Aye, There's the Rub

I realize that most people performing their morning toilettes are not suddenly reminded of humans' astounding lack of empathy for their fellow men.

Blame it on my Kiehl's lotion -- at least partly.

There's another Keihl, you see, Kent Kiehl, the director of clinical cognitive neuroscience at the University of New Mexico's Mind Institute. He does really cool studies with imprisoned psychopaths (20% of the inmate population apparently), hooking 'em up to electrodes and seeing how their brains react to words.

Keihl's seminal "Semantic and affective processing in psychopaths:
An event-related potential (ERP) study" (1999) lent proof to the anecdotal observation that such people have problems with abstraction. The tests showed that these guys made more errors in categorizing and took longer to respond to abstract concepts than concrete words.

If you know any of these losers, it's painfully clear that they didn't get the humanity memo. For, what is abstract thinking if not the defining attribute of our species?

I remember having a three-hour argument over the existence of "good character" with my psychopath (who I didn't know was one at the time). He didn't know what I meant, like, at all. It was a nonsense phrase to him.

Or the time I described someone as "rich." Didn't know what that meant either. "Compared to what? How is that defined?" It went on and on like that 'til I got tired of fighting and bolted.

Which brings us to empathy. Empathy is an abstract concept if there ever was one. So are feelings.

Is it any wonder these people are totally out of the loop?

Kiehl (the scientist, not the cream) frets about society's approach to reforming these people, given his discoveries:

"A large part of modern cognitive therapy that has been applied to the treatment of psychopaths involves teaching conceptually abstract information, empathy, role-playing, rational thinking. Our clinical observation of these treatment programs has revealed that psychopaths have difficulty comprehending this information...Specifically, psychopaths are more likely than others to attempt to interpret abstract information by presenting it in more concrete terms. Understanding the nature of these impairments may lead to alternative, and hopefully superior, forms of treatment."

Or at least to us not trying to debate the existence of "good character," "rich" or, God forbid, "love" with them 'til we're blue in the face.

Dept. of Phineus Gage

A recent study outta the Brain Injury Research Group in Swansea, Wales, and published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, examined the impact of traumatic brain injury on empathy.

60.7% of those with brain trauma scored low on emotional empathy compared to 31% of, um, "normal" folk.

But the interesting thing was that they couldn't really tell who was who. Low empathy wasn't related to the severity of the injury, neuropsychological test performance, cognitive or executive ability impairment or the patient's affect, namely whether they had anxiety or depression. They just had low empathy. That was all that distinguished them.

You ask us, that's enough.

E is for Entertainment

Well, a lack of empathy (No Country for Old Men and its star, Javier Bardem, as the sociopath Chigurh) won big Sunday night, same night a rather vile show called Dexter was on, with a serial killer as hero -- an inappropriate transfer from cable, if ya ask me, which you di'nt.

Sigh.

Not that there's anything wrong with, uh, wrongness and darkness and evil as entertainment and all that. It's fun. It's fascinating and all, the evil in our midst distilled to its most extreme form and whatnot in a character like Bardem's.


But, well, is it winning? Is it the most championable thing out there?

Dunno.

There Will Be Blood was pretty bleak. Atonement was no spring picnic. And Michael Clayton wasn't exactly Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

But the fact is, a cattle stun gun-weilding mass murderer with no conscience who received no justice in the film was the veritable belle of the ball at the Academy Awards.

Strange, no?

Human: Kind

The previous post mentioned Attachment Theory, which is, sadly, just that -- a theory.

We still know so little.

It's obvious that kids do need TLC when they're born. Remember those poor monkey babies hugging the fake wire monkey mommies?

But some stuff appears to be programmed into us, like shyness or being "difficult."

Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan argues that our siblings, peers, economic class as well as natural temperament are all more important than those dinky first two years of life in shaping who we are.

And who we are is pretty, pretty darn impressive to Kagan.

He believes mankind is just the cat's meow, thanks to our uniquely human sense of morality:

"[O]nly we, not chimpanzees, are aware of right and wrong, and we wish to do the right thing. Now we don't always do the right thing, and that's what makes us complicated...

But I remind you... if you look today around the world and you put in the denominator the number of opportunities for every person between 20 and 70 years of age, to do something mean or cruel, that is, to steal, to lie, to rob, to torture, to rape, whatever...and you would not get caught, that's a large number, enormous number. And I want you to put in the numerator the number of times that happened today, and that ratio approaches zero.

That's why murder, rape and torture are in headlines, it's because they're freak events. They're rare. And they're rare because we are essentially a moral creature. If they weren't rare, they wouldn't be in the headlines."

Um....huh?

I want to live in Kagan's neighborhood.

Happy Birthday to the Great Empathizer

"...I think his qualities show that in the hands of a truly great politician, the qualities that we normally associate with decency, things like honesty and sensitivity and kindness and empathy and compassion, can be great political resources because politics is all about human relationships, and he understood that right from the beginning. By treating the people the way he did, and having his own ego sometimes submerged for this larger goal that he was going after, it meant that he was a great politician. And I think it’s important for us to remember that in this country, you can be a great politician and remembered perhaps as the greatest President."

--Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln

Attachment Theory tells us that in order to be caring and empathic in adulthood you would have had to have been held a lot, nurtured and loved in infancy (up to age two) by a consistent caregiver, usually your mother.

Well, Lincoln's mother died when he was 10. But apparently, he did have a very good early relationship with her. Kearns Goodwin, who researched the 16th president for her book, Team of Rivals, notes that although Lincoln had a "melancholy" temperament (nature), he overcame it (nurture):

"People have asked me, “Well, where did his confidence come from?”...And I think part of it is that his mother loved him. He later said everything he owed in life was to his mother. And she must have given him confidence."

Evil, the other "E"

Over at Human Nature Review, I found a killer 2005 New York Times piece on the subject of...dun-dun-dun...

Eeeeeevil

It was about how some CSI types use the word about certain really bad, really icky and nasty perps who do things like sexually humiliate, dissect or burn their victims.

I should say so.

They are "evil" in the sense that "their deliberate, habitual savagery defies any psychological explanation or attempt at treatment."

You should meet some of the folks on my condo board.

While psychologists shun this other "e" word as an official diagnosis, the article asserts, "many career forensic examiners say their work forces them to reflect on the concept of evil, and some acknowledge they can find no other term for certain individuals they have evaluated."

Others who have joined the "evil" bandwagon, author Benedict Carey writes, include NYU shrink Michael Welner, who has a "depravity scale," and Columbia personality expert Dr. Michael Stone who published a 22-level "heirarchy of evil hehavior," culled from the case files of 500 bad souls. Stone feels a designation of "evil" would help define who should be put away for life.

Georgetown's Dr Robert Simon disagrees about that label, arguing "psychiatrists don't know anything more about it than anyone else...What does it add?"

I would have to agree. Evil shmeeevil.

The piece takes up Hare's psychopathy test, which measures "glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity."

The higher your score, the more likely you are to be an unrehabilitatable predatory killer.

It also mentions the differences in the way psychopaths' brains process abstract ideas and emotional content. "No one knows how significant these differences are, or whether they are a result of genetic or social factors."

The piece further explores the dangers of the label -- namely that it will lead to more death penalty convictions.

Plus, a lot of these guys, including John Wayne Gacy, are kind of nice.

One anti-evil label psychiatrist, Park Dietz, observes of the arch-criminal:

"The fact is that there aren't many in whom I couldn't find some redeeming attributes and some humanity. As far as we can tell, the causes of their behavior are biological, psychological and social, and do not so far demonstrably include the work of Lucifer."

He's a nice guy, tons of decaying teenagers in his basement, but a nice guy nonetheless.

Empathy Override

Here's a talk by Daniel Goleman about how-- shiny mirror neurons and all -- we are sometimes oblivious to others' needs.

Nice cut to the "cool dude" wearing dark sunglasses indoors when the subject of narcissism comes up.

(Ditto the background posters of, ahem, Shakespeare and Van Gogh.)

Conclusion: All it takes is the simple act of noticing.

Really wish it was that simple.

Moral Hygene

I avoided doing a post on Steven Pinker's recent Times piece, which, although it contains a mess of stuff relevant to the subject of empathy, intially turned me off with its "silly humans" tone.

The Condescension Instinct?

In it, the Harvard cognitive scientist observes that our species has always engaged in moral flip-flopping on issues from working moms, to homosexuality, to smoking. The distaste he feels for these shifts, from his ivory perch on high, is obvious.

While societies' stances on some topics are fluid, Pinker (per social psychologist Jonathan Haidt) offers five spheres of morality that are nearly universal. (Just as language is a basic, human ability, he says, so is moral thinking.) How these areas are ranked, in what order, however, is culturally determined.

These five spheres -- harm, fairness, community, authority and purity -- have evolutionary roots.

"The impulse to avoid harm...can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey...Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat..."

He goes on.

The biggies for our purposes are fairness and community, which Pinker says grow out of reciprocal altruism.

So where is true empathy in all of this?

Empathy is hot.

Evolutionarily, that is, it is a very attractive quality to potential mates.

"We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates...Since it's good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around."

Ah, but evolutionarily wouldn't one step better be to temporarily and very convincingly appear to be generous without really being, to then show your real colors, hoard all your resources for yourself and your kids, but screw everybody else, even your ex-spouse, once reproduction is complete?!

Divorce explained!

"The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair," he writes.

For a time, at least.

Pinker does make room for the psychopaths (thank goodness!):

"Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don't make the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot encounters."

Amen!

"An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process."

After this, Pinker gets himself all in a ball about moral judgments, lest we forget that just because the other guy seems bad, he might be acting morally to himself. He urges us mere mortals to "see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with."

We'll really, really try.

"At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries' agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us....[I]n any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other's concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance."

Or, then again, the other side may actually be a destructive psychopath trying to appear moral, like you said above, and one false move on our part...

It's difficult to tell.

Shelf Involved, Part III

The note from the publisher of this March release states: "Disarming the Narcissist is a step-by-step guide to treating and communicating with narcissists with compassion and empathy in a way that still preserves the reader's personal boundaries and sanity."

Sounds good. Maybe too "good," if you catch my drift.

Do the empathy-less deserve my empathy?

The subtitle also makes us wonder: "Surviving and Thriving with the Self-Absorbed."

Getting outta Dodge is one sure-fire way to thrive.

These people make bad bed-fellows and worse bosses. There is no surviving with them.

But let's say just you can't get away. It's your family-member, or you reeeeally need the job, or an ex with whom you share kids.

Author Wendy Behary, a LCSW, hasn't come alone to fight this battle of disarmament.

She's got a preface by "The Mindful Brain" man, Dan Siegel and a forward by schema therapy dude, Jeffrey Young.

Two doctors. Not bad for a first publishing date.

But what about Wendy? How does she suggest we get along with these impossible narcissists?

Behary draws heavily on Young's Schema Therapy to suggest that certain deficits in our upbringing (lack of love, abandonment, feeling defective) attract us to and become triggered by the narcissists in our lives -- and further entrap us.

So in other words, we are in control of our reactions and, therefore, of the whole problem we are having.

It's a tricky argument, one that teeters on blaming the victim for how "she" reacts to the narcissist (with his own schemas) and not the other way around.

The author's awareness of the dilemma in her position leads her to term it a "burden," not to "blame." But let's face it, our burdens have a funny way of walking, talking and feeling just like blame.

And how is this our burden?

Someone without empathy is going to rub anyone, Schema be damned, the wrong way.

This should be their burden alone, not ours.

This book is rather depressing.

Behary suggests we undertake "an exhausting commitment" predicated on the brain's ability to change. She invokes Dan Siegel's "contingent communication," in which "'the receiver of the message listens with an open mind and sensory awareness...[The] reaction is dependent on what was actually communicated, not on a predetermined and rigid mental model of what was expected.'"

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...Sorry, I wasn't really listening.

Look, I'm all for anything that can get the empathy-less to change.

"Feeling felt" sounds rockin' to me.

But do we, any of us, have the time? The 5, 10, gulp, 20 years in might take to rewire another human's brain -- and then only maybe, baby, does he change?

It doesn't seem, well, efficient.

Perhaps one day we'll know exactly how such personalities come to be and how they can go away.

Maybe they'll be a pill or mental exercises narcissists can do alone, sort of like push-ups, in which they imagine having feelings, or caring about others, or they watch videos of people talking that they have to be tested on. "What was this person feeling?" "How should her friend react?"

Human being school.

But until then, are we to be the human guinea pigs on which they must practice and train?

Nah. I don't think so. Not me.

Bahary is a therapist and likely a good one. She no doubt has had some success working with these most difficult patients, using her own understanding and techniques to get them to inch up the ladder of human decency.

But for those involved personally with these characters, for now the best not-very-good plan would still seem to be, not painstaking disarmament, but full out retreat.

Shelf Involved, Part II

A couple of far-off empathy-related titles for those hot, yet emotionally cold, summer '08 nights:

Evolution and Empathy: The Genetic Factor in the Rise of Humanism (June). Lawyer/ art lover Milton E. Brener has already put forth singular theories on everything from Watergate, to Opera, to the evolutionary biological roots of artistic advances.

His latest proports to apply "new scientific research in the fields of biology and genetics to an empirical study of the Greco-Roman civilizations and the European Renaissance."

O.K.

"These two periods were remarkable in part because of the dominance of empathy and humanism in the philosophical thought of each era."

Sure, sure, can't disagree.

"Coincidentally, both periods were preceded by the influx of many populations and genetic lines. The author cites the expression of new genetic combinations in these periods as evidence that genetic evolution can play a large part in the development of new philosophical concepts, as manifested in these two periods by an overwhelming dominance of empathy and humanism."

Oooooo, now I'm actually going to have to read the thing before I decide if it's too Eugenics-y or something. Beware of the term "coincidentally," incidentally.

Not to sound too conspiratorial, or anything.

Who Holds the Moral High Ground? (August) presents an aptly utilitarian yet readable proposal for an ethical model called "Negative Utilitarianism."

Authors Colin J. Beckley and Elspeth Waters suggest that society shoot for minimizing overall suffering, as opposed to simply maximizing our own happiness.

Their premises are that:

1. our basic needs and suffering are easily identifiable and

2. most of us have built-in empathy that makes us wish to prevent others' suffering.

That second point is a bit up in the air, wouldn't you say?

The book acknowledges that some folks it names "Egoists" didn't exactly get the memo about the empathy part.

The authors name three types of these characters:

"1. The Pathological Egoist who acts without compassion, empathy and remorse and is, as such, beyond morality.

2. The Non-Pathological Egoist who recognises feelings of empathy but acts upon feelings that promote only his immediate, short-term interest.

3. The Contractual Egoist who looks beyond his short-term interest and embraces some kind of reciprocal arrangement, in the guise of 'if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'

There may be individuals that sit somewhere between these categories since there are no clear boundaries."

It's suggested that NU can still work despite the Egoists, who could get over their egotism if they saw that it was in their interest.

"This approach could be deemed something of an informal insurance policy: if you help others in times of need they are much more likely to reciprocate. As such, by helping others you are really helping yourself."

Counting on the meanies no not be mean?

Sounds a tad iffy to base a societal framework upon to us.

Shelf Involved, Part I

As a former female tourist in Italy, here's where I consider a snarky opener along the lines of:

"Is it any wonder Italian male researchers came up with the concept of 'mirror' neurons?" but think better of it.

Oops.

But you do remember the whole mirror neuron hubbub of about three years ago?

The now legendary tale of the three neuroscientists of Parma who were were innocently monitoring the brains of macaque monkeys when they noticed a weird clump of cells that fired not only when the little guys reached for peanuts, but when they observed the humans doing it as well.

Hello Monkey Shines.

Further research proved that humans had these neurons too and there were ones that worked for emotions, not just actions.

Now here's the literary proof -- or is that the pudding? -- of that fateful discovery and all the ensuing reasearch that's been done in the last decade: Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions, emotions, and experience by Giacomo Rizzolatti (Feb).

Blink, it isn't.

Rizzolatti, the leader of the Parma trio, is a very serious scientist who writes in Italian and while the latter issue has been resolved via a translator, this is rather dry going.

His bottom line is that information from visual areas (expressions, body language) is conveyed to the insula, where it "activates a mirror mechanism that immediately codes these descriptions in the corresponding emotive mode." It's "as if" we were feeling them ourselves.

Without the insula, we would recognize emotions, but "to quote Henry James, our preception of these would be reduced to a perception 'purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth.'"

It's good to quote Henry James.

But here's where the plot thins.

Rizzolati writes:

"This instantaneous understanding of the emotions of others, rendered possible by the emotional mirror neuron system, is a necessary condition for the empathy which lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships. However, sharing someone's emotive state at visceromotor level and feeling empathy for that person are two very different things."

(How many times have I heard that. "Baby, I share your state at visceromotor level, but I just don't love you anymore.")

It gets worse:

"[C]ompassion depends on many factors other than the recognition of pain; just to name a few; who the other person is, what our relationship with him is, whether or not we are able to imagine ourselves in his position, whether we want to assume responsibility for his emotive state, wishes and expectations, and so on.

If it is someone we know and love, the emotive mirroring caused by the sight of their plight may provoke our pity or compassion; if on the other hand the person is an enemy or is doing something that constitutes a threat for us, or if we are declared sadists, then the situation changes radically. In all these cases we understand the other's pain, but we do not necessarily experience empathy."

So you have to recognize the emotion, share it, and then care.

This harkens back to an earlier post discussing two different sorts of empathy, cognitive and emotional.

And, dissapointingly, it doesn't really answer the essential mystery of that last piece of the puzzle: the caring part.

Why do some fret, pity, writhe, have compassion? And what triggers? And why do some...just... don't?

Mind Bender

It's O.K., people, empathy is alive and well in Washington!

Well, in print, at least.

Just caught this meditation on the big E by "A Trained Eye," Douglas LaBier, in The Washington Post.

LaBier is a psychotherapist practicing in the windbag city. (Good luck with that.)

He writes: "You may not realize it, but a great number of people suffer from EDD."

Cute.

EDD actually stands for "Empathy Deficit Disorder."

This example in the article struck a familiar chord with (once-married) me:

"Take the man who reported to me that his wife was complaining that he didn't spend enough time with their children... 'Yeah, I see her point,' he says in a neutral voice, 'but I need time for my sports activities on the weekends...And at night I'm tired, I want to veg out.' As we talked further, it became clear to me that he was unable to experience what his wife's world was like for her. "

As for this next guy, I had the same exact discussion with a (Republican, ahem) neighbor of mine:

"[There's] the computer executive who prided himself on having a stable family life....even though he believed in the environmental threat of global warming, he couldn't care less. 'I'll be long gone when New York is under water[.]'"

Yup. EDD is sooooo common among a certain, unfeeling set, that when you hear this stuff, it just rolls off you, onto the floor, where you sure as heck aren't going to be the one to clean it up.

Leave that for the next guy.

The author notes that empathic ability is "hard-wired through what are called mirror-neurons."

Yet he also asserts that, among his subjects, it's the pursuit of success that is the real empathy killer:

"EDD develops when people focus too much on acquiring power, status and money for themselves at the expense of developing those healthy relationships."

With a little concentration, "you can also overcome EDD by retraining your brain to take advantage of what is known as neuroplasticity."

Whatev. I tend to go with the hard science that points to brain structure, chemistry or both as the culprits that make the rats unempathic -- not the rat race itself.

And as for retraining non-empathizers?

Good luck with that.

Ice, Ice, Baby

Scientific American has a piece about the definition of psychopathy that, rather unscientifically, cites Tony Soprano (of HBO's The Sopranos).

(As I am typing this, I realize a person I have always considered narcissistic, if not psychopathic, counted The Sopranos and Da Ali G. Show, which I've noted as being heartless, as her very favorites. Hmmm.)

The SAM article also mentions Harvard's Jane Murphy, whose interesting cross-cultural data is referenced in Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door:

"From recorded observations, we do know that sociopaths, by various names, have existed in all kinds of societies, worldwide and throughout history. As an illustration, psychiatric anthropologist Jane M. Murphy describes the Inuit concept of kunlangeta, which refers to a person whose 'mind knows what to do but does not do it.'

Murphy writes that in northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist that he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice. "

Ooooo, I like that! But, in reality, I have far too much empathy for such cruel and unusual punishment. (And there's not enough ice around here anyway.)

Instead, I propose rounding up all the empathy-less, putting them in solitary confinement with TVs and complete collections of The Sopranos and Da Ally G. Show on demand. Plus popcorn.

I'll even throw in House and Nip & Tuck.

'Cause that's just the kind of girl I am.