Live and ERN

Have you heard of ERN, Error-Related Negativity? It's what bums you out (er, lowers your dopamine level) when you get an answer wrong on a test, make a mistake, transgress.

Have you ever noticed that some people don't seem to feel bad when they err? A great trait...to an extent. But, what if they don't seem to be bothered -- and it hurts them and you.

Beating oneself up too much is neurotic, but don't we all need a little neurosis to nudge us in the right direction sometimes?

Some folks don't flinch, whimper or whine, but are absolutely fine with failing. They would prefer to win, sure, but if they don't, they show nothing because they feel nothing. It's on to the next activity, business as usual. You could call it resilient...or really low in ERN...or something else.

Well, not surprisingly, in adolescent males, empathy and this ERN don't go together, but risk-taking does.

Psychopaths have been shown to be low ERN, never learning squat from their mistakes since they simply don't make them feel bad.

Political Parting

I'm all for reaching across the aisle and all, but I swear sometimes I think Dems and Repubs are just too plain, damn different to coexist. 

Enter neuroscience, discovering that, yes, left-wing brains are different from right-wing ones. To wit, a study out of Northwestern U.:

"Content analysis of 12 key scenes in life stories showed that conservatives, as predicted, tended to depict authority figures as strict enforcers of moral rules and to identify lessons in self-discipline. By contrast, liberals were more likely to identify lessons learned regarding empathy and openness...." HMMM

A country divided indeed.

Swede Success

An elemental, if not terribly exciting, piece of science outta, well, Sweden, finds that, yes, having a common past experience makes us more empathetic with someone. 

Subjects read stories, some of which mirrored their own lives, and rated the degree of empathy they felt.

Maybe that's the reason why, when comforting others, we tend to bring up similar situations we were in (my mother also died; I too divorced), not to make the other person feel better, or hog sympathy for ourselves, but to try to trigger our own sense of empathy.

Doggie See, Doggie...(oh, you get the idea)

"Dogs catch human yawns" is the title of a new UK study.

This "may indicate that dogs possess the capacity for a rudimentary form of empathy." 

Amazing, quite.

Though, as they're our best friends, guard and protect us, miss us, jump on us and generally love us, we kinda figured something was going on.

Chimps also copy human yawning, but who wants one of those hellions as a pet...

Pricks and Stones

They (O.K., Harvard was involved) showed some "normal" people a video of a hand getting penetrated with a needle.

(Ouch!)

They hooked up their brains and . . .

Those who scored highest on the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI) showed significantly less mirror neuron activity while watching this fright fest. 

But wait, there's more.

A nasty little subset -- those who scored highest on a particularly charming trait called "coldheartedness" -- gave the least damn about the whole "needle through the other guy's hand thingie," so the brain monitoring showed.

Again, these were not patients, malfunctioning psychopaths in jails or hospitals, just regular folk off the street. Your boss maybe. Your ex. 

Geez.

I Can't Believe She's Gone

It is with full-blown sadness that I mourn the passing of someone I've never met, talked to or, save for one, what looks like old, photo, seen.

I'm talking about Kathy Krajco.

I exchanged an email or two as comments on her website shortly before she died. I was looking forward to a continuing dialogue...and now...

One of the clearest, strongest, truest voices on this thing we call the web, is silent. I feel gypped (politically incorrect word). But mostly I feel profoundly sad.

Sadder than I have when other people I've known better, longer, heck, than when people I've actually known, have died!

Why?

If you haven't read her blog and main website in their entirety, digitally run now -- leave this mere shadow of her blog behind. You can also buy her book.

My God, people, this is a loss. This was a Good person. I just know it. You would to, if you read her stuff.

Did I always agree? No. And we went back and forth a bit. But you know what? Kathy Krajco was so smart in that common sense meets great intellect kind of way, that I simply could not argue with her. I could feel the honesty, integrity, the personal truth of her words over the electric picket fence, so to speak, to such a degree that I wound up thinking that, yup, in a way, in her way, she was right.

For Kathy, bad people were bad. She didn't give a hoot how they got that way, I think. (She was a former science teacher, by the way.) In her opinion, they chose their dark path, albeit often at a very young age, and then got locked in. Evil has its rewards. It is very often the easy way, a free ride, morally and emotionally: all take and no give. To Kathy, I guess, trying to put evil's causes under a microscope (looking at hormonal and genetic causes, etc.) felt too close to excusing it. She cared, first and foremost, about educating and helping the victims of abusers. To that end, she discussed the evildoer's methods and motives. But devoting brainpower to figuring out what made the bad bad -- as this blog is wont to do -- I bet she thought that was a major waste of time.

But still, she was supportive of my comments and this website, even linking to it, which was a great honor.

I felt I knew her.

I know I will miss her.

Fight, Fight, Fight!

O.K., empathy scientists aren't exactly to whom we turn when looking for WWF-quality (sorry, World Wide Fund for Nature) combat, but, hey, we'll take what we can get.

This latest tussle takes on one piece of the empathy puzzle: Do you need to care to act?

A new study examines the long-standing  battle between developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman, who argues that empathic distress (suffering when someone else is suffering) is the gateway emotion for altruistic action and, in the other corner, social psychologist Daniel Batson, who says it's not required, as sometimes people "do the right thing" due to a sense of responsibility, social pressure or to make themselves look good.

 This paper, at least, declares Hoffman the winner, offering fMRI results to show that empathic distress and empathic altruism "share a common basis."

So, I feel your pain -- and that's why I'm gonna do something about it.

Bad News

I guess I kind of disagree with today's Supreme Court decision to disallow the death penalty for child rape. 

If you torture, repeatedly rape and mutilate a child (or the equivalent), death should at least be able to be considered.

Then again, maybe a ban would deter someone from going farther and killing their victim.

This is reminding me of all kinds of bad things. 

Yesterday, a homeless ex-con who raped, slit the eyelids of, Krazy Glued the mouth of, poured bleach on, damaged the kidneys of with pills and finally set fire to a grad student for 19 hours was found guilty. He'll be sentenced in a month.

The purpetrator's reaction to his fate has been widely reported:

"The judge said that Williams was told a verdict had been reached, he simply turned over in his courthouse cell and went back to sleep."

Apparently he's lost a lot of his joie de vivre since he stopped being able to violate and torture (other) human beings. 

Ethic Tale

Good golly, what an interesting post about the development of our morality (replete with a little biproduct called religion) over at Evolving Thoughts.

Emanuel, Emanuel, Emanuel

I'm having a delayed reaction to the wild Emanuel brothers appearance on Charlie Rose the other night, which was supposed to be about healthcare, but was not.

In a way it was about genetics.

Filial relatedness -- and not in a good way.

One brother, Ari, is the model for the monster agent, Ari, on HBO's Entourage.

One is some sort of holier-than-thou (wait 'til you're in pain, bucko) NIH ethicist-oncologist against assisted suicide.

(As the daughter of a dead cancer patient, alls I can say is: oy.)

Lastly, we have a "pitbull" congressman, a big "D" Democrat with a Republican personality.

Are you sensing the contradictions in this brood?

What I love about these guys is they are obviously all narcissistic but they wear the mantle of goodness like an Armani tux at a $20,000-a-plate fundraiser for the poor.

Charlie forgot about healthcare (hey, he's covered) and tried to get to the bottom of the brothers' respective and collective grandness.

Lot's of talk about values and service discussed at the childhood dinner table, which was very egalitarian and physically round, a mother who championed civil rights, a father who was a union supporter. . .

This with a Hollywood agent in the room.

Plus a lot of talk about report cards that were posted for all to see, fierce competition, achievement at all costs with a healthy sprinkle of that ultimate in moral contradictions (can you say "chosen people"?), modern-day Judaism.

By the end, I wanted to take a shower, call a therapist, renounce half my ethnicity and change my political party, not necessarily in that order.