The prevalence of such attitudes among some men may in part explain why, in the United States, around 20 percent of women claim to have been forced into unwanted sexual activity despite their resistance—most often by a spouse or partner or someone with whom they were in love at the time.25 Indeed, ten times as many women are forced into sex by someone they love as by a stranger. A study of self-confessed date rapists found that every instance of such coercion followed mutually consensual sex play; the rapist simply ignored the woman’s protests about going further.26
Unlike the majority of men, narcissists actually enjoy and find sexually arousing films in which a couple are petting, the woman wants to stop—and the man then forces sex on her despite her evident pain and disgust.27 While viewing such a scene, the narcissist tunes out of the woman’s suffering and focuses only on the self-gratification of the aggressor. Intriguingly, narcissists in this study did not enjoy a sequence showing the rape alone, without the foreplay and refusal.
Their lack of empathy makes narcissists indifferent to the suffering they cause their “date.” While she experiences the forced sex as a disgusting act of violence, he fails to understand, let alone have compassion for, her displeasure with the act. Indeed, the more empathic a man, the less likely he is to act as a sexual predator or even imagine doing so.28
An additional hormonal force may be at work in coercive sex. Extremely high levels of testosterone, studies find, make men more likely to treat another person as merely a sexual object. It also makes them troubling marital partners.
A study of testosterone levels among 4,462 American men found an alarming pattern among those with the very highest readings for the male hormone.29 They were more aggressive overall, more likely to have been arrested and been in fights. They were also bad risks as husbands: they were prone to hitting or throwing things at their wives, to having extramarital sex, and—understandably—to have divorced. The higher the testosterone, the worse the picture.
On the other hand, the study notes, many high-testosterone men are happily married. What makes the difference, the authors propose, is the extent to which the men have learned to control their wilder testosterone-driven impulses. The prefrontal systems hold the keys to managing impulse of all kinds, sexual and aggressive alike. That gets us back to the need for the high road and its abilities to rein in the low, as a counterweight to raw libido.
Years ago as a science journalist for the New York Times I was talking to an FBI profiler who specialized in the psychological analysis of serial murderers. He told me that such murderers are almost invariably acting out perversely cruel sex fantasies, in which even the pleas of victims become fodder for arousal. Indeed, a (thankfully) tiny subset of men are sexually aroused by depictions of rape more than they are by erotic scenes of consensual sex.30 Their weird appetite for suffering sets this group of outliers apart from the vast majority of men: not even the date-raping narcissists found outright rape a turn-on.
Such utter lack of empathy seems to explain why serial rapists are undeterred by the tears or screams of their victims. A significant number of convicted rapists later report that during the rape they felt nothing for their victim and simply did not know or care how she felt. Almost half convinced themselves she “enjoyed it” despite the fact that she was upset enough that the rapists were now in jail.31
One study of men imprisoned for rape found that they could be effective at understanding other people in most situations, with one notable exception: they were inept at perceiving negative expressions in women, though not positive ones.32 So while they have the capacity for empathy in general, these rapists seem unable or unwilling to read the signals that will stop them. Such predators may well be selectively insensitive, misreading the signals they least want to see—a woman’s refusal or distress.
Most troubling are the highly deviant men whose favored, compulsively acted-on fantasies center on I-It scenarios—a pattern typical of incarcerated sex offenders, particularly those convicted of serial rape, child molestation, and exhibitionism. These men typically are aroused by fantasies of these abusive acts far more than by more ordinary sexual scenes.33 Of course merely having a fantasy by no means implies that someone will force sex on another to act it out. But those who, like sex offenders, actually inflict their fantasied acts on others have broken through the neural barrier between thought and action.
Once the low road has breached the high road’s barrier to acting out an abusive impulse, fantasies become fuel for malevolence, stoking the unbridled libido (some say lust for power) that drives repeated sex crimes. In such cases, those fantasies become a danger signal—particularly when the man lacks empathy for his victims, believes that the victims “enjoy it,” feels hostility toward his victims, and is emotionally lonely.34 That explosive combination almost ensures trouble.
Contrast the cold dissociation of I-It sexuality with the connected warmth of an I-You tryst. Romantic love hinges on resonance; without this intimate connection, lust alone remains. With full two-way empathy, one’s partner is a subject as well, attuned to as a You, and the erotic charge increases dramatically. When a couple mingles in emotional union along with physical intimacy, both lose their sense of separateness in what has been called an “ego orgasm”—a meeting not just of bodies but of their very beings.35
Still, even the most skyrocketing orgasm offers no guarantee that lovers will genuinely care for each other the next morning. Caring operates via its own neural logic.
15
The Biology of Compassion
In a classic Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger promises a lover, “I’ll come to your emotional rescue”—thus expressing a feeling held by romantic partners everywhere. It’s not just the attraction that keeps a couple together; their mutual caretaking plays a role as well. Such emotional caring can operate in any relationship.
A mother nursing her baby is the primal prototype for such nurturance. John Bowlby proposed that the same innate caregiving system springs into action whenever we have the urge to respond to a call for help—whether it is our lover, our child, our friend, or a stranger who is in distress.
Caregiving between romantic partners comes in two main forms: providing a secure base where a partner can feel protected and offering a safe haven from which that partner can take on the world. Ideally, both partners should be able to switch fluidly from one role to the other, providing solace or haven—or receiving it—as needed. Such reciprocity marks a healthy relationship.
We provide a secure base whenever we come to our partner’s emotional rescue, by helping them solve a vexing problem, soothing them, or simply being present and listening. Once we feel a relationship offers us a secure base, our energies are freer to tackle challenges. As John Bowlby put it, “all of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life offers us a series of excursions, long or short, from a secure base.”1
Those excursions can be as simple as spending a day at the office or as complex as making a world-class accomplishment. If you think of the acceptance speeches people give for major prizes, they typically include gratitude toward the person who provides them a safe base. This bespeaks the crucial importance of feeling secure and confident for our ability to achieve.
Our sense of security and our drive to explore are entwined. The more our partner provides us with a haven and security, Bowlby’s theory proposes, the more exploration we can take on—and the more daunting the goal of our explorations, the more we may need to draw on the support of our base to boost our energy and focus, confidence, and courage. These propositions were tested with 116 couples who had been romantically involved for at least four years.2 As predicted, the more a person felt his or her partner to be a dependable “home base,” the more willing they were to pursue life’s opportunities with confidence.
Videotapes of the couples discussing each other’s goals in life revealed that how they talked also mattered. If one partner was sensitive, warm, and positive during the discussion of the other’
s goals, the recipient was understandably more confident by the end of the discussion, often raising the bar on their goals.
But if a partner was intrusive and controlling, the other partner became more downbeat and insecure about the goal, often ending up cutting back on their aspirations and feeling a lower self-worth. Partners who were controlling were perceived by the other as rude and critical—and their advice was generally rejected.3 Attempts to take control violate the cardinal rule for providing a secure base: intervene only when asked to or when it is absolutely necessary. Letting a partner venture forth in his or her own way is a quiet vote of confidence; the more we try to control, the more we tacitly undermine that vote. Intruding hampers exploration.
Partners’ support and attachment styles vary. People who are anxious in their attachments may have trouble relaxing enough to allow space for a partner’s explorations, wanting them instead to stay nearby, just as anxious mothers tend to do. Such overly clingy partners may be fine for offering a secure base, but they cannot function as a safe haven. In contrast, avoidant people typically have no trouble letting their partner roam but are poor at offering a secure base of comfort—and virtually never come to their emotional rescue.
POOR LIAT
It could have been a scene straight out of the television show Fear Factor: Liat, a university student, had to endure a series of ordeals, each more trying than the one before. She was clearly horrified by her first task: looking at gory pictures of a hideously burned man and a grotesquely injured face.
Next, when she had to hold and stroke a rat, Liat was so dismayed that she almost dropped it. Then, instructed to plunge her arm into ice water up to the elbow and keep it there for thirty seconds, she found the pain too intense to keep it immersed for more than twenty.
Finally, when she next was supposed to reach into a glass terrarium and pet a live tarantula, it was just too much for her. Liat screamed, “I can’t go on!”
Now here’s the question: would you have volunteered to help Liat escape the ordeal by offering to take her place?
That very question was asked of fellow students who had volunteered for a study of how anxiety affects compassion, that noble extension of our instinct for caregiving. Their answers reveal that just as attachment styles can skew sexuality, they also lend their distinctive twist to empathy.
Mario Mikulincer, an Israeli colleague of Phillip Shaver in the research on attachment styles, argues that the innate altruistic impulse that follows from empathy with someone in need can become muddled, suppressed, or overridden when people feel the anxiety of insecure attachment. Through elaborate experiments, Mikulincer has shown that each of the three different attachment styles has a distinct impact on the ability to empathize.4
People who had various attachment styles were asked to watch poor Liat—who was, of course, an experimental confederate acting the part. The secure people were the most compassionate, both in feeling Liat’s distress and in volunteering to take her place. Anxious people, however, were swallowed up by their own distressing reactions and could not bring themselves to come to her rescue. And avoidant people were neither upset nor prone to help.
The secure style seems optimal for altruism; such people readily attune to the distress of others and act to help them. Secure people are more likely than others to be actively caring in their relationships, whether as mothers helping their children, romantic partners offering emotional support to a partner feeling distress, caring for older relatives, or helping out a needy stranger.
But anxious people attune with an oversensitivity that can make them all the more upset at another person’s suffering, swamped by contagion. While they feel the other’s pain, those feelings can intensify into “empathy distress,” a level of anxiety so strong that they become overwhelmed. Anxious people seem most vulnerable to compassion fatigue, burning out from their own anguish when faced with a relentless parade of others’ suffering.
Avoidant people find compassion difficult, too. They protect themselves against painful emotions by suppressing them, and so in self-defense they close themselves off to emotional contagion from others who are suffering. Because they empathize poorly, they rarely help. The one exception seems to be when they might benefit personally in some way by helping; their occasions of compassion come with a “what’s in it for me” flavoring.
Caregiving flows most fully when we are feeling secure, possessed of a stable foundation that allows us to feel empathy without being overwhelmed. Feeling cared for frees us to care for others—and when we don’t feel cared for, we can’t care nearly so well. That insight led Mikulincer to explore whether simply making people more secure might boost their capacity for caring.
Imagine you’re reading in your local newspaper about the plight of a woman with three young children. She has no husband, no job, and no money. Every day she brings her hungry youngsters to eat at a soup kitchen; without that meager food, they would have none—they might suffer malnutrition or even die.
Would you be willing to donate some food for her once a month? Help her search the want ads for a job? Would you go so far as to accompany her to a job interview?
Those very questions were asked of volunteers in another study of compassion by Mikulincer. In these experiments, the volunteers first underwent an enhancement of their feelings of security; they received a short (one-fiftieth of a second), unconscious exposure to the names of people who made them feel secure (such as the person they like to talk upsetting things over with). They were also asked to bring these people to mind deliberately, by visualizing the faces of these caring figures in their lives.
Strikingly, anxious people overcame their empathy distress and their usual reluctance to help. Even this temporary boost allowed them to react like secure people, showing more compassion. A heightened sense of security seems to free up an abundant supply of attention and energy for the needs of others.
But avoidant people still failed to empathize and so suppressed their altruistic impulse—unless they stood to gain something from it. Their cynical attitude fits the theory that there is no such thing as true altruism, and that compassionate acts always contain within them at least a bit of self-interest, if not selfishness.5 Mikulincer suggests that there is a grain of truth in that view—but mainly for people who are avoidant and so do not empathize well in the first place.6
Of the three attachment styles, the secure people were still the most willing among the volunteers to lend a hand. Their compassion appears to be directly proportional to the need they perceive: the greater the pain, the more they help.
THE LOW ROAD TO COMPASSION
Such empathy, Jaak Panksepp argues, has its roots in the low-road neural system for maternal nurturance, one we share with a wide range of other species. Empathy appears to be a primary response of this system. As every mother knows, her baby’s cry has particular potency. Lab studies show that a mother’s physiological arousal is distinctly stronger when she hears her own baby crying than when she hers another baby’s wails.7
The baby’s ability to elicit in his mother an emotion similar to what he’s feeling offers the mother guidance on what the baby needs. This ability of an infant’s cries to trigger on-target caregiving—a phenomenon seen not just in mammals but even in birds—suggests that it is a universal template in Nature, one with immense and rather obvious benefits for survival.
Empathy plays the pivotal role in caregiving, which after all centers on responding to the needs of others rather than our own. Compassion, a grand term, in its everyday guise can show as availability, sensitivity, or responsiveness—all signs of good parenting or friendship. And when it comes to a prospective mate, remember, both men and women rate kindness as the number-one trait they seek.
Freud noted a striking similarity in the physical intimacy between lovers and that between a mother and her baby. Lovers, like mothers and infants, spend much time gazing into each other’s eyes, cuddling, nuzzling, suckling, and kissing, with ample skin-to-skin con
tact. And in both cases the contact offers a contented bliss.
Sex aside, the neurochemical key to the pleasures of such contact is oxytocin, the molecule of motherly love. Oxytocin, which the human body releases in women during childbirth and nursing as well as during orgasm, chemically triggers the flood of loving feelings that every mother feels toward her baby—and so the primal biochemistry of protection and caregiving.
As a mother nurses, oxytocin floods through her body, producing many effects. It induces a flow of milk; it also dilates the blood vessels in the skin around the mammary gland, thereby warming her baby. The mother’s blood pressure falls as she feels more relaxed. Along with a sense of peacefulness, she feels more outgoing, wanting to engage with people—the more oxytocin she has, the more sociable she is.
Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg, a Swedish neuroendocrinologist who has studied oxytocin extensively, contends that this chemical flood occurs whenever we engage in affectionate contact with someone we care for. The neural circuitry for oxytocin intersects with many low-road nodes of the social brain.8
The benefits of oxytocin seem to emerge in a variety of pleasant social interactions—especially caregiving in all its forms—where people exchange emotional energy; they can actually prime in each other the good feelings that this molecule bestows. Uvnäs-Moberg suggests that repeated exposures to the people with whom we feel the closest social bonds can condition the release of oxytocin, so that merely being in their presence, or even just thinking about them, may trigger in us a pleasant dose. Small wonder that cubicles in even the most soulless of offices are papered with photos of loved ones.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 25
