Empathy - Page 5 of 5

Art Elevates the Mind by Increasing Empathy, Critical Thinking and Tolerance

Study of school trips to a museum provides evidence that art can elevate the mind.

A new large-scale experiment on over 10,000 students finds that a one-hour tour of an art museum can increase empathy, tolerance and critical thinking skills.

The study took advantage of a new museum opening in the US state of Arkansas, which many schools applied to visit (Greene et al., 2014).

By carefully timetabling when they visited, the researchers were able to create an experiment on the effects of art on the students’ mind.

Each school was randomly assigned to visit the museum earlier, or delayed until later. Each school that visited earlier was demographically matched with a similar school that had to wait–this provided the control group.

The museum tour itself was pretty simple. It was one hour long and they viewed and talked about five paintings. The entire trip was around half a day.

After the early museum visits, all the students, including those that hadn’t been, were asked to write about a painting they hadn’t seen before to assess how they thought about art. They were also tested for historical empathy and tolerance.

The results showed that, compared with those who had not been to the museum, students who had visited:

Thought about art more critically.
Displayed greater empathy about how people lived in the past.
Expressed greater levels of tolerance towards people with different views.

The museum had clearly been a mind-expanding experience for the young people.

Interestingly, the improvements were larger when the students were from more deprived backgrounds.

Visiting the museum also made students more likely to want to visit art museums again in the future. This could create a cascading effect over their lifetime, continuing to boost critical thought, empathy and tolerance.

What is art for?

Field trips are often seen by teachers and students as purely for pleasure, rather than for educational purposes.

But the authors point out that museums are about more than that:

“We don’t just want our children to acquire work skills from their education; we also want them to develop into civilized people who appreciate the breadth of human accomplishments. The school field trip is an important tool for meeting this goal.” (Greene et al., 2014)

Image credit: Henry Bloomfield

Neuroscience Reveals The Deep Power of Human Empathy

Without empathy, human beings are lonely, disconnected creatures.

An old philosophical question asks: is there any such thing as a selfless act?

Cynics answer no, because any apparently selfless act is always tacitly showing off what ‘good’ people we are.

Even if no one else knows about the act, the good feeling you get yourself from helping someone else means a selfless act is never really entirely selfless.

But perhaps cynics will be impressed by recent neuroscientific studies which demonstrate in the living mind the enormous human capacity for empathy.

Holding hands

In a brand new experiment, participants were first put in an fMRI machine and shown a series of ‘X’s and ‘O’s on a screen (Beckes et al., 2013).

The ‘X’s indicated there was a 17% chance they would get a mild electric shock through the ankle, while the ‘O’s indicated they were safe (for the moment).

The scans of participants’ brains showed that when there was a chance they were about to receive a shock, the parts of the brain that are involved in threat response became more active. This was as expected.

The twist was that sometimes participants held hands with a close friend, and it was their friend that received the shock, and not themselves.

What the researchers then saw was that the activity in people’s brains was almost identical when their friend was about to receive the shock as when they themselves were about to receive it.

In comparison, there was relatively little activity in the threat response regions when they held a stranger’s hand.

One of the study’s authors, James Coan explained:

“The correlation between self and friend was remarkably similar. The finding shows the brain’s remarkable capacity to model self to others; that people close to us become a part of ourselves, and that is not just metaphor or poetry, it’s very real. Literally we are under threat when a friend is under threat. But not so when a stranger is under threat.”

Mere presence

So the brain scanner could ‘see’ people empathising with their friends, but can it see whether this empathy does any good?

That’s what was examined in a previous study with a similar procedure—except this time participants were husband and wife (Coan et al., 2006).

The question was: would it make any difference to the brains of people who were about to receive an electric shock whether or not they were holding their spouse’s hand?

Indeed it did. When people held their spouse’s hand, as opposed to that of a stranger, the threat response regions of the brain were significantly less active than otherwise.

And, the better the marital relationship, the greater the positive effect of holding hands with their partners.

Subsequent studies showed that the other person only needs to be in the room for the threat response regions to quieten.

Connected minds

We all know from personal experience how gut-wrenching it is to watch the suffering of someone we love. And we all know that, when we are suffering ourselves, it’s better to have someone around that we love.

But it’s fascinating to see these fundamental aspects of what makes us human occurring right there, deep in the living mind.

Image credit: Entrer dans le reve

Empathy Causes Facial Similarity Between Couples to Increase Over Time

Would you believe that people who live with each other for 25 years actually develop similar facial features?

Would you believe that people who live with each other for 25 years actually develop similar facial features? I don’t just mean that people tend to choose partners who resemble them, rather that over time together couple’s features actually converge. It’s weird, but there’s evidence for it from a singular study carried out by the noted psychologist Robert Zajonc and colleagues.

Here’s what they did.

Continue reading “Empathy Causes Facial Similarity Between Couples to Increase Over Time”

What is empathy?

Some of the most striking discoveries in psychology have come from patients with deficits of various kinds.

[Photo by messtiza]

Some of the most striking discoveries in psychology have come from patients with deficits of various kinds. Phineas Gage, one of the most famous patients in psychology, was thought to have suffered emotional blunting – along with personality changes – after a tamping rod was propelled through his frontal lobes. Less dramatically, but no less vitally, it seems highly probable that common psychological disorders have, at their heart, a problem processing emotions. Two examples are alexithymia and autism spectrum disorders, both of which seem to involve problems with empathising. But what is empathy?

Continue reading “What is empathy?”