Category: Empathy

Perspective taking helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

We can spontaneously form images of the world from another person’s perspective, research finds.

This allows us to virtually see things from another person’s perspective in an instant.

The new study shows our brains can change our perspective without doing any ‘mental rotation’.

Mental rotation is our ability to manipulate objects in our minds and, cognitively, it is hard work.

Ms Eleanor Ward, the study’s first author, explains that sometimes we don’t need to do this mental rotation:

“Imagine you’re in a car and you see a pedestrian crossing the road, and a bus is travelling at speed towards the crossing.

Suddenly you realize the driver hasn’t seen the pedestrian and could hit them, so you beep your horn.

How did you make this split-second decision?

Our study suggests you automatically put yourself in the bus driver’s shoes and saw the scene through their eyes.”

The results come from a study in which 203 people had to judge whether letters had been rotated or not.

Below is an example:

All the Rs on the top row are the ‘same’ R rotated.

The Rs on the bottom row are all mirror-image Rs and are also the ‘same’ R.

The Rs on the top row are not the same as the Rs on the bottom row.

The results of the study showed that people were much quicker to spot whether the letters matched when they took someone else’s perspective.

In other words, they didn’t have to mentally rotate the images — they ‘saw’ the image through the other person’s eyes.

Dr Patric Bach, study co-author, said:

“Perspective taking is an important part of social cognition.

It helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

It is important for many everyday activities in which we need interact with other people.

It helps us to empathize with them, or to work out what they are thinking.

Our study provides new insights that people can do this because they very quickly and spontaneously form a mental image of how the world looks to another person.

As soon as we have such a mental image, it is easy to put ourselves in the other person’s place and to predict how they will behave.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Ward et al., 2019).

The pill is taken by 100 million people around the world.

The oral contraceptive pill, which is taken by roughly one-third of US women, damages the ability to empathise, research finds.

Women taking the pill do 10% worse at reading facial emotions than women who are not taking it.

While the pill has no effect on reading simple emotions, it reduces the ability to read complex emotions, the scientists have found.

Dr Alexander Lischke, study co-author, said:

“More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but remarkably little is known about their effects on emotion, cognition and behavior.

“However, coincidental findings suggest that oral contraceptives impair the ability to recognize emotional expressions of others, which could affect the way users initiate and maintain intimate relationships.”

For the study, 42 users of the contraceptive pill were compared with 53 non-users.

All were given a special emotional recognition task.

The test was designed to pick up subtle differences, Dr Lischke explained:

“If oral contraceptives caused dramatic impairments in women’s emotion recognition, we would have probably noticed this in our everyday interactions with our partners.

We assumed that these impairments would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test women’s emotion recognition with a task that was sensitive enough to detect such impairments.

We, thus, used a very challenging emotion recognition task that required the recognition of complex emotional expressions from the eye region of faces.”

The results showed that the oral contraceptive had no effect on reading simple facial expressions.

However, on more complex facial expression, women taking the pill did 10% worse.

Dr Lischke said:

“Whereas the groups were equally good at recognizing easy expressions, the OCP users were less likely to correctly identify difficult expressions.”

Dr Lischke explained why the results makes sense:

“Cyclic variations of estrogen and progesterone levels are known to affect women’s emotion recognition, and influence activity and connections in associated brain regions.

Since oral contraceptives work by suppressing estrogen and progesterone levels, it makes sense that oral contraceptives also affect women’s emotion recognition.

However, the exact mechanism underlying oral contraceptive induced changes in women’s emotion recognition remains to be elucidated.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience (Pahnke et al., 2019).