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Empathy - Nature’s Glue? A small baby who sees his father burst into tears suddenly starts crying himself, his sad little face the very picture of misery. Is this empathy? Or is it, as psychologist Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Learning at the University of Washington in Seattle, thinks, something less exalted, like emotional “contagion?” A slightly more evolved creature – a toddler - watches her mother wince and yell “Ouch!” after hitting herself with a hammer. The child suddenly picks up a teddy bear and toddles over to give it to her mother. Now, that’s got to be empathy, right? After all, the child not only knew, or seemed to know, what her mother was feeling, she had an appropriately compassionate response. But, then, what about chimps? When two chimps fight, says Lisa A. Parr, a research associate at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, the loser is often consoled by a third chimp, who will walk up to the victim and offer a kiss or a hairy arm around the shoulders. Sweet, just like the toddler. But do chimps, or toddlers, for that matter, really understand what they’re doing? And if they do, are they acting from altruism, or a more selfish desire to calm their fellow creature so that they feel less distressed themselves? Empathy is what we all claim we want more of – from our spouses, our bosses, our friends and perhaps especially, our harried doctors. But what is it, exactly? Does it truly aid healing to be understood? Do empathizers run the risk of burning out if they care too much? And how, if empathy is such a good thing, can we get –and give – more of it? Empathy is nothing less than “the unseen glue that holds civilization together,” adds Metzoff. From an evolutionary point of view, we’re probably hardwired for empathy, which confers “selective advantage,” allowing the young - and the species - to survive, says Dr. Steven Hyman, provost at Harvard University and professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Indeed, “if parents are not empathic, then that infant is at greater risk of perishing,” says psychologist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago. Empathy is important from a
mental health point of view, too. The inability to empathize is a
hallmark of autism, a condition characterized by social withdrawal.
But understanding empathy can get tricky. For those, like Robert W. Levenson, director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, empathy comes in three forms. “Cognitive empathy,” he explains by email, is “knowing what someone is feeling.” This does not automatically imply kindness. “I can know how you feel and torture you, intensify the pain,” says Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine who studies empathy and facial expressions. “Emotional empathy,” says Levenson, is what most of us mean by the term, “feeling what someone is feeling.” And compassionate empathy is doing something about it – offering a teddy bear or a kiss. The capacity for empathy probably grows, at least in part, out of a baby’s inborn ability to mimic facial expressions, theorizes Meltzoff.. Literally from the moment of birth, his work shows, a baby will stick out her tongue while watching an adult do so, or mimic an adult’s open mouth or frowning face. Through this mimicry, the infant constructs a worldview that says, in essence, that other people are “like me,” he says. Empathy, including the sophisticated talent for treating others as you would like to be treated, “builds on primitive imitation.” Ekman’s work supports this idea, showing, in fact, that merely imitating someone else’s facial expression can elicit that feeling in oneself. But Ekman’s work also suggests that facial mimicry is not absolutely necessary for empathy. His studies show that patients with facial paralysis (Moebius syndrome) can nonetheless develop normal cognitive and emotional empathy. At the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Marco Iacoboni, an associate professor, used a technique called functional MRI to obtain brain images of people observing and mimicking the facial expressions of others showing fear, surprise, disgust, anger, sadness and happiness. He found that a specific set of circuits – including a tiny, island-shaped structure called the insula – “light up” whether people are merely observing an emotion or trying to imitate it, although this response is stronger when they’ve actively imitating. This suggests, Iacoboni says, that “some treatment based on imitation might help people with emotional disorders like autism.” It also suggests that “the way you understand the feelings of others is through your own body.” The trick, of course, is to do this without drowning in the other person’s feelings. A good psychotherapist, says Dr. Paul Mc Hugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, can experience a patient’s feelings as if they were his own, but without accepting the patient’s perhaps-unrealistic assumptions. For the rest of us, there are potential pitfalls. In some people, experiencing another’s person’s pain can lead to “empathic over-arousal,” says Nancy Eisenberg, Regents Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University in Tempe. In this unpleasant state, the focus then becomes one’s own feelings of stress rather than the other person’s need. The over-aroused person may have to leave the room or emotionally withdraw to feel better. Empathy can even be too much for some people seemingly in need of it, she says. “Empathy could lead someone to feel they are being pitied, especially if that person has a strong need to be autonomous.” But most of the
time, we all want more empathy, not less. After all, says Dr.
Jonathan Kolb, a psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society
and Institute, “When you’re feeling bad, nothing is as helpful as
returning to that kind of basic, bedrock caretaking.”
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