Compassion Journal

The way our brain responds to others’ good fortune is linked to how empathetic people report themselves to be, according to new UCL-led research.

The study, published today in the Journal of Neuroscienceand funded by the Medical Research Council, shows that a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) seems particularly attuned to other people’s good news, but how it responds varies substantially depending on our levels of empathy.

For people who rated themselves as highly empathetic, the ACC responded only when another person had good news coming, but for people who gave themselves lower empathy scores, the ACC also responded when bad news was predicted for themselves.

This new insight could prove important in understanding the role of the ACC in disorders of social behaviour and empathy, including psychopathy and autism. Further studies could focus on how the brain responds to our own success compared to others’ in people with these disorders.

Researchers scanned the brains of 30 male volunteers aged 19-32 using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they saw symbols that predicted how likely either they or another person was to win money.

Participants also completed a questionnaire that assessed their empathy level in the week before they had the scan.

“We looked at how this brain response varied in people with different levels of empathy. We wanted to see whether the brains of people who have high levels of empathy are particularly responsive to other people’s good fortune” said lead author Patricia Lockwood, UCL Psychology & Language Sciences.

The study found that the ACC region of the brain activated in all the volunteers when someone else was very likely to win money. However, there were substantial differences in how ‘specialised’ this ACC response was, which were linked to how empathetic participants said they were.

Participants whose ACC activation was the most specialised for other people showed an ACC response only when the other person was very likely to win money. These volunteers had rated themselves as high in empathy.

However, participants whose ACC activation was less specialised for other people also showed an ACC response when they themselves were very unlikely to win money. These participants had given themselves much lower empathy scores.

“We were excited to find that differences in how empathetic people were changed how ‘specialised’ the ACC was when responding to other people’s rewards,” said Professor Essi Viding, the senior author of the study.

“Future research is needed to determine whether this degree of specialization also relates to other traits besides empathy, such as how competitive people are.”

Further research is also needed to examine how real life social interactions can be influenced by how specialised this area of the brain is, and whether these results can help to explain why some people only feel happy for others’ success when they feel successful themselves.

This article first appeared in http://medicalxpress.com/. 

What comes more naturally: To punish a thief—or to help her victim?

That’s the question tackled in a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Current Biology. “Until recently,” the researchers write, “little attention has been paid to how punishment and a sense of justice develop in children.”

To find the answer, the researchers created experiments for children ages three to five that are similar to those previously tested on our evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees.

With their cohort of 137 children, the authors placed a single child and two puppets at a table, and put into motion scenarios that mimicked some societally recognized wrongs, such as theft and unfair treatment.

For example, a child seated at a table with two puppets would witness goods being taken away by one puppet from the other, or by a puppet from the child himself.

Dr. Keith Jensen is one of the study’s authors and a lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester. In an email, he points out that one of the study’s key outcomes is that many preschoolers in the former scenario showed outright concern for the victim who was thieved. The children tried to restore the filched object to the upset puppet rather than punish the thief-puppet.

Why would a child—here acting as an “observer” or “bystander”—bother to intervene and help the puppet-victim?

“There are famous examples where, even as adults, we don’t,” Jensen says. “What is particularly reassuring is that children do respond strongly to the needs of others.”

In similar studies with chimpanzees, the bystander watches passively as an injustice occurs, not acting to help the victim. Or, as a matter of copycat behavior, the chimp takes the desired object herself, believing it’s OK to do so.

By contrast, Jensen notes that human children in most cultures learn at a very young age that stealing is bad.

Many in the study became very aware that taking away from someone an important item like food or a toy is bad, as it causes anguish. To remedy the other’s woe, the children would restore the object to the wronged puppet or instead cache it in his “cave.”

“It seems the concern for the distressed puppet was just so strong, the children felt the need to do something,” Jensen reports.

And this tendency should be nurtured, he says. “[W]e could build on the natural inclination of young children to help others and their sensitivity to distress.”

Practically speaking, on a playground, for instance, where a modicum of the world’s rough-and-tumble nature often transpires, “The parent or teacher could ask the observing child (say, of a pushing incident) to help them help the victim and focus more on the good they can do,” Jensen explains.

Should an injustice never be punished? The researchers agree that when consequences are warranted, they should be put in place. But they argue that punishment should take a back seat to shoring up innate kindness.

“[T]his has important implications for the evolution of cooperation,” says Jensen. His co-authors are Drs. Katrin Riedl, Michael Tomasello, and Josep Call, all from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany.

Jensens concludes: “The natural justice of younger kids is what we should nurture first.”

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

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/.