Is lower stress the secret to finding empathy?
rael-science
Is lower stress the secret to finding empathy?
Photo credit: Gisela Giardino (Creative Commons)
How
is it that people can sometimes show such empathy when other times our
ability to feel compassion seems to be in such short supply? A study
published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on January 15 shows that stress is a major factor.
A
drug that blocks stress hormones increases the ability of college
students and mice to “feel” the pain of a stranger, the study shows.
That phenomenon, known as “emotional contagion of pain,” is one form of
empathy. In even better news, a shared round of the video game Rock Band
worked just as well as the drugs among those undergrads.
“We
found what in some sense might be thought of as the ‘secret’ to
empathy; that is, what prevents it from occurring more often between
strangers,” says Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal. “The
secret is–quite simply–stress, and in particular the social stress of
being in close proximity with a stranger.”
Earlier
studies had shown that mice and humans both have empathy for another’s
pain, especially when the individual in pain is someone they know. It
was also clear from those studies that stress levels rise in both mice
and people when in the presence of a stranger.
To
test for a direct connection between stress and empathy, Mogil and his
colleagues treated male mice with a stress hormone-blocker called
metyrapone and watched their response to the pain of other mice.
They
found that the drug allowed greater empathy as mice began reacting to
strangers in a manner normally reserved for familiar cagemates. In other
tests, the researchers found that when they put mice under stress, the
mice showed less empathy when their peers were in pain. In other words,
biochemical changes related to stress were preventing emotional
contagion in the animals.
The
researchers went on to test for signs of empathy in undergraduate
students by pairing them with either a friend or a stranger and having
them rate the pain associated with holding a hand in ice water. Again,
undergrads treated with metyrapone showed a greater sense of empathy
toward strangers. After taking the drug, participants not only reported a
greater experience of pain, but they also showed more pained facial
expressions and more often touched their own hands when witnessing
another’s pain.
This
doesn’t mean that Mogil would recommend that anyone with the goal of
becoming more empathetic take a pill. There is an easier way: A simple
psychosocial interaction–a game of Rock Band–worked just as well as the
drugs in boosting empathy toward another person, the researchers report.
The
findings are the first to suggest an important role for the stress axis
in the brain and endocrine system in modulating our response to other
people, the researchers say. They also suggest that mice and humans are
surprisingly similar when it comes to social behaviors.
“It
is quite intriguing indeed that this phenomenon appears to be identical
in mice and humans,” Mogil says. “First, it supports the notion that
mice are capable of more complex social phenomena than is commonly
believed. Second, it suggests that human social phenomena might actually
be simpler than commonly believed, at least in terms of their
organizing principles. This is an emerging theme of much research
currently ongoing in my lab; when it comes to social behavior, ‘mice are
people too.'”
A game of Rock Band, anyone?
