conceptions of empathy view it as the capacity to share, understand and respond to the affective states of others. But they can be dissociated. All the neuroscience we have really has to do with how we react to emotions; we don’t really know the mechanisms involved in action. “Mirror neurons are bogus.” DSM-IV says psychopaths lack empathy, but they also lack self-regulation in other ways; we don’t know the mechanism of what they’re missing that causes them to exhibit lack of empathy.  Most papers studying scans of “psychopaths” don’t really study psychopaths; they study college students who score high on tests of anti-sociality. Don’t overestimate what we know.