I
feel your pain
Page 3
 ...reasons
to justify the importance of empathy?”
The ability to put oneself in another’s position
hinges on the theory of mind – the ability to attribute mental
states like our own to others, taking into account what others are
thinking. This usually develops around age four, allowing people
to understand that other people are like themselves, with their
own internal mental lives, and makes it possible to not only learn
from each other, but through each other’s experience. “There
is good evidence that we can figure out how others are feeling,
what they intend and how they are likely to act by putting ourselves
in their shoes, so to speak,” said Ralph Adolphs, a neurologist
at the University of Iowa.
Putting ourselves in another’s shoes involves a certain amount
of imitation, whether it’s an outer expression of the emotion
like facial expressions and posture or an inner expression through
the activation of similar regions of the brain. In a study on imitation,
Iacoboni found that overt imitation of gestures or facial expressions
increased the inner level of imitation; increased the amount of
brain activity that was echoed. Eleven subjects were underwent MRI
scanning while they either imitated or simply observed various facial
expressions from happiness and surprise to anger, sadness, disgust
and fear. When the subjects simply observed the faces, activity
occurred in the emotional centers of the brain, like the amygdala.
When the subjects actually imitated the faces, the brain became
far more active. Part of the activity was in regions that deal with
physical motion, which wouldn’t be triggered by observation
alone, but even the areas like the amygdala that only deal with
emotion showed more blood flow, meaning more activity. “The
more one tends to imitate others,” said Iacobini, “the
more one is empathetic.”
The imaging data corroborates previous work that used the older
psychological questionnaires. Through the surveys, scientists found
that people with something called the chameleon effect – a
tendency to imitate mannerisms, expressions, accents and postures
of other people automatically and subconsciously – would test
higher on the empathy scales. The more in tune their physical body
was to the people around them, the more in tune they were to the
mental aspects of those surrounding them. “If you really want
to understand what the mental state of the person is, you still
have to invoke some of the mental aspects that are associated with
that state,” said Iacoboni.
The use of brain imaging in empathy has led researchers to consider
empathy as more than just a philosophical moral value, but as something
that is actually hard-wired into the brain. Scientists... |
