8. On mirroring in humans, see, for example, L. Fadiga et al., “Motor Facilitation During Action Observation: A Magnetic Stimulation Study,” Journal of Neurophysiology 73 (1995), pp. 2608–26.
9. That blocking is by inhibitory neurons in the prefrontal cortex. Patients with damage in this prefrontal circuitry are notoriously uninhibited, saying or doing whatever pops into their head. The prefrontal areas may have direct inhibitory connections, or posterior cortical regions that have local inhibitory connections may be activated.
10. To date, mirror neurons have been found in several areas of the human brain in addition to the premotor cortex, including the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus, and the insula.
11. On mirror neurons in humans, see Iacoboni et al., “Cortical Mechanisms.”
12. See Kiyoshe Nakahara and Yasushi Miyashita, “Understanding Intentions: Through the Looking Glass,” Science 308 (2005), pp. 644–45; Leonardo Fogassi, “Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding,” Science 308 (2005), pp. 662–66.
13. See Stephanie D. Preston and Frans de Waal, “The Communication of Emotions and the Possibility of Empathy in Animals,” in Stephen G. Post et al., eds., Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
14. If another person’s actions hold high emotional interest for us, we automatically make a slight gesture or facial expression that reveals that we feel the same. This “preview” of a feeling or movement, some neuroscientists suggest, may have been essential for the development of language and communication among humans. One theory holds that in prehistory, the evolution of language stemmed from the activities of mirror neurons, initially for an idiom of gesture and then a vocal form. See Giacomo Rizzolatti and M. A. Arbib, “Language Within Our Grasp,” Trends in Neuroscience 21 (1998), pp. 188–94.
15. Giacomo Rizzolatti is quoted in Sandra Blakelee, “Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times, January 10, 2006, p. C3.
16. Daniel Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 76.
17. Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
18. Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking Press, 2000).
19. On the brain’s preference for happy faces, see Jukka Leppanen and Jari Hietanen, “Affect and Face Perception,” Emotion 3 (2003), pp. 315–26.
20. Barbara Fraley and Arthur Aron, “The Effect of a Shared Humorous Experience on Closeness in Initial Encounters,” Personal Relationships 11 (2004), pp. 61–78.
21. The circuitry for laughing resides in the most primitive parts of the brain, the brain stem. See Stephen Sivvy and Jaak Panksepp, “Juvenile Play in the Rat,” Physiology and Behavior 41 (1987), pp. 103–14.
22. On best friends, see Brenda Lundy et al., “Same-sex and Opposite-sex Best Friend Interactions Among High School Juniors and Seniors,” Adolescence 33 (1998), pp. 279–88.
23. Darryl McDaniels is quoted in Josh Tyrangiel, “Why You Can’t Ignore Kanye,” Time, August 21, 2005.
24. Legend was quoted in “Bling Is Not Their Thing: Hip-hop Takes a Relentlessly Positive Turn,” Daily News of Los Angeles, February 24, 2005.
25. On memes, see Susan Blakemore, The Meme Machine (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999).
26. For a more thorough account of priming, see E. T. Higgins, “Knowledge Activation: Accessibility, Applicability, and Salience,” Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).
27. On priming for politeness, see Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, “Automaticity of Social Behavior,” p. 71.
28. On automatic trains of thought, see John A. Bargh, “The Automaticity of Everyday Life,” in R. S. Wyer, ed., Advances in Social Cognition (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1997), vol. 10.
29. On mind-reading accuracy, see Thomas Geoff and Garth Fletcher, “Mind-reading Accuracy in Intimate Relationships: Assessing the Roles of the Relationship, the Target, and the Judge,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003), pp. 1079–94.
30. On the confluence of two minds, see Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating,” in Ulric Neisser, ed., The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 121–73.
31. The emotional merge occurred whether or not the duo felt they had become close friends. Cameron Anderson, Dacher Keltner, and Oliver P. John, “Emotional Convergence Between People over Time,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 5 (2003), pp. 1054–68.
32. At the infamous Heysel disaster in 1985, British hooligans charged Belgian fans, causing a wall to collapse and thirty-nine deaths. In the intervening years there have been fatal or near-fatal soccer riots throughout Europe.
33. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1973).
34. The rapidity of group mood sweeps is noted in Robert Levenson and Anna Reuf, “Emotional Knowledge and Rapport,” in William Ickes, ed., Empathic Accuracy (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), pp. 44–72.
35. On sharing emotions, see Elaine Hatfield et al., Emotional Contagion (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
36. On emotional contagion in teams, see Sigal Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior,” Administrative Science Quarterly 47 (2002), pp. 644–75.
37. Looping in a group helps everyone stay on the same wavelength. In decision-making groups it fosters the kind of connection that can allow airing differences openly, without fear of blow-ups. Harmony in a group allows the widest range of views to be considered fully and the very best decisions to be made—provided people feel free to bring up dissenting views. During a heated argument it’s hard for people to take in what another says, let alone attune.
Chapter 4. An Instinct for Altruism
1. On the Good Samaritan experiment, a classic in social psychology, see J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973), pp. 100–08. I cited the study in my 1985 book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths.
2. As with the rushed students, social situations influence the degree of looping that seems appropriate and even whether looping occurs at all. We would, for instance, feel little need to rush to help someone moaning if we see ambulance attendants also approaching them. And since we loop most readily with people who seem similar to us, and progressively less so the more differences we perceive, we are more likely to offer help to a friend than to a stranger.
3. On the Good Samaritan and helping, see, for example C. Daniel Batson et al., “Five Studies Testing Two New Egoistic Alternatives to the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (1988), pp. 52–57.
4. English seems to be missing a word with the meaning of kandou, which Asian languages have named. In Sanskrit, for example, the word mudita means “taking pleasure in the goodness done by or received by someone else.” But, English has readily adopted Schadenfreude, the exact opposite of mudita. See also Tania Singer et al., “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but Not Sensory Components of Pain,” Science 303 (2004), pp. 1157–62.
5. See Jonathan D. Haidt and Corey L. M. Keyes, Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well Lived (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2003).
6. On fish brains, see Joseph Sisneros et al., “Steroid-Dependent Auditory Plasticity Leads to Adaptive Coupling of Sender and Receiver,” Science 305 (2004), pp. 404–07.
7. If the baby feels tired or upset, he does the opposite, moving in ways that close down his perceptual systems, as he curls himself up waiting to be held or caressed for calming. See Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating,” in Ulric Neisser, ed., The Perceived Self: Ecolo
gical and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 121–73.
8. On empathy in evolution and across species, see Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1872; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
9. S. E. Shelton et al., “Aggression, Fear and Cortisol in Young Rhesus Monkeys,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 22, supp. 2 (1997), p. S198.
10. On sociable baboons, see J. B. Silk et al., “Social Bonds of Female Baboons Enhance Infant Survival,” Science 302 (2003), pp. 1231–34.
11. Earlier thinking on what allowed humans to develop such a large and intelligent brain had fixed on our ability to hold and make tools. In recent decades the utility for survival—and for raising children who survive into parenting age—that a sociable life offers has drawn more proponents.
12. Stephen Hill, “Storyteller, Recovering from Head-on Crash, Cites ‘Miracle of Mother’s Day,’” Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 11, 2005, p. B1.
13. The notion that empathy entails an emotional sharing has a long history in psychology. One of the earliest theorists, William McDougall, proposed in 1908 that during “sympathy” the first person’s physical state is elicited in the second. Eighty years later Leslie Brothers suggested that understanding the emotion of another person required that we experience the same emotion to some degree. And in 1992 Robert Levenson and Anna Reuf, reporting a concordance of heart rate in partners having an emotional discussion, suggested this physiological similarity could be a basis for empathy.
14. The neuroscientist is Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, quoted in Greg Miller, “New Neurons Strive to Fit In,” Science 311 (2005), pp. 938–40.
15. Constantin Stanislavski is quoted in Jonathan Cott, On a Sea of Memory (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 138.
16. Neural circuitry for our own and others’ feelings is discussed in Kevin Ochsner et al., “Reflecting upon Feelings: An fMRI Study of Neural Systems Supporting the Attribution of Emotion to Self and Others,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16 (2004), pp. 1746–72.
17. On circuitry active during observing or imitating an emotion, see Laurie Carr et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans: A Relay from Neural Systems for Imitation to Limbic Areas,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, no. 9 (2003), pp. 5497–502. The areas activated: premotor cortex, inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula, and right amygdala (which showed a significant increase from levels during observation alone to levels during imitation).
18. For Einfühlung, see Theodore Lipps cited in Vittorio Gallese, “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–7 (2001), pp. 33–50.
19. On empathy and the brain, see Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 1–20.
20. This similarity, however, does not inevitably indicate empathy. It could be that at the current resolution of our measuring instruments, happiness from two different neural sources looks similar.
21. On brain circuitry in empathy, see Stephanie D. Preston et al., “Functional Neuroanatomy of Emotional Imagery: PET of Personal and Hypothetical Experiences,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: April Supplement, 126.
22. In technical terms, this neural shorthand is “computationally efficient,” both in the processing of information and in the space needed to store it. Preston and de Waal, “Empathy.”
23. On the felt sense, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt, 2000).
24. On Hobbes, see J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, Between the years 1669 and 1696, ed., A. Clark (London: Clarendon Press, 1898), vol. 1.
25. A softer version of “every man for himself” was put forth by the eighteenth-century British philosopher Adam Smith, who championed the creation of wealth in a laissez-faire economic system. Smith urged us to trust that individual self-interest would produce equitable markets, one of the economic assumptions underlying the free market system. Both Hobbes and Smith have frequently been cited in modern attempts to analyze the driving force of human behavior, particularly by those who favor pure self-interest—brutal in the case of Hobbes, rational in Smith.
26. Stephanie D. Preston and Frans de Waal, “The Communication of Emotions and the Possibility of Empathy in Animals,” in S. Post et al., eds., Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), argue that the selfish versus altruistic distinction is irrelevant from an evolutionary perspective, which can read a wide range of behaviors as technically “selfish.”
27. Mencius quoted in Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (New York: Basic Books-Perseus, 2001), p. 256. Mencius proposes that if a child is about to fall into a well, anyone who sees has the impulse to help.
28. Jean Decety and Thierry Chaminade, “Neural Correlates of Feeling Sympathy,” Neuropsychologia 41 (2003), pp. 127–38.
29. Ap Dijksterhuis and John A. Bargh, “The Perception-Behavior Expressway: Automatic Effects of Social Perception on Social Behavior,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 33 (2001), pp. 1–40.
30. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, with commentary by Paul Ekman (1872; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
31. Beatrice de Gelder et al., “Fear Fosters Flight: A Mechanism for Fear Contagion When Perceiving Emotion Expressed by a Whole Body,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (2004), pp. 16701–06. The medial prefrontal-anterior cingulate circuit that responds to social stimuli like pictures of people in distress in turn recruits other brain systems according to the nature of the challenge.
32. On similarity see, for example, Dennis Krebs, “Empathy and Altruism: An Examination of the Concept and a Review of the Literature,” Psychological Bulletin 73 (1970), pp. 258–302; C. D. Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Scientific Answer (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991). Conventional experimental paradigms in social psychology may not present human need in an urgent enough manner to tap the empathy-action pathways. A checklist asking whether one would donate to a charity appeals to cognitive as well as emotional systems. But an equivalent of Mencius’ test—seeing a baby about to fall in a well—should tap into a different neural circuit and so yield contrasting results.
33. Preston and de Waal, “Communication of Emotions,” propose an emotional gradient in relating to someone else’s distress. Emotional contagion elicits the same intense state in the observer as in the distressed person, softening the boundary between self and other. In empathy the observer takes on a similar—though weaker—emotional state but maintains a clear self-other boundary. In cognitive empathy the observer arrives at a shared state through thinking about the predicament of the one in distress at a distance. And sympathy is a sense of the other’s distress, with little or no sharing of that state. The likelihood of helping increases with the strength of the emotional sharing.
34. On the case for kindness, see Jerome Kagan in Anne Harrington and Arthur Zajonc, eds., The Dalai Lama at MIT (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
35. One philosophical approach that offers a way to reconcile these positions: Owen Flanagan, “Ethical Expressions: Why Moralists Scowl, Frown, and Smile,” in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 41
