Archives for July 2015

Film and Compassion: What Disney Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’ Teaches Us

July 15, 2015 By Kristen Lee Costa

Disney Pixar’s new “emotion” picture, Inside Out is not only another endearing creative masterpiece, it also teaches us some important lessons on the nature of our emotions.

It turns out that our unique tapestry of emotional responses — whether joy, anger, curiosity, disgust, surprise, sadness, fear, shame or guilt — all serve a distinctive purpose. Even though we might like to eliminate unfavorable emotions, they serve an important role.

The American Psychological Association defines emotion as a “complex feeling state”, impacting nearly all facets of our lives. Our responses are influenced by what we perceive to be “personally significant”. We experience emotions in a wide variety of ways, according to what stage of life we are in, our unique temperament, and how we view ourselves- and the situations we find ourselves in.

Inside Out, while appealing largely to a younger audience, offers sound wisdom we can apply to make sense of our emotions-both at work and at home:

1. Feelings add color to our lives. Life would be boring if our emotions were flat lined. We’d lack passion and zest. The wide range of emotions we are capable of experiencing contribute to our human experience and essence — our personality, mood, behavior and motivation. Yes, emotions can be raw, messy and visceral — but they can also be profound, beautiful, and comforting. They all add dimension and flavor.

2. We don’t always have to think positive. It’s unrealistic to think that we are always going to put an instant positive spin on things. Very often, we may need to buy time to regroup and work through complex emotions. Our tendency to want a quick fix can help us look for solutions, but it can also be a trap that makes us fight ourselves when we think we “should” have already gotten past something and instead find ourselves needing time to regroup and put the pieces together.

3. Emotional contrasts are important. When we’ve experienced difficult emotions, it can help us appreciate the good moments all the more. If we never had to endure rainy days and seasons, we’d have less appreciation for sunny ones once they arrive. In a similar way, it’s what makes us enjoy a break after a long and intensive work period.

4. Emotional states aren’t permanent. Even though we might think we’re forever stuck — feeling states, like weather patterns, are temporary. The winds of change are inevitable. Knowing this can help us learn to appreciate and anchor down the positive moments and ride out the ones that clobber us and bring us to our knees.

5. Difficult emotions can protect us. If given the choice to completely squash feelings like sadness, rage and disgust, our first tendency might be to instantly jump at the chance. This could be detrimental, since our emotions provide us with all sorts of important information. Our fears or apprehensions often serve us well and prevent us from living with reckless abandon.

6. Emotions reflect our deeper values and desires. Feelings reflect what we care about. In the film, Riley, the main character, grappled with difficult emotions associated with her family moving across the country. Her happy memories of childhood were hard to let go of, bringing about great sorrow and frustration. When we’re immersed in sadness or anger during life’s changes, it reflects our desire for closeness, connection, and contentment.

7. All emotions can be catalysts towards growth. When we meet a goal or experience success, the energy propels us to keep striving. When we make a mistake, or have setbacks, even though it can be a tough pill to swallow, the emotions generated can prompt us to take action towards improvement.

Inside Out provides a poignant reminder that when our emotional responses are strong in one area-whether joy or sorrow, we can’t magically switch gears. We also learn that these emotions are intricately connected, and you can’t have one without the other.

We are inevitably going to have powerful responses to our life circumstances. It takes time and effort to sort out our complex emotions and come to terms with change, loss and stressors. We can’t force ourselves to feel a certain way at a given moment, but knowing this can help us remember to make the joyful moments count and recognize that the more unsettling ones can also be useful.

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

The Compassionate Brain: A Personal Story

July 15, 2015 By Helen Weng

It takes strength to be gentle and kind.

In high school, I was of the only racial minorities. I was bullied for this, leaving me feeling disconnected and isolated. To cope, I became obsessed with sad music like The Smiths, who were one of my favourite bands.

One Morrissey lyric became a mantra for me: “It’s so easy to laugh. It’s so easy to hate. It takes strength to be gentle and kind.”

Through music, I found a framework in which to feel and hold my pain. I listened in a meditative way until the feelings of sadness and pain turned into connection, beauty, and ultimately joy.

I had a choice in how to respond to teasing. I could choose kindness and compassion, for myself and others. I could try to connect to the harassers in a genuine way rather than slinging words back, and I could comfort myself instead of repeating the cycle of shame and dehumanization.

One word I used to label the space I had found was transformation, another word was compassion. Reading books on Buddhist philosophy, I learned compassion could be trained, that we could become more connected to others and that this would lead to greater well-being.

Compassion is an emotional response to someone’s suffering that is caring and concerned. It leads to a desire to relieve that person’s suffering. This is not always a natural response. People can have a variety of responses to others’ suffering – avoidance, fear, discomfort, sometimes even enjoyment.

But can compassion be learned through practice?

As a graduate student I designed and conducted a study testing this exact hypothesis: that we can become more compassionate through practicing meditation, and that this will result in more kind acts towards others. I hypothesized this wouldn’t take extreme amounts of practice.

As part of the study, people from the Madison, Wisconsin community practiced just 30 minutes a day for two weeks, like a new exercise regime.

Guided by an online meditation, the participants practiced compassion for different kinds of people: a loved one, themselves, a stranger, and someone they actually had conflict with: the “difficult” person. They practiced imagining a time when each person had suffered, and noticed the emotions that arose and what it felt like in their bodies. They were instructed to “sit” with the feelings, and notice them non-judgmentally.

They then practiced wishing that the other person’s suffering was relieved, and repeated compassion-generating phrases such as, “May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease.”

The control group learned a technique called cognitive reappraisal, where they practiced thinking about a stressful situation in a new way to decrease negative emotional responses. They used techniques such as thinking about the situation from a friend or family member’s perspective, imagining a year had passed with everything going well, and coming up with a way to reinterpret the situation. This is one of the core skills of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is found to be effective with many types of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

We tested our hypothesis – that practicing compassion through meditation would result in more helping behaviour in real life – by having participants consent to a separate study where they play an economic exchange game with strangers over the Internet. In the Redistribution Game, participants witnessed an unfair economic exchange between two players, and had the opportunity to spend their own money to redistribute money from the unfair player to the player with less money.

After practicing compassion meditation for just two weeks, the participants ended up spending almost twice the amount of money compared to the control group (a statistically significant difference). Practicing compassion in their minds actually resulted in more altruistic behavior towards a stranger.

We wanted to see what emotional changes in the brain contributed to the changes in altruistic behavior. We scanned the participants’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and had them view images of others suffering (physical injury, emotional pain) before and after the two weeks of training. The compassion group was asked to generate compassion towards the people in the images, and the reappraisal group was asked to reinterpret the meaning of the pictures to decrease negative emotions. We found that in the compassion group, the more they spent in the Redistribution Game, the more their brain activity had changed in response to people’s suffering. Changing their minds internally had indeed changed the outside world.

We found changes in regions associated with empathy, emotion regulation and reward processing. One region that changed was the inferior parietal cortex, which is associated with the “mirror neuron network”, and activated in response to your own experiences as well as others’.

This suggests that through learning compassion, people became more sensitive to other people’s suffering. The purpose is to not simply feel another’s pain, but to transform your own response in order to help the other person. We also found changes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, which are respectively involved in emotion regulation and positive emotions. This suggests that emotional habits can be transformed into something more positive – an emotional connection and caring.

As Morrissey sang, “It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” It takes awareness, commitment, and practice to change habits of mind into something more beneficial for yourself and others. Learning any new skill requires attention, effort, and persistence, and this is often associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex. It takes strength to open yourself up to another’s suffering, to hold it and understand it, and to have the desire to relieve it through appropriate means.

Through my work as a clinical psychologist, I have witnessed first-hand the power of compassion. I learned to actively listen and respond to people’s stories in a way that allowed their authentic voices to arise. What emerged from empowering their voices was an experience of transformation that was no longer just a private moment of listening to sad music.

I transformed sadness into joy with other people, and this has changed me in turn.

This article first appeared in https://www.opendemocracy.net.

How to Raise Non-Judgmental Children: 5 Ways to Build Compassion

July 15, 2015 By Anna Partridge

Hands up who has been judged for saying the ‘wrong’ thing, wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes, driving the ‘wrong’ car, being the ‘wrong’ weight, living in the ‘wrong’ house, eating the ‘wrong’ food, living the ‘wrong’ life?

Hands up who has judged someone for wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes, driving the ‘wrong’ car, being overweight, being the ‘wrong’ race, color or age or raising their kids the ‘wrong’ way?

I have a challenge for you – for the next hour, you won’t judge anyone. You won’t judge your parents, you won’t judge your children, you won’t judge the person you just walked past on the street.

Imagine a world where people didn’t judge each other.

Imagine a world where people showed kindness and compassion to others.

Imagine for a second if parents didn’t judge each other, but worked together to raise happy, healthy children. Imagine if there was no judgment in mothers groups or on the playground, but parents actually helped each other out.

What if people in workplaces didn’t judge each other, but worked together to get the best outcomes.

Imagine if you didn’t judge the homeless person you walked past on the street last night – instead you talked to them with care and compassion.

You have probably all heard the story of when the father got on the subway late at night with his 5 children who were all being loud and misbehaving in one way or another. Catching the disapproving look from the other people in the carriage, the father apologized. ‘Sorry, I am on my way home from the hospital and just trying to imagine how I will handle my first night without their mother’.

The world can be a cruel place. It can lack compassion and kindness for people who are judged and for those who judge.

Why do people judge others? Judging others is a natural instinct because they look, sound or behave differently to us. It is a primal instinct to defend territory and we take a fight or flight response and this may have worked for cave men that needed to protect their own areas, however today it runs deeper.

The main reasons for judging others is a lack of understanding, perceived views from experience or upbringing or a lack of empathy and compassion.

Perceived views and lack of empathy and compassion are largely learnt and built on behaviors stemming right from our childhood and upbringing.

As parents, we have a responsibility to teach our children about differences, educate them about others so they have a genuine understanding and build on their empathy and compassion. We can teach our kids how to be non-judgmental.

Here are the 5 ways to raise non-judgmental children.

1. Expose your children to people from different walks of life

‘It takes a good deal of character to judge a person by his future instead of his past’ ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the past two years, I have been working at a homeless shelter. People who came there were mentally ill, drug addicted, homeless, socially isolated and marginalized by society. I took my children with me some days and people judged me for taking them to a ‘dangerous’ place.

The encounters my children had with the visitors to this shelter were always a raw and beautiful experience for my kids and for me to see how they interacted with people who they would not normally speak to.

One meeting that sticks out in my mind is when my children met Cathy* – an Aboriginal lady in her early 40s with bright pink, curly hair who was homeless at the time.

She had a rough side and had experienced life in ways different to many. My son sat with Cathy on the bench and asked her where she slept at night and she described where she slept and what it was like. As a mum of 9, she had a way with kids. They talked about what it was like to be homeless and how different her life was to his.

They talked about what happened when it rains in the middle of the night and where she gets her breakfast without a kitchen. They talked about what bathroom she used and where she put her clothes without a cupboard. She loved my kids as soon as she met them and they got to know each other quite well over the next few months. There was no judgment from either side. Now when it rains at night, my kids wonder where Cathy is and hope she has found somewhere dry to sleep for the night.

If we allow our kids to meet people from different backgrounds, we are building on their empathy, compassion and understanding of differences.

2. Allow your children to experience many cultures

‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ ~ Henry David Thoreau

If you can, live in a different country. When my kids were little, we lived in the States. My husband was doing a university masters with military members who were serving from all over the world and they brought their families to live in Washington DC for the year. My kids played with children from Pakistan, Holland, Norway, Lebanon and the UAE. They also went to school with American kids and learnt the pledge of allegiance. It was a great immersion into a new culture.

Here are a few other ideas to experience other cultures:

– Go on holidays to places with cultures vastly different from your own

– Meet local families who are from different cultures and invite them for dinner

– Each city generally has an enclave of particular cultures with many great restaurants to visit e.g. China town in Sydney, Brick Lane in London, Washington DC has an Ethiopian quarter

– Go to your local Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai restaurants and meet the chefs

– Put the world map up on the wall in the dining room and pick a different country each week to look at their culture or cook a different meal from a particular country

– Children generally learn a language at school – look at the culture specific to the language or encourage them to learn another language

3. Educate your kids about differences and celebrate differences

From a very young age, children know that people look or speak differently to them.

Take the time to tell your kids it is OK to be different and talk about the differences they have observed. It is not OK to judge that person for being overweight or being a different race.

Talk to your kids about difference religions, cultures, appearances, illnesses and how other people live their lives.

Talk to them about mental illness, about alcoholism, about children with autism and about people’s idiosyncrasies. If these things are not foreign to our children, they will accept the differences they observe as normal everyday occurrences and not judge it for being different.

By talking to our children we provide them with a vocabulary to discuss differences.

4. Tell the truth, not opinion

I was in the park with a friend the other day and four men were sitting on the chairs in turbines with long beards. Her 5 year old son asked ‘Are they religious people mom? Are they OK?’

No matter her views or judgment she replied – ‘They are from the Sikh community that live close by us. You know Alibi* from your school is from this community’.

She could have shrugged it off and not answered in a truthful way – she could have shrouded it with opinion to illicit fear or pity. Her answer was straight up and her son knew he was in a safe environment with different people around.

No matter your views and opinions, if you can tell the truth around differences, our children will make have the chance to form their own ideas.

5. Use non-judgmental language

Our kids will take our lead from the language we use. If we use judgmental language, our children will. Our children will soon pick up if we are racist, sexist, biased or judging others and copy.

Being mindful of the language we use will give our children the right words to use around others to show kindness and compassion.

A family with a little girl was sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. A Pakistani man walked in and sat down on the bench next to the little girl. The dad stood up and sat in between the little girl and the man, obviously uncomfortable with his appearance. The doctor came out and called the family in and the Pakistani man followed – it turned out he was the donor of the bone marrow that saved the little girl’s life months earlier.

If we educate our children about differences, teach them about other cultures and provide them with opportunities to meet people from many walks of life – we set our children up to be compassionate, kind adults.

This article first appeared in Positive Parenting with Anna Partridge.

Innate Compassion and Restorative Justice

July 15, 2015 By Mary Papenfuss

Toddlers are compassionate. Young children apparently have an innate sense of justice, and they’re more interested in setting things right than in punishing wrongdoers, researchers have discovered.

Children 3 and 5 years old who watched different scenarios involving puppets, toys and cookies quickly determined whether or not a “master puppet” was being mean and who was the rightful owner of certain toys or cookies, according to a new study at the University of Manchester in England. And they were much more concerned with restorative justice than with retributive justice. They tended to restore order by returning an item to its owner rather than doling out punishment to thieves or cheaters, said researchers.

The three-year-old children in particular “didn’t seem to want to punish; they wanted to help as much as they could,” a co-author tells Live Science. “If the only thing they could do was punish the thief, they would just cry.”

The study demonstrated that children tend to pay most attention to “what happened to the victim, and they want to make sure they are OK in the end,” said Katherine McAuliffe, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Yale University.

The Manchester researchers concluded that children “from a very young age, have some sense of justice, in the sense that they’ll treat others as they expect themselves to be treated,” said study co-author Keith Jensen. Children in the study were just as concerned about puppets losing a toy as they were about themselves.

Youngsters also seem to be strongly motivated by empathy and the distress of others, rather than a normative sense of right and wrong, such as the notion that “stealing is always wrong,” Jensen said.

Other research has shown that babies as young as eight months old can identify, and seek to punish, wrongdoers. Babies will snatch treats away from nasty puppets they had seen previously yelling at another puppet, according to a 2011 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new research suggests toddlers have an innate aptitude for both justice and empathy.

This article first appeared in http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/.

Can Compassion Change the World?

July 15, 2015 By Jill Suttie and Daniel Goleman

The Dalai Lama has a long history of meeting and collaborating with social scientists—psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, and others looking to understand the science of human emotions and behavior. Through these collaborations, he has learned about the research in this area and has encouraged scientists to pursue fields of inquiry more directly aimed at serving the public good.

Now that he will be turning 80 this year, the Dalai Lama asked psychologist and bestselling author Daniel Goleman to write a book outlining his vision for a better world and the role science can play. The result of their collaboration, A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World, is both a translation of the Dalai Lama’s ideals and a call to action.

Recently, I spoke with Goleman about the book.

Jill Suttie: After reading your book, it seemed to me that the Dalai Lama’s vision for a better future comes down, in large part, to cultivating compassion for others. Why is compassion so important?

Daniel Goleman: He’s not speaking from a Buddhist perspective; he’s actually speaking from a scientific perspective. He’s using scientific evidence coming from places like Stanford, Emory, and the University of Wisconsin—also, Tanya Singer’s project at the Max Planck Institute—which shows that people have the ability to cultivate compassion.

This research is very encouraging, because scientists are not only using brain imagery to identify the specific brain circuitry that controls compassion, but also showing that the circuitry becomes strengthened, and people become more altruistic and willing to help out other people, if they learn to cultivate compassion—for example, by doing traditional meditation practices of loving kindness. This is so encouraging, because it’s a fundamental imperative that we need compassion as our moral rudder.

JS: You use the term “muscular compassion” in your book. What do you mean by that?

DG: Compassion is not just some Sunday school niceness; it’s important for attacking social issues—things like corruption and collusion in business, government, and throughout the public sphere. It’s important for looking at economics, to see if there is a way to make it more caring and not just about greed, or to create economic policies that decrease the gap between the rich and the poor. These are moral issues that require compassion.

JS: Compassion can be cultivated through mindful meditation. But, I think a lot of people start meditating for personal reasons—to decrease stress and to learn to be more accepting of what is. How does that lead to social activism?

DG: I don’t agree with that interpretation of what meditation or spiritual practice is for. That view of mindfulness leaves out the traditional coupling of mindfulness with a concern for other people—loving kindness practice, compassion practice. I think the Dalai Lama’s view is that that’s inadequate. Meditation does not mean the passive acceptance of social injustice; it means cultivating the attitude that I care about other people, I care about people being victimized, and I’ll do whatever I can to help them. That he sees as true compassion in action.

JS: Is there any research that supports the idea that mindfulness and social activism are linked?

DG: There’s some evidence that mindfulness not only calms you and gives you more clarity, but it also makes you more responsive to people in distress. In one study, where people were given the chance to help someone in need—offering a seat to someone on crutches—mindfulness increased the number of people who did that. And, if you extrapolate from there to helping the needy whenever they cross your radar in any way you can, it suggests that mindfulness would help. However, there’s even more direct evidence that cultivating compassion and loving kindness enhances the likelihood of helping someone. Putting the two together is powerful.

JS: In your book, the Dalai Lama refers to something he calls “emotional hygiene”—or learning how to handle difficult emotions with more skill and equanimity. He says it should be as important as physical hygiene, and that we should all improve our “emotional hygiene” before trying to tackle social problems. Why is that?

DG: That’s the Dalai Lama’s perspective—we need to get all of our destructive and disturbing emotions under control before we act in the world. If not, if we act from those emotions, we’ll only create more harm. But if we can manage our distressing emotions in advance, and have calm, clarity, and compassion as we act, then we’ll act for the good, no matter what we do.

It’s not that any one emotion is destructive, though; it’s the extremes that can harm others and ourselves. When emotions become destructive, you need to manage them and not let them run you. For example, anger: if it mobilizes you and energizes you and focuses you to right social wrongs, then it’s a useful motivation. However, if you let it take over and you become enraged and filled with hatred, those are destructive, and you’ll end up causing a lot more damage than good.

JS: I think it’s difficult for some people to actually know when their emotions are causing them to act inappropriately, though.

DG: That’s why self-awareness is absolutely crucial. Many people get hijacked by their emotions and have no idea, because they are oblivious, because they lack self-awareness. And what meditation and mindfulness practice can do is to boost your self-awareness so you can make these distinctions more accurately, with more clarity.

JS: One of the Dalai Lama’s tenets you articulate in the book is that we should have a universal ethic of compassion for all. Does he suggest we extend compassion even to those who commit atrocities, like murder or genocide?

DG: He holds out an ideal of universal compassion, without exception. That’s something we can move toward. But he also gives us a very useful instruction: He says, make a distinction between the actor and the act. Oppose the evil act—no question—but hold out the possibility that people can change. That’s why he opposes the death penalty, because a person can turn their life around, and we shouldn’t exclude that possibility.

Universal compassion is a high standard, and I don’t think most of us can meet it. But we can move toward it by expanding our circle of caring. Paul Ekman has had extensive dialogues with the Dalai Lama about this, and he says that this is a good target, but that it’s very hard to reach. It goes against natural mechanisms that make us favor our own group—our family, our company, our ethnic group, etc. So, the first step is to overcome that tendency and to become more accepting of and caring toward a wider circle of people. Caring for everyone is the final step, and I don’t think many people can get there. But we can all take a step closer.

JS: It sounds like many of the Dalai Lama’s suggestions are aspirational in nature.

DG: The Dalai Lama often talks to people with great aspirations, and, after he’s gotten them all roused up, he says, “Don’t just talk about it, do something.” That’s part of the message in my book: Everyone has something they can do. Whatever means you have to make the world a better place, you need to do it. Even if we won’t see the fruits of this in our lifetime, start now.

This article originally appeared in http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/.