The Age of Empathy (13 page)

The mother who “turns off” her pups’ aversive noise by taking care of their problem is showing other-oriented behavior for self-centered reasons. I call this
self-protective altruism;
that is, helping another so as to shield oneself from aversive emotions. Such behavior does benefit others, yet lacks true other-orientation. Is this perhaps how concern for others evolved? Did it start with self-protective helping? Did this gradually evolve into helping geared toward the other’s well-being? Libraries’ worth of books try to draw a sharp line between selfishness and altruism, but what if we’re facing an immense gray area? We can’t exactly call empathy “selfish,” because a perfectly selfish attitude would simply ignore someone else’s emotions. Yet it doesn’t seem appropriate either to call empathy “unselfish” if it is one’s own emotional state that prompts action. The selfish/unselfish divide may be a red herring. Why try to extract the self from the other, or the other from the self, if the merging of the two is the secret behind our cooperative nature?

An intriguing example is how monkeys reacted in the same experiment discussed earlier for rats. In the 1960s, American psychiatrists reported that rhesus monkeys refused to pull a chain that delivered food to themselves if it shocked their companion. The monkeys went much further than the rats, which interrupted their behavior only briefly. One monkey stopped responding for five days and another for twelve days after witnessing the effect of its behavior on a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain on others.

Again, this was probably self-protective altruism: a desire to avoid unpleasant sights and sounds. It’s just awful to watch others in pain, which is, of course, the whole point of empathy. Monkeys
are extremely sensitive to one another’s body language. This was shown in another experiment. One monkey watched a video screen that showed the face of another, who could hear a click sound that announced the arrival of electrical shocks for both. By deciphering the other’s reaction to the sound, the first monkey could quickly press a lever that turned off the shocks. Even though the monkeys were sitting in separate rooms, they were highly successful at staying pain free. Apparently, the monkey with the lever had no trouble reading the face of the one who could hear the warning. The monkey was better at reading the other’s expressions than the scientists who watched the same screen and concluded that “a monkey was a much more skilled interpreter of facial expression in another monkey than was man.”

Isn’t it horrible that such procedures are deemed necessary to prove the sensitivity of animals to one another? Can’t research on animal empathy be conducted without arousing our own empathy? I’m not going to defend these procedures, but it’s good to keep in mind how extremely little we know about animal empathy. Compared with the attention science has paid to negative emotions, such as fear and aggression, there has been a profound neglect of positive ones. It should be possible, however, to study empathy in a more benign way, as we do with humans. We could use mild stressors, for example, or reactions to spontaneous life events. After all, the daily life of primates is full of strains.

In my own research, I avoid causing pain or deprivation even though this leaves me with one obvious drawback: I never get to see what happens on the “inside” of my animals. Once, however, I saw a chance for an exception when radio transmitters became small enough to be implanted under the skin. This allowed measurement of a monkey’s heart rate. It was being done with pets, so why not primates? In the old days, scientists needed to put monkeys in a restraining chair or outfit them with a heavy backpack to get heart data, but we were able to do so with a freely moving rhesus monkey. Live radio signals were picked up by an antenna mounted next to a young student, Stephanie Preston, who sat in a tower overlooking an outdoor corral with monkeys.

We wanted to know how body contact affects the heart. I had just published my 1996 book,
Good Natured,
which had broached the controversial topic of animal empathy. How primates reduce stress was a big part of my argument, which is why we wanted to take a peek at their hearts.

In retrospect, I agree with one of my teachers, Robert Goy (the scientist who convinced me to move across the Atlantic), who warned me long ago: “Frans, stay away from the heart, because it’s a mess.” Obviously, he didn’t mean the metaphorical heart of love and affection—he meant that it’s almost impossible to make sense of heart rate. The heart reacts to everything: sex, aggression, fear, but also nonemotional activities such as jumping or running. Even if a monkey just sits up and scratches itself, its heart rate shoots up. How is one ever to figure out what’s going on? If the heart slows down following a fight, for example, is this because the monkey is at peace, or is it simply because it stopped running and is now catching its breath?

At least we could tell that the monkey with the transmitter knew her relationship network intimately. If she was quietly sitting in the shade and another monkey strolled by, her heart rate would remain steady provided the other was a member of her family or a low-ranking monkey. Her heart would start racing, however, if the other was of high rank. We couldn’t see much in her face or posture, but her heart revealed high anxiety. Rhesus monkeys live in the most hierarchical society I know, in which dominant individuals rarely hesitate to punish subordinates. They control them so completely that they sometimes even take food out of their mouths, literally—holding their heads still while reaching in. Our monkey’s heart showed the silent terror that is life in rhesus society.

Stress begs alleviation, which rhesus monkeys achieve through grooming. The relaxing effect of this activity wasn’t easy to prove, however, because for every time our monkey was being groomed we needed a perfect match, such as an almost identical situation in which she was
not
being groomed. The difference in heart rate could then be attributed to the grooming. We found indeed that grooming slows
down the heart, which was the first such demonstration for any animal in a naturalistic setting. It confirmed the widely held assumption that grooming is an enjoyable, calming activity that serves not only to remove lice and ticks, but also to eliminate stress and foster social ties. Drops in heart rate have also been found in horses being petted by humans, and conversely, in humans petting their pets. In fact, animal companions are so effective against stress that they are increasingly recommended for heart patients.

I’ll need to think of this the next time our cat, Sofie, wakes me up by tapping my face—ever so gently, but also ever so persistently—so she can slip under the covers.

In the winter, that is.

During our heart rate study, Stephanie must have caught the empathy bug. After she’d gone on to study elsewhere, she decided to read more widely on the topic. The empathy literature is completely human-centered, never mentioning animals, as if a capacity so visceral and pervasive and showing up so early in life, could be anything other than biological. Empathy is still often presented as a voluntary process, requiring role-taking and higher cognition, even language. Stephanie and I wanted to go over the existing data from a different angle.

When I visited her years later in Berkeley, California, Stephanie dragged two large cardboard boxes from the corner of her office and put them on the table. I saw more articles on empathy than I had ever dreamed existed, neatly organized by topic, including historical papers, such as those by Theodor Lipps. Evidently, our review project had been growing larger and larger. The focus was on how empathy works, especially how the brain connects the outside world with the inside. The sight of another person’s state awakens within us hidden memories of similar states that we’ve experienced. I don’t mean conscious memories, but an automatic reactivation of neural circuits. Seeing someone in pain activates pain circuits to the point that we
clench our jaws, close our eyes, and even yell “Aw!” if we see a child scrape its knee. Our behavior fits the other’s situation, because it has become ours.

The discovery of
mirror neurons
boosts this whole argument at the cellular level. In 1992, an Italian team at the University of Parma first reported that monkeys possess special brain cells that fire not only when the monkey itself reaches for an object, but also when it sees another do so. In a typical demonstration, a computer screen shows the firing of a cell as recorded by electrodes in a monkey’s brain. If the monkey takes a peanut from the experimenter’s hand, the neuron gives a brief signal burst that (through an amplifier) sounds like a machine gun. When, a little later, the experimenter picks up a peanut while being watched by the monkey, the very same cell fires again. This time, however, it responds to
someone else’s
action. What makes these neurons special is the lack of distinction between “monkey see” and “monkey do.” They erase the line between self and other, and offer a first hint of how the brain helps an organism mirror the emotions and behavior of those around it. It’s like a Pink Floyd song of long ago that draws attention to eye contact between people: “I am you and what I see is me.” The discovery of mirror neurons has been hailed as being of the same monumental importance to psychology as the discovery of DNA has been for biology. That this key discovery took place in monkeys has obviously not helped claims of empathy as uniquely human.

The automaticity of empathy has become a point of debate, though. For the same reason that Dimberg ran into resistance showing unconscious facial mimicry, some scientists profoundly dislike any talk of automaticity, which they equate with “beyond control.” We can’t afford automatic reactions, they say. If we were to empathize with everybody in sight, we’d be in constant emotional turmoil. I’d be the last to disagree, but is this really what “automaticity” means? It refers to the speed and subconscious nature of a process, not the inability to override it. My breathing, for instance, is fully automated, yet I remain in charge. This very minute, I can decide to stop breathing until I see purple.

The ability to control and inhibit responses is not our only weapon against rampant empathy. We also regulate it at its very source by means of selective attention and identification. If you don’t want to be aroused by an image, just don’t look at it. And even though we identify easily with others, we don’t do so automatically. For example, we have a hard time identifying with people whom we see as different or belonging to another group. We find it easier to identify with those like us—with the same cultural background, ethnic features, age, gender, job, and so on—and even more so with those close to us, such as spouses, children, and friends. Identification is such a basic precondition for empathy that even mice show pain contagion only with their cage mates.

If identification with others opens the door for empathy, the absence of identification closes that door. Since wild chimps occasionally kill one another, they must be capable of shutting the door completely. This takes place mostly when groups compete, which is of course also the situation in which humans run lowest on empathy. In one African reserve, a community of chimpanzees split into a northern and southern faction, eventually becoming two separate communities. These chimpanzees had played and groomed together, reconciled after squabbles, shared meat, and lived in harmony. But the factions began to fight over territory nonetheless. Shocked researchers watched as former friends literally drank one another’s blood. Not even the oldest community members were exempt: An extremely frail-looking male was pummeled for twenty minutes, dragged about, and left for dead. This is why victims of chimpanzee warfare have been called “dechimpized,” suggesting the same suppression of identification that marks dehumanization.

Empathy can also be nipped in the bud. Doctors and nurses in emergency rooms, for example, just cannot afford to be constantly in an empathic mode. They have to put a lid on it. There is a grisly side to this, such as the stories of Nazis who were quite sentimental about their own families, taking care of them as any normal father would, yet at the same time they had lamp shades made out of human skin and they exterminated masses of innocents. Or take Maximilien
Robespierre, the French revolutionary leader who rarely thought twice about sending “enemies of the Republic” to the guillotine—some of them former friends—yet loved to play with his dog, Brount, his sole companion on long walks. People who are perfectly attached and sensitive in one context may act like monsters in another.

But even if empathy is hardly inevitable, it is automatically aroused with those who have been “preapproved” based on similarity or closeness. With them, we can’t help resonating. We often focus on the face, but obviously the entire body expresses emotions. As shown by Belgian neuroscientist Beatrice de Gelder, we react as rapidly to body postures as we do to facial expressions. We effortlessly read bodies, such as a fearful pose (ready to run, hands warding off danger) or an angry one (chest out, taking a step forward). When scientists played a trick on their subjects by pasting an angry face on the picture of a fearful body and a fearful face on an angry body, the incongruity slowed down reaction time. But the body posture won out when subjects were asked to judge the emotional state of the depicted person. Apparently, we trust postures more than facial expressions.