Empath-I-ze

Interacting with other people is a part of everyday life. But merely interacting is not usually all that people desire. Humans seem to have a need to connect with others and to belong. Empathy is one thing that facilitates this; it enables the understanding of others, and promotes sharing and responding to others’ emotional states.

According to recent neuroimaging studies, different neural systems are activated depending upon the type of event that’s being empathized with. An article entitled "The neural components of empathy: Predicting daily prosocial behavior" describes a study in which participants were asked to empathize with people in different images. They underwent fMRI scanning while viewing images portraying three types of emotional events: positive, negative, and painful. Images for positive and negative events were accompanied by social context (e.g. ‘this person just got engaged to the love of their life’, ‘this person is waiting to find out if they will get laid off’), while the images of people experiencing pain had no contextual information (e.g. hand getting slammed in a car door). Results showed that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, which are associated with negative affect, were active when empathizing with images of people experiencing pain and anxiety. In contrast, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with positive affect, was activated when empathizing with images of happy individuals. The septal region, however, which is involved in reward and reinforcement, was activated in all three empathetic experiences. From this finding, Dr. Sylvia Morelli and the other authors of this article proposed that empathy could be a source of motivation for prosocial behavior, due to its rewarding effect for the individual. Their hypothesis was confirmed by post-hoc analyses showing that the degree of functional overlap in septal area activation during empathy for the three emotions was positively correlated with the number of daily helping behaviors that individuals reported engaging in.

During a lecture, Dr. Morelli proposed that some people may engage in helping behaviors more frequently due to a “prosocial phenotype” (Morelli, 2017). She claimed that certain individuals may experience a greater reward when they engage in positive empathy because the activation of their medial olfactory area and nucleus accumbens (reward areas) is heightened in comparison to others. If individuals experience a greater reward when empathizing, they would be more inclined to empathize with others in the future, therefore increasing their likelihood of demonstrating prosocial behavior in the real world. Dr. Morelli concluded that from this hypothesis, if a neural basis for prosocial motivation was identified, it may be possible to predict general patterns of daily prosocial behavior outside of the laboratory.

Unfortunately, this view of empathy, as having prosocial implications, is not reflected in the public’s current understanding. An article entitled “Is ‘Empathy’ Really What the Nation Needs?”, from the New York Times, implies that the rise of social networking sites has turned empathy into a “dispassionate approach” that encourages understanding other peoples’ feelings only for self-interest. Various companies advertise through Facebook because they’ve found that emotionally engaging content shares well, and that empathy can prompt real-world action, such as buying their products. Similarly, during the most recent presidential election, the term empathy is said to have been a “buzzword” on Facebook, implying that people should only try to understand others’ motivations well enough to persuade them to vote differently. The public’s current view and use of empathy is quite limited; it has taken the human ability to understand one another and has tried to exploit it. As the attempts to understand others continue to be personal-gain focused, it will be important to research how this egoistic motivation and public’s negative perception of empathy may influence broader social behavior. For example, is it possible that a negative view of empathy could lessen the rewards associated with an empathetic experience, and therefore might decrease the likelihood that an individual would engage in prosocial and empathetic experiences in the future?

References

Hess, A. (2016, November 29). Is ‘Empathy’ Really What the Nation Needs? Retrieved April 23, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/magazine/is-empathy-really-what-the-nation-needs.html

Morelli, S. A., Rameson, L. T., & Lieberman, M. D. (2012). The neural components of empathy: Predicting daily prosocial behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(1), 39-47. doi:10.1093/scan/nss088

Morelli, S. (2017, March 14). Neural Correlates of Positive Empathy: From Dyads to Social Networks. Lecture presented at the Neuroscience Seminar at Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Images

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