Empathy
ToeCheeseHogJam
of others and be sympathetic, what makes the one who empathizes even give a
damn?
I've known people from the most miserable and cruel environments
who were kind hearted and caring about others, and people from
loving and nurturing families who were cruel jerks, without
regard for anyone but themselves.
As a kid, some of the meanest, most selfish kids I knew were
preachers' kids. I only knew one that I liked and he was adopted.
The kid who had a hard life certainly knows from experience
what the other person is going through, but something more
than bad experience has to cause empathy.
Maybe it's the water.
Sir Frederick
Brain structure and function. We each are more different inside
(brain structure and function), than our outside appearances
are different.
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcn...@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
http://members.cox.net/fmmcneill/
*************************
Phrase of the week :
We have entered the cell, the mansion of our birth,
and have started the inventory of our acquired wealth.
-- Albert Claude (1899-1983)
:-))))Snort!)
*************************
Immortalist
"ToeCheeseHogJam" <chees...@bestfoods.mayonnaise> wrote in message
news:107gnjp...@news.supernews.com...
Building Empathy Toward Others. Picture the following scene: There is a long
line of cars stopped at a traffic light at a busy intersection. The light
turns green. The lead driver hesitates for 15 seconds. What happens? Of
course, there is an eruption of horn-honking. Not simply a little toot
designed to supply the lead driver with the information that the light has
changed, but prolonged and persistent blasting indicative of a frustrated
group of people venting their annoyance. Indeed, in a controlled experiment,
it was found that, in this kind of situation, approximately 90 percent of
the drivers of the second car honked their horns in an aggressive manner. As
part of the same experiment, a pedestrian who crossed the street between the
first and second cars while the light was still red was out of the
intersection by the time the light turned green. Still, almost 90 percent of
the second-car drivers tooted their horns when the light turned green. But
what happened when the pedestrian was on crutches? Apparently, seeing a
person on crutches evoked an empathic response; the feeling of empathy
overwhelmed the desire to be aggressive, and the percentage of people
honking their horns decreased dramatically.
Empathy is an important phenomenon. Seymour Feshbach notes that most people
find it difficult to inflict pain purposely on another human being unless
they can find some way of dehumanizing their victim. Thus, when our nation
was fighting wars against Asians (Japanese in the 1940s, Koreans in the
1950s, Vietnamese in the 1960s), our military personnel frequently referred
to them as "gooks." We see this as a dehumanizing rationalization for acts
of cruelty. It is easier to commit violent acts against a "gook" than it is
to commit violent acts against a fellow human being. As I have noted time
and again in this book, the rationalization Feshbach points out not only
makes it possible for us to aggress against another person, but it also
guarantees that we will continue to aggress against that person. Recall the
example of the schoolteacher living in Kent, Ohio, who, after the killing of
four Kent State students by Ohio National Guardsmen, told author James
Michener that anyone who walks on the street barefoot deserves to die. This
kind of statement is bizarre on the face of it; we begin to understand it
only when we realize that it was made by someone who had already succeeded
in dehumanizing the victims of this tragedy.
We can deplore the process of dehumanization, but at the same time, an
understanding of the process can help us to reverse it. Specifically, if it
is true that most individuals must dehumanize their victims in order to
commit an extreme act of aggression, then, by building empathy among people,
aggressive acts will become more difficult to commit. Indeed, Norma and
Seymour Feshbach have demonstrated a negative correlation between empathy
and aggression in children: The more empathy a person has, the less he or
she resorts to aggressive actions. Subsequently, Norma Feshbach developed a
method of teaching empathy and successfully tested its effects on
aggression. Briefly, she taught primary-school children how to take the
perspective of another. The children were trained to identify different
emotions in people, they played the role of other people in various
emotionally laden situations, and they explored (in a group) their own
feelings. These "empathy training activities" led to significant decreases
in aggressive behavior. Similarly, in a more recent experiment, Georgina
Hammock and Deborah Richardson demonstrated that empathy is an important
buffer against committing acts of extreme aggression. When they placed
college students in a situation where they were instructed to deliver
electric shocks to a fellow student, those who had learned to experience
empathic concern for the feelings of others delivered less severe shocks
than those who were less empathic. Ken-ichi Obuchi and his colleagues,
working with Japanese students, found similar results. Obuchi instructed
students to deliver electric shocks to another student as part of a learning
experiment. In one condition, prior to receiving the shocks, the victims
first disclosed something personal about themselves葉hus opening the door to
the formation of empathy; in the control condition, the victims were not
afforded an opportunity for self-disclosure. Subjects in the disclosure
condition administered much milder shocks than subjects in the nondisclosure
condition.
There are many ways to foster empathy among people; some of these can be
learned in elementary-school classrooms謡ithout being specifically
taughtå‚ut I am not ready to discuss them yet. Before we get to that point,
we must first take a look at the other side of the question妖ehumanization,
the kind of dehumanization that occurs in prejudice, the kind of
dehumanization that hurts not only the victim but the oppressor as well.
Read the first paragraph of the next chapter, and you'll see what I mean.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
[C] - EARLY MORALITY
That young children are morally incompetent may seem obvious. They often
behave in ways clearly excluded by local moral standards. Adults use a whole
panoply of measures (from good examples to threats or coercion) in the hope
of correcting that. Children do change and in general gradually acquire
intuitions similar to those of adults, so that whatever measures were taken
by adults are invariably construed as the cause of these changes. But
psychologists know that this is a gross oversimplification. Children may not
be totally incompetent in the domain. Indeed, it would be difficult to
explain the development of morality if young children did not have some
inkling of moral concepts. As philosophers used to say, you cannot derive an
ought from an is. There is no simple way to define what "morally right"
means, as distinct from desirable, conventionally agreed on, positively
sanctioned, approved by the authorities, etc.
Because there were two general accounts of moral judgement-in terms of
reasoning based on principles, and of feelings, respectively-psychologists
have tried to explain the acquisition of morality either as the gradual
refinement and abstraction of principles or as the gradual development of
specific emotional reactions. Seen from the first, principle-based
perspective, children acquire morality by gradually making their principles
more general, less centered on very specific actions. In this view, any
child who is attentive enough should find out how to optimize rewards by
behaving the way more powerful others, such as parents and older peers,
recommend. Then children would gradually acquire a more abstract version of
the principles, which would allow them to predict whether a given behavior
would be all right or not. Once the child understands that tormenting a pet
is "bad" but so is maiming a friend or hitting a sibling, they form a more
general concept of "brutal behavior" as punishable because of its effects.
Later, children get even more abstract principles about Good and Bad in
general.
If feelings are the main source of moral understandings, then children's
development in this domain should be slightly different. Consider a
prototypical moral sentiment, like feelings of guilt at harming others.
Morality gives us a (minor) punishment in the form of an emotion that
supposedly mirrors the suffering of others. So children should acquire these
feelings as a measure of their capacity to represent the thoughts and
feelings of others. This might happen if their first sources of moral
principles were people whose feelings are easily perceived, like parents,
and whose reactions are so crucial that even young children are very
attentive to them. This capacity for empathy would gradually extend to
others and the norms would become internal to the child's mind.
Both accounts of moral development explained some of the actual evidence,
that is, of how children actually use moral concepts. But there were some
problems too. First, many such studies were based on interviews designed to
elicit explicit moral reasoning. But we know that this method is not quite
sufficient. In many domains where we have specialized mental systems, there
is a large gap between our precise intuitions and the explicit concepts that
would justify them. The gap is even larger in children, who lack the verbal
sophistication to explicate their own intuitions; so subtler experimental
techniques are necessary. Here is a simple illustration: Six-year-olds, like
adults, have the intuition that it is wrong to lie, or rather, that it is
wrong to communicate information (either true or false) with the intention
of deceiving someone. However, young children also tend to use the word
"lie" in the narrow sense of "communicating false information," which is why
they would sometimes call a genuine mistake a lie, and conversely fail to
identify as a lie an elaborate deception that used only true information.
Their moral concept of "lying" is quite similar to the adults' but their use
of the word does not correspond to that concept. You will not understand
their moral judgements if you just ask them explicit questions such as "Is
it wrong to lie?" because of this discrepancy, which may extend to other
moral concepts as well.
Indeed, when psychologist Eliot Turiel used indirect tests he found that
even young children had sophisticated moral understandings. Turiel wanted to
find out whether children make a distinction between violations of moral
principles (for instance hitting people) and violations of conventional
rules (for instance chattering while the teacher is talking). The violation
of a convention disappears if there is no convention; if the teacher did not
insist on silence then chattering is no offense. Moral transgressions, in
contrast, are such that they remain violations even in the absence of
explicit instruction. The distinction points to what is specific about
ethical rules as such. So if children made such a distinction, this would
suggest that they had the first rudiments of a special concept of ethical
behavior.
Turiel found that even some three-and four-year-olds have the intuition that
hitting people would be wrong both in those contexts where it had been
explicitly forbidden and in those where there was no prohibition. On the
other hand, shouting in class is perceived to be wrong only if there was an
explicit instruction to keep quiet. Slightly older children (but still as
young as four or five) also have precise intuitions about the relative
seriousness of various violations. They can perceive that stealing a pen is
not quite as bad as hitting people; in the same way, shouting in class is
only a minor violation of convention, whereas boys wearing skirts would
violate a major social convention. But they find it much easier to imagine a
revision of major social conventions (e.g., a situation where boys would
wear skirts) than, a revision of even minor moral principles (e.g., a
situation where it would be all right to steal an eraser). Also, children
differentiate between moral principles and prudential rules (e.g., "Do not
leave your notebook next to the fireplace!"). They justify both in terms of
their consequences but assume that social consequences are specific to moral
violations.
One might think that Turiel's young subjects were special because they lived
in a particular culture. But studies in North Korea and America gave similar
results. Or perhaps their attitude to moral transgressions was special to
the context of schooling. But psychologist Michael Siegal found that
newcomers who had just enrolled in a kindergarten were if anything stricter
in their moral attitudes than old-timers (that is, four-year-olds who had
spent two years in day care). Or perhaps one might think that Turiel's
subjects were special because they led a relatively stress-free existence in
which serious violations of moral rules were in fact uncommon. But neglected
or abused children seem to have similar intuitions.
So experimental studies show that there is an early-developed specific
inference system, a specialized moral sense underlying ethical intuitions.
Notions of morality are distinct from those used to evaluate other aspects
of social interaction (this is why social conventions and moral imperatives
are easily distinguished by very young children). Having principled moral
intuitions-intuitions that apply only to a specific aspect of social
interaction and that are directed by particular principles-does not mean
that you can articulate them explicitly. Also, obviously, that young
children have early moral concepts does not mean that they produce the same
moral judgements as adults; far from it. Children are different for a
variety of reasons. First, they have some initial difficulty in representing
what others believe and feel. Intuitive psychology is among their
capacities, but it requires a lot of fine-tuning before it can provide
reliable descriptions of mental states in other people. So whether someone
was hurt by one's own action is not quite as easy to figure out as adults
may think. Second, children need to acquire all sorts of local parameters in
order to understand, for instance, what counts as "hurting" in a particular
social context. Third, older children and adults have a much larger
repertoire of previous situations and judgements about these situations on
the basis of which to produce case-based analogies.
Despite these differences, it is quite striking that some important aspects
of reasoning do not really change with development. Our moral intuitions
specify that behavior is either right or wrong or morally irrelevant; that
whether we are able to justify our intuition by invoking abstract principles
is irrelevant; that a course of action is in actual fact right or wrong
regardless of how the agents themselves explain their behavior. If you think
that stealing a friend's pen is wrong, you think it is wrong not just from
your viewpoint but also from anyone else's viewpoint. Whether the
perpetrator of this minor offense can invoke self-serving excuses or not is
completely irrelevant. Whether the owner of the pen minds the theft or not
is equally irrelevant.
This is what philosophers call "moral realism"-the assumption that behaviors
in themselves have specific moral values. In general, being a realist
consists in assuming that the qualities of things are in the things
themselves; if a poppy looks red it is because it is red. If we place it
under blue light it does not appear red any more but we have the intuition
that it still is that color, that it has some intrinsic redness that is
difficult to detect under these special circumstances. (Obviously, our
common intuitions are not always congruent to how a scientist would approach
the question, here as in many other domains.) Moral realism is the same,
only applied to the ethical aspect of actions, so that wrongness is thought
to be as intrinsic to stealing as redness is to a poppy. Moral philosophers
are not in general too keen on moral realism because it creates difficult
paradoxes. But that is precisely the point: the children studied by Turiel
and others are not philosophers. That is, they are not in the business of
making ethical principles explicit, testing their application to difficult
cases and checking that the overall results are consistent. They just have
spontaneous moral intuitions with a realistic bias, and when this bias
creates an ambiguity they just live with it.
Now this realist assumption does not change much with development, which is
remarkable because in other domains children gradually form more and more
sophisticated descriptions of the difference between their own and other
people's viewpoints on a situation. This "perspective-taking" is an
indispensable skill in a species that depends so much on social interaction.
You have to monitor situations not only as you see them but also the way
others see them, and to assess what creates the difference between these
viewpoints. So it is all the more interesting that no such change is
observed in the domain of moral intuitions. For the three-year-old as well
as for the ten-year-old and indeed for most adults, the fact that a behavior
is right or wrong is not a function of one's viewpoint. It is only seen as a
function of the actual behavior and the actual situation.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465006965/
WOMEN'S SOCIAL SKILLS
Grammar's study of modern courtship showed that women are socially more
astute than men. They orchestrate social interactions so skillfully that
they can control their date, even when the man believes he is running the
show. The view that women arc more verbal than men is more than a
stereotype. Women score higher on verbal tests, speak more words in a day,
are quicker to verbal aggression, are more articulate, get verbal responses
out rapidly, have more friends, and spend longer amounts of time speaking to
them on the telephone. Moreover, when women talk, they reveal more intimate
and meaningful information about themselves. Women are better listeners.
They tend not to let their attention wander in the middle of a long story.
They are more willing to offer comfort to another person a sex difference in
empathy that is present even in young children.
Women are more skilled in reading and using body language. countless
laboratory experiments have showed that they are more skilled at reading
facial expressions and detecting nonverbal signs of lying, for example. This
research backs up the findings of field studie on courtship interactions.
Psychologists often point to different childhood influences in order to
explain why women have better interpersonal skills. They argue that giving a
doll to a little girl and giving a tool set to a little boy conveys
important messages about the kind of skills each needs to develop. While
this may be true, it is also true that boys and girls differ in their
inclinations regardless of how they are treated, a point already made for
the development of aggression in boys. Parents who strive to inculcate
nonviolence in their sons by keeping them away from violent toys and violent
TV are often alarmed to discover that the boys imaginatively turn common
objects into weapons of destruction. Sticks are guns or spears. Pine cones
are hand grenades. Sex differences in aggression are largely due to biology,
as already pointed out, but upbringing does accen- tuate them, as happens in
warlike societies. Sex differences in social skills may also reflect evolved
differences.
Thus, women's abilities to entice and manipulate men in a dating context
would have helped to ensure male support for their children. In the past,
they may not have had much personal interest in striving for political power
and social status, but they were attracted to men who had these qualities
and therefore acquired them by association. In other words, a woman who
succeeded in marrying a high-ranking man acquired high social status for
herself. Even today, when women's earning power immediately after college is
almost equivalent to that of men, they still express the same emotional
needs that helped them to obtain paternal in vestment in the evolutionary
past.
The Science of Romance - by Nigel Barber
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573929700/
Sympathy is "feeling with," whereas empathy is "feeling into" (a translation
of the German concept of "Einfuhlung" developed in the nineteenth century).
One sympathizes with the feelings of other people or animals.
Writers often depend upon engaging readers' sympathies in order to achieve
desired effects through the readers' fellow-feeling with characters in drama
or narrative, or the persona in poetry and what she or he expresses (see
catharsis and hamartia).
For instance, Shakespeare arouses our sympathy for Hamlet, and Robert Burns
makes us feel a sympathetic fright along with the "tim'rous beastie" of his
poem "To a Mouse" (1786). Likewise, writers manipulate readers' antipathy
toward characters, such as Iago in Othello, or more often create a complex
interplay of sympathy and antipathy, as in our mixed feelings even for a
murderer like Macbeth
Empathy is a closer identification than sympathy, giving one a sense of
participating in what is being described or seen. Moreover, the object of
empathy may be not only a living being but something inanimate (the sea, a
tree).
Shakespeare, in his poem "Venus and Adonis" (1592), describes a snail that
on being struck "Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain"; in
"Endymion" (1818) Keats describes a wave that "Bursts gradual, with a
wayward indolence"; both descriptions invite empathy with the objects
described. Empathy implies an identification with the things described,
whereas descriptions evoking sympathy still view the object as separate from
the speaker and reader. (See also metaphor and simile.)
http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/LTSympEmpathy.html
Love has always been a central preoccupation in individual human lives, but
there has been little consideration of it by psychologists or other
scientists and little attempt to explain it as an evolutionary phenomenon.
There are various possible behavioral precursors of love: animal "love",
empathy, group feeling, sexuality, the mother/infant bond. The principal
candidates are sexuality and the mother/infant bond. Sexuality has been
favored as an origin by those few writers who have discussed the issue but
has characteristics which distinguish it sharply from love and make it an
unlikely precursor. However, the mother/infant bond alone does not fully
account for the characteristics of human love. Love evolved as the outcome
of interaction between the genetic basis for mother/infant attachment and
other capabilities of the evolving human manifested in and made possible by
the increase in human brain- size: enlarged cognitive capacity, improved
communication abilities and the evolution of language. The capacity for
language led to the emergence of the conscious self, and with this the
capability to recognise and empathise the selfhood of others. The deepening
of the mother/infant attachment into love played, and still plays, an
essential role in the transmission of culture from one generation to the
next and in making possible the cohesion of the human group. This account
fits well with recent research into the process and significance of the
mother/infant relation.
http://www.percepp.demon.co.uk/lovempat.htm
Attribution theory is defined as "an attempt to describe the psychological
operations that lead people to embrace situational or dispositional
interpretations of other people's behavior" (Gilbert, 1995, p. 103). While a
long history of attribution research had been established by the 1980's, the
understanding that these processes were highly cognitive in nature was not
introduced until Quattrone (1982) presented his model of attribution.
Quattrone asserted that attributional inferences were not dichotomous, but
rather, dispositional and situational attributions could be placed on a
continuum; dispositional attributions on one end, and situational
attributions on the other. If the observer interprets the situation as one
that is severe enough to warrant the behavior in question, then the observer
will correct the dispositional attribution to include the situation. This
process was later identified as the situational correction.
Further investigation of attribution theory, explored the saliency of either
disposition or situation in the cognitive processes of attribution. The
predominant question investigated was no longer whether or not dispositional
and situational attributions existed, but rather, to what extent
dispositional attributions were more or less automatic than situational
attributions. Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull (1988) explored this question by
integrating the use of cognitive methodology, namely cognitive busyness
tasks, with the study of attribution. The researchers hypothesized that if
an observer was viewing an anxious target featured in a silent video clip
who was said to be discussing a highly embarrassing situation, the observer
would take into account the situation and find the disposition of the target
to be less salient. As a control, participants also viewed an anxious target
featured in a silent video clip who was said to be discussing a mundane
topic. This control was integrated into the study to assess whether or not
the participants favored either attributional inference. The findings showed
that despite the saliency of the topic, participants automatically
attributed the target's anxious state to their disposition.
Given these findings, it became important to understand to what degree, if
any, the situation influences the assessment of behavior. Having established
the automaticity of dispositional attributions, Gilbert, Pelham & Krull
(1988) then sought to investigate a theory posited by Quattrone (1982).
Gilbert, Pelham and Krull (1988), again with the use of cognitive busyness
tasks, tested when and to what degree the situation is integrated into the
observer's attributional assessment. These researchers postulated that
because the dispositional attribution was so pervasively automatic
regardless of the saliency of the situation, correcting for situational
influences will be more cognitively effortful. Thus, the use of cognitive
busyness tasks would enable them to constrain the amount of cognitive
resources available to the observer, and to measure the amount of
situational corrections that occurred.
http://www.isguc.org/arc_view.php?ex=140
>
>
Immortalist
"Sir Frederick" <mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message
news:40787528...@fuzzysys.com...
> ToeCheeseHogJam wrote:
> >
> > If empathy is to experience vicariously, the feelings or conditions
> > of others and be sympathetic, what makes the one who empathizes even
give a
> > damn?
> >
> > I've known people from the most miserable and cruel environments
> > who were kind hearted and caring about others, and people from
> > loving and nurturing families who were cruel jerks, without
> > regard for anyone but themselves.
> >
> > As a kid, some of the meanest, most selfish kids I knew were
> > preachers' kids. I only knew one that I liked and he was adopted.
> >
> > The kid who had a hard life certainly knows from experience
> > what the other person is going through, but something more
> > than bad experience has to cause empathy.
> >
> > Maybe it's the water.
>
> Brain structure and function. We each are more different inside
> (brain structure and function), than our outside appearances
> are different.
> --
"emotions and feelings are mediated by distinct neural systems. Whereas
emotions are automatic responses to sensory stimuli, feelings are 'private,
sbjective experiences' that emerge from the cognitive processing of an
emotion eliciting state."
"Human survival depends on the ability to function effectively within a
social context. Central to successful social interaction is the ability to
understand others intentions and beliefs. This capacity to represent mental
states is referred to as "theory of mind" or the ability to "mentalize".
Empathy, by contrast, broadly refers to being able to understand what others
feel, be it an emotion or a sensory state. Accordingly, empathic experience
enables us to understand what it feels like when someone else experiences
sadness or happiness, and also pain, touch, or tickling."
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/002026.html
goHeseehCmaJeoT
"Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1ZCdnRzxk6v...@comcast.com...
to
> the formation of empathy; in the control condition, the victims were not
> afforded an opportunity for self-disclosure. Subjects in the disclosure
> condition administered much milder shocks than subjects in the
nondisclosure
> condition.
>
> There are many ways to foster empathy among people; some of these can be
> taught-but I am not ready to discuss them yet. Before we get to that
point,
> we must first take a look at the other side of the
I think the truth is that no one can know if the baby in the womb
is an unborn serial killer or good citizen.
>
>
Chzwmn
>Path:
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>From: "goHeseehCmaJeoT" hav...@horseradish.mayonnaise
>Newsgroups: alt.philosophy
>Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 13:02:54 -0700
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>> >
>
>I think the truth is that no one can know if the baby in the womb
>is an unborn serial killer or good citizen.
Hogwash!!!!!!!! Genetic determinist crap!
Serial killers are not born, neither are good citizens - they learn to be that
way. We all learn to be the way we are. We all have the ability to change and
grow.
Society can make a good citizen into a serial killer.
Society can say that a serial killer is a good citizen. (If you put him in an
army uniform)
You have learned nothing from the above posting - perhaps you can't read?
Sir Frederick
>
> Hogwash!!!!!!!! Genetic determinist crap!
> Serial killers are not born, neither are good citizens - they learn to be that
> way. We all learn to be the way we are. We all have the ability to change and
> grow.
>
> Society can make a good citizen into a serial killer.
>
> Society can say that a serial killer is a good citizen. (If you put him in an
> army uniform)
>
> You have learned nothing from the above posting - perhaps you can't read?
Hogwash!!!!!!!! Your agenda is showing. Genetic basis permeates every behavior.
Also : Why do you post the header info on what you are responding to?
--
andy-k
news:20040412051734...@mb-m06.aol.com...
> >Subject: Re: Empathy
> >Path:
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> >From: "goHeseehCmaJeoT" hav...@horseradish.mayonnaise
> >Newsgroups: alt.philosophy
> >Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 13:02:54 -0700
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What's this all about then?
> Hogwash!!!!!!!! Genetic determinist crap!
> Serial killers are not born, neither are good citizens - they learn to be
> that way. We all learn to be the way we are. We all have the ability to
> change and grow.
Is it impossible that a person may be born with a defect such as a
pathological absence of empathy? That such a defect may be caused by
environmental influences in the womb? Or by a certain combination of genes
that occurred during meiosis?
> Society can make a good citizen into a serial killer.
>
> Society can say that a serial killer is a good citizen. (If you put him
> in an army uniform)
Environment encourages or discourages the flourishing of innate tendencies
like empathy, but this doesn't preclude the possibility of mutations
wherein a specific innate tendency is suppressed or absent. Serial killers
are thankfully rare, so I guess it would be difficult to assemble a
statistically representative sample that would allow a thorough
investigation of the relative influences of nature and nurture.
Immortalist
"andy-k" <spam.free@last> wrote in message
news:ttuec.66$zU6.15@newsfe1-win...
> "Chzwmn" <chz...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:20040412051734...@mb-m06.aol.com...
> > >Subject: Re: Empathy
>
> > Serial killers are not born, neither are good citizens - they learn to
be
> > that way. We all learn to be the way we are. We all have the ability to
> > change and grow.
Partially True.
>
> Is it impossible that a person may be born with a defect such as a
> pathological absence of empathy? That such a defect may be caused by
> environmental influences in the womb? Or by a certain combination of genes
> that occurred during meiosis?
>
> > Society can make a good citizen into a serial killer.
True!
> >
> > Society can say that a serial killer is a good citizen. (If you put him
> > in an army uniform)
TRUE
>
> Environment encourages or discourages the flourishing of innate tendencies
> like empathy, but this doesn't preclude the possibility of mutations
> wherein a specific innate tendency is suppressed or absent. Serial killers
> are thankfully rare, so I guess it would be difficult to assemble a
> statistically representative sample that would allow a thorough
> investigation of the relative influences of nature and nurture.
>
I agree with you in response to him but his points are valid in the sense
that with nature and nurture many things are possible. And I agree with
SirFred mostly.
- LIMITS TO PLASTICITY
DESPITE THE BRAIN'S amazing ability to adapt, there are limits to its
flexibility. Age does make it harder to reroute and establish new circuits.
Music teachers, chess champions, and star athletes all advise parents to
start their disciples young. We've all seen how much easier it is for young
children to pick up second languages. In an American family that is
transferred to Tokyo for a year, the preschool child will learn to converse
in Japanese while her mother is still struggling with basic communication.
Children who are exposed to two languages from birth learn to speak both
fluently. Linguistic researcher Patricia Kuhl, at the University of
Washington in Seattle, likes to say that all babies are bom "citizens of the
world," meaning that they can learn any language perfectly. She has tested
newborn infants with sounds unique to African languages, English, and
Japanese. No matter where a baby is being reared, he or she can distinguish
the fine auditory cues typical of any non-native language and is presumably
ready to learn any language heard.
From about six months on, however, if babies have not heard a particular
speech sound, they can no longer distinguish it. Infants whose parents speak
English have formed different linguistic connections than infants whose
parents speak Japanese, based on the phonemes they hear: the long "oooo" and
abrupt "ba" of English, the clipped "toh" and slurred "rr/11" of Japanese.
By its first birthday an infant can no longer process phonemes it hasn't
heard; it is functionally deaf to foreign sounds, having learned to ignore
sound distinctions not necessary for its native language. In fact its
babbling, though not yet words, is confined to sounds that the infant has
already heard in its own language. To learn Japanese after childhood, we
conjugate long lists of verbs and endlessly repeat dialogue from language
tapes, but we can never speak like a native, because our language circuits
are unable to form new basic connections.
Brain development in the fetus and baby occurs through a series of critical
periods, "windows of opportunity," when the connections for a function are
extremely receptive to input. Once the window closes, neural connections are
pruned down to the most efficient, according to how much they are used. Then
the battle is over: the closed eye and the deciphering of foreign phonemes
will never regain space in the brain. It is clear that it is possible for
adults to learn to speak a new language with little or no accent, but it is
also clear that they do not do this the way a baby does, and instead use
altogether different systems to learn. The adult systems are not nearly as
good as the baby ones.
These precious windows of opportunity are also times of great vulnerability
to irreversible damage. "Closet kids" found by police provide the strongest
evidence. These children have been locked in closets or basements for years
by psychotic or brutal parents. They grow up without hearing human
conversation and are never able to master the sounds and grammatical rules
necessary for smooth speech. Through long instruction after they are found,
other pathways compensate to some extent, but tragically, owing to the
extreme deprivation, the critical period for natural speech development has
been missed.
One girl, Genie, was discovered in 1970 in Los Angeles at age thirteen. She
had spent her entire life, from babyhood on, in one room, often chained for
hours to a potty chair and beaten if she made a noise. Imprisoned and
isolated by her psychotic father, she had effectively grown up without human
contact. All she was able to hear was blurred conversation through the walls
of her room. After four years of subsequent experiments and training she had
learned a vocabulary and sign language, but her syntax remained disrupted.
She could produce pidgin-like sentences such as "Applesauce buy store," but
was permanently incapable of mastering grammar. She had already passed the
limited window of opportunity for language acquisition. (Unfortunately,
Genie did not come out of this story well. Funding ran out and Genie
regressed after passing through a string of foster homes, where she was
beaten and abused.)
In contrast is Isabelle, who was six years old when she and her mute,
brain-damaged mother escaped the silent imprisonment of her grandfather's
house. With training, a year and a half later she had a 1,500-word
vocabulary and could form complex sentences like "What did Miss Mason say
when you told her I cleaned my classroom?" She had not yet passed through
the window of opportunity for attaining syntax.
University of Chicago psychologist Janellen Huttenlocher has found that the
frequency with which normal parents speak to and around their child during
the child's second year significantly affects the size of the child's
vocabulary for the rest of his or her life. The more words a child hears
during this sensitive period, whether it's "cat" or "existentialism," the
stronger the basic language connections.
Constraints on plasticity for many sensory and motor functions also depend
on critical time periods. Most humans move all their body parts during the
first two years of life. By age two the motor circuits become hard-wired. If
for some reason a child never moved his arms these circuits would be lost
and he would never be able to move his arms in a natural way. Regions for
basic vision are complete by six months. Acquisition of other functions,
however, such as academic learning, takes place over a lifetime,
unconstrained by windows of development.
Understanding when the brain's circuits are most receptive to learning a
particular skill can help create the optimum environment for a child's
development. Psychiatrist Dan Stern at the University of Geneva believes
that the critical period for developing emotions occurs from ten to eighteen
months. Stern was one of the first and most long-term baby watchers, and has
looked for evidence of emotional and social critical periods. His work
indicates that if parents regularly respond to their baby with delight, the
child's circuits for positive emotions are reinforced. If parents repeatedly
respond with horror, the child will shut down those circuits and instead
reinforce the fear circuits; the research shows that early fright conditions
the baby's brain for more fright. Prolonged depression in the mother
conditions the baby for depression, too. The key words here are "repeatedly"
and "prolonged." An occasional scowl won't set the child up for a miserable
life.
Stress management is also learned during a critical period early in lite,
according to research on newborn rats, which have neurons very similar to
humans. The studies reveal that the more the rats are gently handled, the
more they produce serotonin, a brain chemical that controls aggressive
behavior. As adults, the rats who had received gentle handling were better
able to cope with stress, had stronger immune systems, and actually lived
longer than rats who had not been treated gently.
Many cognitive functions share pathways in our brain's complex tangle of
neural connections. The development of one skill can therefore profoundly
influence another that is seemingly unrelated. As the Mozart effect shows,
music and spatial reasoning appear to be linked. Listening to words and
reading share some of the same circuits, too.
A user's guide to the brain: perception, attention, and the four theaters of
the brain / John J. Ratey.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375701079/
Read more from this chapter
http://tinyurl.com/232zg
>
Chzwmn
Go back and read the rest of the posting from the previous person! You missed
the point totally!!! It suggested that empathy training in education reduced
violence amongst children. It demonstrated that education, nurture can make
signifiacnt changes in human behaviour. Then you came ot with the determinist
crap, because you had either failed to read it or didn't understand it.
You response to me was less then enlightened.
So what if "Genetic basis permeates every
>behavior."
This does not explain why different cultures have less serial killers than the
USA. Maybe you can tell me why 10 million Americans are in jail? Can you tell
me why Canada, with the same gun laws does not suffer the same problems with
gun crime? Can you tell me if it was genetics or life experience that turn a
Vietman Vet. into a serial killer?
There is nothing we can do about genetics but everything we can do to help
prevent people turning into monsters.
Serial killer are not born, they learn.
Chzwmn
>What's this all about then?
>
>
>> Hogwash!!!!!!!! Genetic determinist crap!
>> Serial killers are not born, neither are good citizens - they learn to be
>> that way. We all learn to be the way we are. We all have the ability to
>> change and grow.
>
>Is it impossible that a person may be born with a defect such as a
>pathological absence of empathy? That such a defect may be caused by
>environmental influences in the womb? Or by a certain combination of genes
>that occurred during meiosis?
>
A pathological absence of empthy is not the same as a serial killer. It's all
to do with how we can recognise and deal with these problems and what sort of
society we are allowed to live in and grow with. Serial killer are not born.
>
>> Society can make a good citizen into a serial killer.
>>
>> Society can say that a serial killer is a good citizen. (If you put him
>> in an army uniform)
>
>Environment encourages or discourages the flourishing of innate tendencies
>like empathy, but this doesn't preclude the possibility of mutations
>wherein a specific innate tendency is suppressed or absent. Serial killers
>are thankfully rare, so I guess it would be difficult to assemble a
>statistically representative sample that would allow a thorough
>investigation of the relative influences of nature and nurture.
>
The point origianlly made was that excellent results were being made to reduce
playground violence in schools by introducing what was called empathy teaching.
From an early age children are encouraged to role play and understand how it
feels to be bad to someone else. The original posting stated that school
violence was reduced.
In Britain there are schemes which allow the victims of crime to confront the
criminal. This has had fantastic results where criminals have simply given up
crime. The victims cease to be faceless individuals, but become real people
with real problems.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
andy-k
> >
> >Is it impossible that a person may be born with a defect such as a
> >pathological absence of empathy? That such a defect may be caused by
> >environmental influences in the womb? Or by a certain combination of
genes
> >that occurred during meiosis?
>
> A pathological absence of empthy is not the same as a serial killer. It's
all
> to do with how we can recognise and deal with these problems and what
sort of
> society we are allowed to live in and grow with.
I'm in complete agreement with you on the conditioning issue.
> Serial killer are not born.
It's here I have the problem -- some people really are born crazy, though
that isn't to say that society can't make a normal person crazy too.
> >Environment encourages or discourages the flourishing of innate
tendencies
> >like empathy, but this doesn't preclude the possibility of mutations
> >wherein a specific innate tendency is suppressed or absent. Serial
killers
> >are thankfully rare, so I guess it would be difficult to assemble a
> >statistically representative sample that would allow a thorough
> >investigation of the relative influences of nature and nurture.
> >
> The point origianlly made was that excellent results were being made to
reduce
> playground violence in schools by introducing what was called empathy
teaching.
> From an early age children are encouraged to role play and understand how
it
> feels to be bad to someone else. The original posting stated that school
> violence was reduced.
> In Britain there are schemes which allow the victims of crime to confront
the
> criminal. This has had fantastic results where criminals have simply
given up
> crime. The victims cease to be faceless individuals, but become real
people
> with real problems.
Yes, this is good. I don't doubt your point that society has gone to the
dogs, obstructing the normal flourishing of the instinct for empathic
relationship. I guess I'm nit-picking then, because my only point is that
people really can be born that way too. I have no experience with children
but some considerable experience with horses, and although most horse
problems are rider- and/or owner-induced, believe me there are some that
are simply born crazy and that most trainers wouldn't touch with a barge
pole.
Chzwmn
There is nothing you can do about ones genetic makeup. But for sure there is no
gene for "serial killer". I don't disagree that people are born with problems.
Autism is a very common condition. Autistic children don't have a sense of
empathy, but with the right upbringing there is no reason for them to be safely
integrated into society.
I believe that TV and Cinema have their rols to play in providing ideas,
desensitising emotional responses to violence, and providing role models. Just
take the daily diet of cop shows, live action shootings. Kids see all
that..they cannot be unaffected by it.
Most American heroes are criminals. Butch Cassidy, Dillinger, Bonnie and
Clyde..Perhaps this fact has contributed to the biggest per capita prison
population on earth.
andy-k
>
> There is nothing you can do about ones genetic makeup. But for sure there
> is no gene for "serial killer". I don't disagree that people are born
> with problems. Autism is a very common condition. Autistic children don't
> have a sense of empathy, but with the right upbringing there is no reason
> for them to be safely integrated into society.
> I believe that TV and Cinema have their rols to play in providing ideas,
> desensitising emotional responses to violence, and providing role models.
> Just take the daily diet of cop shows, live action shootings. Kids see
> all that..they cannot be unaffected by it.
> Most American heroes are criminals. Butch Cassidy, Dillinger, Bonnie and
> Clyde..Perhaps this fact has contributed to the biggest per capita prison
> population on earth.
Correct, there is no gene for "serial killer". Genes confer predispositions
upon behavior, and a predisposition is encouraged or discouraged by
environmental conditions. So either some people are more genetically
predisposed to become serial killers than others are, or we're *all*
predisposed to become serial killers. I'd prefer to see some evidence
before giving any credence to the latter conjecture.
Keynes
>
>Go back and read the rest of the posting from the previous person! You missed
>the point totally!!! It suggested that empathy training in education reduced
>violence amongst children. It demonstrated that education, nurture can make
>signifiacnt changes in human behaviour. Then you came ot with the determinist
>crap, because you had either failed to read it or didn't understand it.
>You response to me was less then enlightened.
>So what if "Genetic basis permeates every
>>behavior."
>This does not explain why different cultures have less serial killers than the
>USA. Maybe you can tell me why 10 million Americans are in jail? Can you tell
>me why Canada, with the same gun laws does not suffer the same problems with
>gun crime? Can you tell me if it was genetics or life experience that turn a
>Vietman Vet. into a serial killer?
>There is nothing we can do about genetics but everything we can do to help
>prevent people turning into monsters.
>Serial killer are not born, they learn.
Can learning determine future behavior, good or bad?
Sounds like cause and effect determinism to me.