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.

Left is More

If you're in a boring work meeting, a never-ending college seminar, or just toughing it out at the old in-laws, you might want to seat yourself on your boss's/professor's/relative's left.

Researchers studying right hemisphere activation and empathy have discovered that we tend to interpret faces as looking happier if they are portside as we face them.

Kinda counterintuitive, I think. I mean the term "sinister" and all that.

But maybe this brain glitch -- of being fooled by the appearance of those on our left and trusting them too much -- contributed to the left side's bad rep.

Basinette of Evil

Babies, babies everywhere!

Big pregnant ladies about to burst!

'Tis the season of giving birth. Glorious signs of new life abound.

A good friend is expecting her bundle of...joy...any second now. 

Got me thinking about the whole nature vs. nurture debate.

I mean, what are we, as mothers, to think if, after busting our butts and doing everything "right," the proverbial bad seed comes out of us?

It's a river in Egypt, for most of us, I expect.

But parents of horrors needn't be in denial or fret and feel guilty (at least the ones who didn't provide the meanie genes!): More and more evidence shows that, to a large degree, bad guys and gals are, well, born bad as babies.

What's more, our harsh or "bad" parenting may just be a result of these annoyingly naughty and haughty kids' behavior and not a cause of it.

As reported in Crime Times, genetic epidemiologist Henrik Larsson and colleagues have found that anti-social and so-called callous-unemotional traits (lack of empathy) are highly heritable (his previous work showed this also, as have many others'). The (poor) parents of these bad-behaving kids do tend to punish them more if they also have antisocial behaviors to go along with callousness (sins of commission plus sins of omission), says the study. But this harsh discipline is child-driven.  

We're talking setting the table on fire, not forgetting to set the table, n'est pas?

So, what about some kind of genetic testing to avoid the Child from Hell?

You read my mind.

Another recent study has identified genotype GG (of the C-1291G polymorphism in the alpha 2A adrenoreceptor gene, or something like that) to be connected with low morality, low orderliness and depression in adolescents.

That's right, your nasty teen who never comes out of her messy room is a random victim of her genes. 

Get her a "GG" t-shirt, bribe her way into community college and call it a day.

Did we mention the same genotype makes her crave sweet foods, become overweight and smoke cigarettes?

We're off the hook.

The Brain as Colonizing (Fashion) Icon

Happy Father's Day.

Did we mention that men are thought to be less empathic than women?

Yeah, we thought we did.

After a recent, fruitless online search for black, patent leather mid-heeled sandals (<3"), I at least found something great (but, alas, unwearable), on the MIT Press website: a book about gender -- with "sex" in the title to boot, uh sandal.

In Sexualized Brains, outta Frankfurt, a bunch of freulines, fraus and dudes too will examine gender and emotion. It's an anthology. The pub date is Nov. 30.

"Scholars from a range of disciplines reflect on the epistemological claims that emotional intelligence (EI) can be located in the brain and that it is legitimate to attribute distinct kinds of emotions to the biological sexes."

Bring it on! (Must. look. up. epistemological.)

"The brain, as an icon, has colonized the humanities and social sciences,-"

O.K.

"leading to the emergence of such new disciplines as neurosociology, neuroeconomics, and neurophilosophy."

Yup.

"Neuroscience and psychology now have the power to transform not only the practice of science but also contemporary society."

Well, I'd always liked to think that if we understood the origins and properties of empathy better, the hows and whys of our good -- and not so good -- treatment of other human beings, the world as we experience it might be a better place. . .

Now, about those shoes . . .

Blood, Sweat and, Yes, Plenty of Tears

The autonomic nervous system is what keeps us keeping on, so I gather. 

It controls the pesky little details of living so we, mercifully, don't have to think about them every second of every day, little things like breathing, our heartbeat, digestion, sweating, salivating, dilation of pupils, peeing -- you get the idea.

It's lowbrow stuff, but evidence is showing that it's connected to one of our highest human functions: empathy.

Disrupt the autonomic system so folks can't perform simple functions and, so finds a new British study, scores on the BEES suffer and the brotherhood of man goes out the window.

What's BEES? No, not the insects, though we like them too.

BEES is Mehrabian's Balanced Emotional Empathy Test.

A person's BEES score supposedly relates negatively with their propensity for interpersonal violence.

Sample test statement: "Unhappy movie endings haunt me for hours afterward."

(I'm still getting over my anger at the "editors" of Speed Racer for making it so long -- does that count?)

Mehrabian (the test's inventor, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA) and colleagues have found that high empathy people, ie. those who score well on the BEES, are, among other things, more likely to:

"• have higher skin conductance and heart rate to emotional stimuli

  

• be emotional, as evidenced by their tendency to weep [weep, wow, not just cry]

• have had parents who spent more time with them, displayed more affection, and were more explicit verbally about their feelings. . ."

Oh, Mehrabian also finds that people who score well on BEES tend to be in better relationships, wealthier, more successful career-wise and happier . . . when they're not weeping, we guess.

Smart Moves

I posted about recent research that indicated people tend to base moral decisions on emotions rather than logic. 

Well, maybe that was a bit of a generalization.

A new study says that smart people (and by that they mean those with good working memories -- guess I'm out), "are capable of voluntarily suppressing these emotional reactions" and using cold logic in their deliberations to a greater degree than we little people.

The genesis of the evil genius?

This comes from a study in Psychological Science.

Makes sense, systemizing minds and all that.

Could you push the overweight guy off the bridge? Or are you too dumb?

Where the Giving is Easy (and Hard)

You might find things to do in Denver when you're dead, but living there is rough.

Charity Navigator ranks the country's most charitable places. Colorado's Mile-High city was lowest, spending the least on social programs.

Miami is a charity hot spot, coming in at #1.

San Diego, Houston, Pittsburgh and Boston round out the top five most giving towns.

New York gets special mention for paying their CEOs the most. (Hello, can you say "non-profit.")

Other locales in which you don't want to find yourself down and out: Portland (uh, too laid-back to give?), Charlotte (whither the hospitality?), Baltimore, Indianapolis and surprise, the original tough town, Detroit.

Hot Head? No, Cold Blood

Who are the really bad kids?

The out of control ones with hair-trigger tempers, who bounce off the walls despite the Ritalin in their systems, getting into fights and taking everything the wrong way?

These kids tend to come from dysfunctional families. 

Or the cool customers who orchestrate their own brand of mahem?

According to a piece in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry, it would seem we should keep our eyes on the latter.

These are the teens with so-called "callous-unemotional traits, ie. lack of empathy, lack of guilt, [and] callous use of others for personal gain."

Their behavior (unlike the situational trouble-maker) is "relatively stable and is associated with a more severe and persistent pattern of antisocial behavior, including instrumental aggression," meaning they start it.  (The AHDH kids' aggression tends to be reactive.)

What's more, this cold-as-ice trait seems to be highly heritable.

While fMRI imaging shows that the hot-headed kids have greater amygdala response to angry faces than normal (as a result of abuse?) and high reactivity to others' distress, psychopathic youths have normal responses to angry faces but abnormally ho-hum reactions to fearful ones.

So you know that quiet, well-behaved kid in the back of the class?

He's got a plan.

Thirst for Power

That last post got me thinking about voles and vasopressin, cousin of oxytocin. 

Anecdotal, of course, but the least empathic person I know is constantly drinking: water, soda, juice, sports drinks, you name it. This guy chugs 'em down like there's no tomorrow.

Hmmm.

What if he's missing something? Like receptors for the above-mentioned anti-diuretic hormone, vasopressin. Vasopressin compensates in times of low fluid intake by conserving water in our bodies. 

What if, in this unfeeling and uber-quaffing guy, something is damaged in the hypothalamus where vasopressin is synthesized? Or the pituitary gland where it's secreted? 

Poor sociopath is dying of thirst!

Well, it turns out, a growing body of recent research is showing that --  just like in voles -- a gene called AVPR1a, which controls the placement of vasopressin receptors in the brain, is shorter in non-empathic types.

Bingo! Beware of the thirsties.

In a recent Israeli study involving an allocation experiment called the Dictator Game, those with shorter AVPR1a's were much more stingy with the shekels, ie. less altruistic. 

(There's an article about it at Free Republic.)

But wait, there's more: Several studies have made a vasopressin-autism connection and a new NIH brain imaging study shows AVPR1a variation predicts facial emotion recognition ability (can you say empathy?) in "normal" people.

I know Hitler really liked mineral water.

The Right Stuff

USAToday's got a round-up of last week's round table at the World Science Festival on the "Science of Morality." 

Token religious-guy-about-town Jon Meecham was the moderator and totally in over (or under, at least spiritually) his head with these logical scientists. 

He didn't like the chicken love experiment. 

Then again, neither did I. Proof that morality is hard-wired and not religious or culturally-based!

More highlights:

-Your childhood ability to wait for cookies predicts your marital stability.

-Someone wondered if it was immoral for scientifically-identified amoral types not to take niceness drugs.

-Male voles with more vasopressin receptors are monogomous. The other kind seriously play around.

Chicken Love or When It Comes to Morality We Wing It

A few posts back I brought up that Ugandan orphanage experiment indicating that moral decision-making was based on a gut feeling that certain things were fair or weren't fair. Seems we have a rather predictable, built-in sense of justice that is, well, a wee bit impractical and just a little irrational. But hey, we're humans, so sue us.

More fuel for the fairness fire comes in this monumental (or at least really, really long) piece in the UK's The Prospect magazine with the enticing title: "The emerging moral psychology." 

The article argues that when it comes to deciding what is right and wrong, unconscious instinct trumps rational parsing:

"Our moral intuitions...derive not from our power of reasoning, but from an evolved and innate suite of  'affective' systems that generate 'hot' flashes of feelings when we are confronted with a putative moral violation."

Now here's the part about chicken love:

"[E]xperimental studies [by psychologist Jonathan Haight] give cause to question the primacy of rationality in morality. In one experiment...a son who promised his mother, while she was on her deathbed, that he would visit her grave every week, and then reneged on his commitment because he was busy. Another scenario told of a man buying a dead chicken at the supermarket and then having sex with it before cooking and eating it. These weird but essentially harmless acts were, nonetheless, by and large deemed to be immoral."

(This is a UK publication.)

The article also discusses the classic Trolley and Footbridge Problems, moral experiments that show people are unwilling to save lives if it means having to physically push someone off a footbridge, but have no problem flipping a switch to make the same sacrifice kill. 

These dilemmas are processed in different, warring parts of the mind. The first scenario (flip the switch) gets treated almost like a math problem cerebrally; the second (bridge push) does too -- but also sets off the center of emotional angst.

Meanwhile, some brain damaged sorts, according to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, push the man off the bridge no problem, pass the peanuts.

The piece compares Noam Chomsky's idea of an innate grammar with an innate morality -- with similar considerations for cultural differences. 

As to the question of why some "normal" people opt to push the guy off the bridge, the article suggests it could be the way their brains' affective and rational parts are set up, environment, culture, or how much coffee they drink.

I made up that last part.