Tag: empathy

Ravens appear to share negative emotions with one another, but not positive ones.

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by Carolyn Wilke

Here’s a downer: Pessimism seems contagious among ravens. But positivity? Not so much.

When ravens saw fellow birds’ responses to a disliked food, but not the food itself, their interest in their own food options waned, researchers report May 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study suggests that the birds pick up on and even share negative emotions, the researchers say.

Ravens are “very good problem solvers … but this paper’s really highlighting their social intelligence as well,” says Andrew Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, N.Y., who was not involved in the study. The work paints a richer picture of how the birds’ brains work, he says.

Known for their smarts, ravens act in ways that suggest a capacity for empathy, such as by appearing to console a distressed comrade. Thomas Bugnyar, a cognitive ethologist at the University of Vienna, and his colleagues wanted to look into one building block of empathy — whether animals share emotions. To be able to feel for others, an animal needs to be able to feel like others, he says.

But sizing up an animal’s mood is tricky. Scientists generally rely on behavioral or physiological cues to clue into a creature’s emotional state. More challenging is assessing how one animal’s mood might influence another’s: Similar actions appearing to stem from kindred emotions may just be mimicry.

To tune into the moods of ravens, the researchers set up experiments to watch whether the birds reacted positively or negatively to a neutral stimulus. This so-called cognitive bias test, used on a wide variety of animals from bees to pigs, “is basically … asking how you would judge a glass — if it’s half full or half empty,” Bugnyar says.

Eight ravens, tested in pairs, were first given a choice between a box containing a cheese treat and an empty box. Once the birds learned the location of each option, they were given a third box in a new spot that hadn’t been used in the training. Whether a bird acted as if the box was a trick or a treat indicated a cognitive bias, interpreted as pessimism or optimism.

Next, one bird in a pair was offered both unappealing raw carrots and tastier dried dog food before one was taken away. Birds left with the treat moved their heads and bodies as they studied it, while those getting the carrots appeared crankier, spending less time attending to the offering and sometimes kicking or scratching elsewhere. The other bird in the pair watched these reactions from a separate compartment, without being able to see the researcher or which food the bird received.

Both birds then performed the cognitive bias test again. This time, observer birds that had seen their partner appearing perky showed on average the same level of interest in their own ambiguous box as they had previously. But those that had seen their partner reacting negatively typically took more than twice as long to approach the ambiguous box. This dip in the observer birds’ interest was somehow influenced by seeing their partner’s apparent disappointment, the researchers say.

Each bird was tested four times, half of the time with the undesired food and the other half with the treat.

It’s interesting that while the negative responses seemed contagious, the positive ones did not, Gallup says. This may be because negative reactions are easier to provoke or observe, or because animals tune in more to negative information in their environment, the authors say.

The ravens study marks one of the first times the cognitive bias test has been used to examine emotions and social behavior, says coauthor Jessie Adriaense, a comparative psychologist at the University of Vienna. “Emotions are extremely important drivers of our behavior, but how they actually drive animals … is still an open question,” she says. To truly understand what motivates behavior in animals, scientists need to delve deeper into their emotions, she says.

Bad moods could be contagious among ravens

Empathy in rats shown with discovery of mirror neurons

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Summary: Study reports the anterior cingulate cortex of rats contain mirror neurons that respond to pain experienced by and observations of others.

Source: KNAW

Why is it that we can get sad when we see someone else crying? Why is it that we wince when a friend cuts his finger? Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have found that the rat brain activates the same cells when they observe the pain of others as when they experience pain themselves. In addition, without the activity of these “mirror neurons”, the animals no longer share the pain of others. As many psychiatric disorders are characterized by a lack of empathy, finding the neural basis for sharing the emotions of others, and being able to modify how much an animal shares the emotions of others, is an exciting step towards understanding empathy and these disorders. The findings will be published in the leading journal Current Biology on April 11th.

Human neuroimaging studies have shown that when we experience pain ourselves, we activate a region of the brain called “the cingulate cortex”. When we see someone else in pain, we reactivate the same region.

On the basis of this, researchers formulated two speculations: (a) the cingulate cortex contains mirror neurons, i.e. neurons that trigger our own feeling of pain and are reactivated when we see the pain of others, and (b) that this is the reason why we wince and feel pain while seeing the pain of others. This intuitively plausible theory of empathy, however, remained untested because it is not possible to record the activity of individual brain cells in humans. Moreover, it is not possible to modulate brain activity in the human cingulate cortex to determine whether this brain region is responsible for empathy.

Rat shares emotions of others

For the first time, researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience were able to test the theory of empathy in rats. They had rats look at other rats receiving an unpleasant stimulus (mild shock), and measured what happened with the brain and behavior of the observing rat. When rats are scared, their natural reaction is to freeze to avoid being detected by predators. The researchers found that the rat also froze when it observed another rat exposed to an unpleasant situation.

This finding suggests that the observing rat shared the emotion of the other rat. Corresponding recordings of the cingulate cortex, the very region thought to underpin empathy in humans, showed that the observing rats activated the very neurons in the cingulate cortex that also became active when the rat experienced pain himself in a separate experiment. Subsequently, the researchers suppressed the activity of cells in the cingulate cortex through the injection of a drug. They found that observing rats no longer froze without activity in this brain region.

Same region in rats and humans

This study shows that the brain makes us share the pain of others by activating the same cells that trigger our own pain. So far, this had never been shown for emotions – so-called mirror neurons had only been found in the motor system. In addition, this form of pain empathy can be suppressed by modifying activity in the cingulate cortex.

“What is most amazing”, says Prof. Christian Keysers, the lead author of the study, “is that this all happens in exactly the same brain region in rats as in humans. We had already found in humans, that brain activity of the cingulate cortex increases when we observe the pain of others unless we are talking about psychopathic criminals, who show a remarkable reduction of this activity.” The study thus sheds some light on these mysterious psychopathological disorders. “It also shows us that empathy, the ability to feel with the emotions of others, is deeply rooted in our evolution. We share the fundamental mechanisms of empathy with animals like rats. Rats had so far not always enjoyed the highest moral reputation. So next time, you are tempted to call someone “a rat”, it might be taken as a compliment…”

I feel you: Emotional mirror neurons found in the rat

Catching someone’s yawn is linked to empathy, and psychopaths are often immune

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To determine whether someone is a psychopath, they have to score highly on tests like the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, answering questions about superficial charm, impulsive behaviour, and pathological lies.

But there could be a simpler test: yawning.

It’s hard not to yawn when someone else does, because yawning is so contagious. Even dogs can catch them. But according to a study from 2015, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, psychopaths aren’t so susceptible.

The researchers from Baylor University recruited 135 students and measured their personalities for psychopathic traits. They then subjected them to a contagious yawning experiment.

Those who scored highly on the psychopathic scale were much less likely to catch a yawn.

In previous research, yawning has been linked to empathy. For example, in one study, children with autism were less likely to catch yawns, possibly because they find it harder to read other people. Babies don’t catch yawns either, and won’t until they are at least 4 years old, when they have more emotional awareness.

The researchers suggest empathy could be at play in their experiment, as psychopaths tend to lack it.

This isn’t to say if someone doesn’t yawn when you do they must be a psychopath. It’s just an intriguing symptom of the people who struggle to connect with other people’s emotions.

Also, people can catch yawns to different degrees. For some, it’s just reading the word “yawn” is enough to set them off. So if you yawned the whole way through reading this article, you might be able to conclude that your empathy is pretty high.

https://www.thisisinsider.com/psychopaths-dont-catch-yawns-2018-10

Listening to your heartbeat helps you understand the emotions of others

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By Helen Thomson

You really should listen to your heart. People who are more aware of their heartbeat are better at perceiving the emotions of people around them. What’s more, improving this ability might help some people with autism and schizophrenia.

Can you feel your heart beating softly against your breastbone? Or perhaps you feel hungry, thirsty or in pain? If so, you are perceiving your internal state – a process called interoception. It’s thought that to generate emotions, we first need to interpret our body’s internal state of affairs.

So if we see a rabid dog, we only feel fear once we recognise an increase in our heart rate or perceive a sweaty palm. Some people with conditions that involve having poor interoceptive abilities also have trouble interpreting their emotions.

But researchers have also speculated that interoception is important for understanding what other people are thinking, and even guessing what they think a third person might be thinking – known as theory of mind. The idea is that if we have trouble distinguishing our own emotions, we might also find it hard to interpret the emotions – and corresponding mental states – of others.

Empathy test

To investigate, Geoff Bird, now at the University of Oxford, and his team asked 72 volunteers to count their heartbeats, but without using their fingers to take their pulse – a measure of interoception.

The participants then watched videos of various social interactions. After each clip, they were asked multiple-choice questions that tested their ability to infer the characters’ mental states.

For instance, one scene showed a man called Tom trying to flirt with a girl called Gemma, who was clearly interested in a second, shyer man, Barry.

Some questions required the participants to understand the emotions of a certain character – for instance, “Is Gemma feeling annoyed?” Participants who were better at counting their own heartbeat performed better on such questions. “They were more empathetic,” says Bird.

But there was no link between interoceptive abilities and accuracy on theory of mind questions that didn’t involve any emotions, such as “What does Barry think Gemma thinks Tom’s intentions are?” This suggests that our ability to interpret signals from our own body only helps us understand the thoughts of others when emotion is a factor.

Heartbeat training

“Studies like these show nicely that interoceptive abilities are engaged in different ways for different tasks,” says Anil Seth at the University of Sussex in Brighton. “But these relations are likely to be highly complex, so it would be interesting to look also at other dimensions of interoception, like breathing.”

Bird says that interoceptive difficulties probably play a role in a range of symptoms experienced by some people with conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. For instance, some people with autism find loud noises and bright lights upsetting. These things are linked to interoception, making our hearts beat faster and raising our level of arousal.

“It’s purely theoretical for now,” says Bird, “but if you’re not good at distinguishing the internal signals that arise from loud noises and bright lights from others that are related to pain, say, then maybe those [innocuous] signals could be interpreted as painful.”

“It’s not yet been shown whether training your interoception also improves your empathy, but it’s an experiment we’d like to try,” adds Bird. One way to do this is to get people to listen to a tone that beats in time with their heart and gets quieter over time. There’s also some evidence that looking in a mirror can improve interoception.

We don’t know yet what effect such training might have on our ability to discriminate between our own emotions and those of other people. “Could training better interoceptive awareness make it more difficult for people to disentangle their own feelings from those of others?” asks Lara Maister at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Journal reference: Cortex, DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.02.010

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2129367-listening-to-your-heartbeat-helps-you-read-other-peoples-minds/

Tylenol reduces empathy

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When you take acetaminophen to reduce your pain, you may also be decreasing your empathy for both the physical and social aches that other people experience, a new study suggests.

Researchers at The Ohio State University found, for example, that when participants who took acetaminophen learned about the misfortunes of others, they thought these individuals experienced less pain and suffering,when compared to those who took no painkiller.

“These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen,” said Dominik Mischkowski, co-author of the study and a former Ph.D. student at Ohio State, now at the National Institutes of Health.

“Acetaminophen can reduce empathy as well as serve as a painkiller.”

Mischkowski conducted the study with Baldwin Way, who is an assistant professor of psychology and member of the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research; and Jennifer Crocker, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology and professor of psychology at Ohio State. Their results were published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Acetaminophen — the main ingredient in the painkiller Tylenol — is the most common drug ingredient in the United States, found in more than 600 medicines, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a trade group.

Each week about 23 percent of American adults (about 52 million people) use a medicine containing acetaminophen, the CHPA reports.

In an earlier study, Way and other colleagues found that acetaminophen also blunts positive emotions like joy.

Taken together, the two studies suggest there’s a lot we need to learn about one of the most popular over-the-counter drugs in the United States.

“We don’t know why acetaminophen is having these effects, but it is concerning,” said Way, the senior author of the study.

“Empathy is important. If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse’s feelings.”

The researchers conducted two experiments, the first involving 80 college students. At the beginning, half the students drank a liquid containing 1,000 mg of acetaminophen, while the other half drank a placebo solution that contained no drug. The students didn’t know which group they were in.

After waiting one hour for the drug to take effect, the participants read eight short scenarios in which someone suffered some sort of pain. For example, one scenario was about a person who suffered a knife cut that went down to the bone and another was about a person experiencing the death of his father.

Participants rated the pain each person in the scenarios experienced from 1 (no pain at all) to 5 (worst possible pain). They also rated how much the protagonists in the scenarios felt hurt, wounded and pained.

Overall, the participants who took acetaminophen rated the pain of the people in the scenarios to be less severe than did those who took the placebo.

A second experiment involved 114 college students. As in the first experiment, half took acetaminophen and half took the placebo.

In one part of the experiment, the participants received four two-second blasts of white noise that ranged from 75 to 105 decibels. They then rated the noise blasts on a scale of 1 (not unpleasant at all) to 10 (extremely unpleasant).

They were then asked to imagine how much pain the same noise blasts would cause in another anonymous study participant.

Results showed that, when compared to those who took the placebo, participants who took acetaminophen rated the noise blasts as less unpleasant for themselves — and also thought they would be less unpleasant for others.

“Acetaminophen reduced the pain they felt, but it also reduced their empathy for others who were experiencing the same noise blasts,” Mischkowski said.

In another part of the experiment, participants met and socialized with each other briefly. Each participant then watched, alone, an online game that purportedly involved three of the people they just met. (The other participants weren’t actually involved).

In the “game,” two of the people the participants had met excluded the third person from the activity.

Participants were then asked to rate how much pain and hurt feelings the students in the game felt, including the one who was excluded.

Results showed that people who took acetaminophen rated the pain and hurt feelings of the excluded student as being not as severe as did the participants who took the placebo.

“In this case, the participants had the chance to empathize with the suffering of someone who they thought was going through a socially painful experience,” Way said.

“Still, those who took acetaminophen showed a reduction in empathy. They weren’t as concerned about the rejected person’s hurt feelings.”

While these results had not been seen before, they make sense in the light of previous research, Way said.

A 2004 study scanned the brains of people as they were experiencing pain and while they were imagining other people feeling the same pain. Those results showed that the same part of the brain was activated in both cases.

“In light of those results, it is understandable why using Tylenol to reduce your pain may also reduce your ability to feel other people’s pain as well,” he said.

The researchers are continuing to study how acetaminophen may affect people’s emotions and behavior, Way said. They are also beginning to study another common pain reliever — ibuprofen — to see if it has similar results.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160510084257.htm

The human brain is particularly vulnerable to trauma at two distinct ages

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Our brain’s ability to process information and adapt effectively is dependent on a number of factors, including genes, nutrition, and life experiences. These life experiences wield particular influence over the brain during a few sensitive periods when our most important muscle is most likely to undergo physical, chemical, and functional remodeling.

According to Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at MIT, your “terrible twos” and those turbulent teen years are when the brain’s wiring is most malleable. As a result, traumatic experiences that occur during these time periods can alter brain activity and ultimately change gene expressions—sometimes for good.

Throughout the first two years of life, the brain develops at a rapid pace. However, around the second year, something important happens—babies begin to speak.

“We start to understand speech first, then we start to articulate speech ourselves and that’s a really complex thing that goes on in the brain,” Swart, who conducts ongoing research on the brain and how it affects how we become leaders, told Quartz. “Additionally, children start to walk—so from a physical point of view, that’s also a huge achievement for the brain.

Learning and understanding a new language forces your brain to work in new ways, connecting neurons and forming new pathways. This is a mentally taxing process, which is why learning a new language or musical instrument often feels exhausting.

With so many important changes happening to the brain in such a short period of time, physical or emotional trauma can cause potentially momentous interruptions to neurological development. Even though you won’t have any memories of the interruptions (most people can’t remember much before age five), any kind of traumatic event—whether it’s abuse, neglect, ill health, or separation from your loved ones—can lead to lasting behavioral and cognitive deficits later in life, warns Swart.

To make her point, Swart points to numerous studies on orphans in Romania during the 1980s and 1990s. After the nation’s communist regime collapsed, an economic decline swept throughout the region and 100,000 children found themselves in harsh, overcrowded government institutions.

“[The children] were perfectly well fed, clothed, washed, but for several reasons—one being that people didn’t want to spread germs—they were never cuddled or played with,” explains Swart. “There was a lot of evidence that these children grew up with some mental health problems and difficulty holding down jobs and staying in relationships.”

Swart continues: “When brain scanning became possible, they scanned the brains of these children who had grown up into adults and showed that they had issues in the limbic system, the part of the brain [that controls basic emotions].”

In short, your ability to maintain proper social skills and develop a sense of empathy is largely dependent on the physical affection, eye contact, and playtime of those early years. Even something as simple as observing facial expressions and understanding what those expressions mean is tied to your wellbeing as a toddler.

The research also found that the brains of the Romanian orphans had lower observable brain activity and were physically smaller than average. As a result, researchers concluded that children adopted into loving homes by age two have a much better chance of recovering from severe emotional trauma or disturbances.

The teenage years

By the time you hit your teenage years, the brain has typically reached its adult weight of about three pounds. Around this same time, the brain is starting to eliminate, or “prune” fragile connections and unused neural pathways. The process is similar to how one would prune a garden—cutting back the deadwood allows other plants to thrive.

During this period, the brain’s frontal lobes, especially the prefrontal cortex, experience increased activity and, for the first time, the brain is capable of comparing and analyzing several complex concepts at once. Similar to a baby learning how to speak, this period in an adolescent’s life is marked by a need for increasingly advanced communication skills and emotional maturity.

“At that age, they’re starting to become more understanding of social relationships and politics. It’s really sophisticated,” Swart noted. All of this brain activity is also a major reason why teenagers need so much sleep.

Swart’s research dovetails with the efforts of many other scientists who have spent decades attempting to understand how the brain develops, and when. The advent of MRIs and other brain-scanning technology has helped speed along this research, but scientists are still working to figure out what exactly the different parts of the brain do.

What is becoming more certain, however, is the importance of stability and safety in human development, and that such stability is tied to cognitive function. At any point in time, a single major interruption has the ability to throw off the intricate workings of our brain. We may not really understand how these events affect our lives until much later.

http://qz.com/470751/your-brain-is-particularly-vulnerable-to-trauma-at-two-distinct-ages/