'Why Should We Care?'—What to Do About Declining Student Empathy - Commentary By Paul Anderson and Sara Konrath Picture a college student appealing for a higher grade in his professor's office. The student admits to a mixed performance during the semester, but he still doesn't understand why the professor gave him such a low grade. "Can't my worst grades just be dropped, including those zeros on the missed quizzes?" "But," the professor counters, "think of the students who worked hard all semester to read, take notes, and study, and who sacrificed time from other important activities to earn good grades. The student may agree that he doesn't want to be unfair, but he remains convinced that he deserves a higher grade. Many who teach experience versions of this conversation regularly and attempt to reason with wheedling students using arguments that rely on a principle of basic fairness. Imaginatively taking on another person's thoughts and identifying with their emotions are two habits at the core of empathy.
Fuller Picture of Oxytocin’s Role Emerging By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on August 2, 2011 There is good news and not-so-good news about the hormone oxytocin. It seems to promote a number of essential social functions and has been found to enhance social behaviors for people with autism. But new research suggests a downside as well. Oxytocin has sometimes been called the “love hormone” or “trust hormone” as studies have shown the chemical to be associated with the ability to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships and psychological boundaries with other people. But a study by Andrew Kemp, Ph.D., of the University of Sydney and published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggests the actions of oxytocin are more complex than what is commonly believed. Kemp and coauthor Adam Guastella, Ph.D., report that a number of studies have shown that oxytocin accents a variety of emotions. These are also both social emotions, but they’re negative. APA Reference Nauert, R. (2011).
Why Dignity Matters Why Dignity Matters When I tell people that I have written a book about dignity, the response is always the same: They pause for a moment and say "that is so important." When I ask them to tell me why they think it's important, the most common response is that "we all want that feeling of self-worth ." While it is true, my experience is that in spite of its universal appeal, it's a topic that rarely gets discussed. We may not have words to describe it, but we all have an internal experience of it. We know how great it is to be seen, heard, and acknowledged for who we are and treated as if we mattered. Matters of dignity are at the heart of every interaction we have on a daily basis and the time has come for us to pay attention to them and to give them voice. This is why I have focused my attention on matters of dignity.
The Thing Inside You That's Holding You Back In 2008, Haile Gebrselassie made the run of his life. The weather for the Berlin marathon was perfect, a clear cool morning in late September. At the starting gun the 35-year-old Ethiopian set off at the front of the pack. By the halfway mark, he was running at a record-beating pace. But with Kenyan James Kwambai matching him stride for stride, the path to victory was still uncertain. An hour and a half into the race, however, Kwambai fell back, and from then on Gebrlassie might as well have been running solo. The performance was a remarkable achievement by a human body continuously pushed to its limit. "End spurt," as physiologists call it, is an automatic behavior often observed among competitive runners. What scientists have recently discovered, however, is that we always have more to give, no matter what form of exertion we're undertaking. The researchers then asked their subjects to pedal hard on a stationary bike for as long as they could.
Doctor Disruption » The Evolution of Emotion Inspector Insight has written recently on the role of evolution and emotions in consumer behaviour. Paul Ekman’s work on facial expressions is particularly useful for understanding customer reactions, but we all know that human emotions are much richer than the seven (7) which he identified as universal. Many other scientists have developed models of human emotions, going back as far as Darwin (and ultimately to Aristotle). The most useful I have found so far is the work of Robert Plutchik. Although some of his conclusions are not universally accepted, the richness of the emotional vocabulary and his interpretation of the emotions in terms of evolution are particularly useful in brainstorming and innovation. A model of emotions Plutchik’s wheel of emotions shows the basic emotions, their different levels of intensity and their opposites. Each of the basis emotions addresses a specific survival issue. Emotional combinations The 48 Emotions of Plutchik
Some of us experience bigger 'emotional hangovers', whether from fun activities or hurricanes While some of us may be generally happier than others, all of us experience different emotions from day to day. A fascinating new study suggests that these fluctuations are due to two factors: a cycling of emotion levels across the working week, and our unique personal sensitivity to both good and bad daily events. The study even has hurricanes. Daniel J. The 65 participants completed 21 end-of-day surveys (prompted by an email reminder), rating intrinsic task motivation, together with how much they felt emotional states like frustrated, discouraged, happy and proud. The authors also calculated each participant’s ‘affect spin’, a measure of day-to-day emotional volatility, a high score meaning that person experienced a wide range of different affect states from day to day. After Hurricane Ike, everyone experienced lower levels of positive affect. Beal, D., & Ghandour, L. (2011).
The Allure of Anger and the Entitlement-Mindset Trap Interested in these topics? Go to Sapient Nature Anger is alluring in the short-run, but happiness-eroding in the long-run Imagine that you have just broken up with your boyfriend because he cheated on you. How would you feel? Now imagine, instead, that you broke up with your boyfriend because you cheated on him. If you are like most people, you are likely to feel angry in the first instance, and guilty in the second. Most people find it easier to be angry than to be guilty. Anger is triggered by thoughts related to fairness: we feel angry when we think that others have treated us unfairly. Contrast that with guilt. Sadness, like guilt, makes us feel small and weak. So, of all the negative emotions, anger is different. What this translates into is: when a negative outcome occurs (e.g., failing an exam, a financial loss, break-up with a significant other), we find it easier to blame others than to take the blame because it is easier to deal with anger. There are several symptoms.
Eat Your Guts Out: Why Envy Hurts and Why It's Good for Your Brain Envy is a peculiarly unpleasant emotion. Why should someone else's success trigger mixed feelings of inferiority, injustice, resentment, and sometimes hostility toward a fortunate person who has achieved some advantage we don't have? As Bible stories and volumes of literature attest, sometimes envy corrupts to the point where a green-eyed person will sacrifice their own outcome if this will diminish a competitor's relative advantage. It is easy to understand why so many other unpleasant sensations should be distasteful, but why is our brain wired to evoke this painful emotion in response to someone else's success? To understand why this might be so, you must take an evolutionary view. The researchers designed a test to see if people paid more attention to other people, and were better able to recall information about them, if the observers were experiencing the emotion of envy. The result was that the envious evaluators spent significantly more time examining the interviewees. S.E.
The amygdala - not command central for our fear reactions? Most of us have accepted for years, starting from LeDoux's early work, that there is an automatic unconscious 'downstairs' rapid pathway in our brain that does our most important affective processing, before other more 'upstairs' cortical networks fill in the consciousness perceptual details. A recent review by Pessoa and Adolphs ( PDF here ) has offered a more nuanced view, from a 'low road' to 'many roads' model for our processing the significance of affective stimuli, in which the cortex plays a much larger role in processing affective visual information than is typically acknowledged. Part of their argument is based on recent studies showing that reaction times for detecting fearful faces in a patient with complete bilateral amygdala lesions were normal, a finding now extended to several further patients. Here is the abstract of that review:
Shock and recall: Negative emotion may enhance memory, study finds (Medical Xpress) -- Picture a menacing drill sergeant, a gory slaughterhouse, a devastating scene of a natural disaster. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that viewing such emotion-laden images immediately after taking a test actually enhances people’s retention of the tested material. The data the researchers gathered in recent studies are the first to show that negative arousal following successful retrieval of information enhances later recall of that information. The finding is counterintuitive. Instead, learning is enhanced by the (negative) emotion, says Bridgid Finn, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in psychology in Arts & Sciences. Finn and Henry L. The researchers tested 40 undergraduate WUSTL students who studied ten lists of ten pairs of Swahili-English vocabulary items (lulu/pearl; ubini/forgery). A final cued-recall test on all 100 Swahili-English items revealed that participants did best on items that had been followed by the negative pictures.
Those Darned Emotions! They can't be out-talked So many people are puzzled by their emotional state when they come to see me for therapy . They understand the difficulty of their situation and how best to respond. When upset, they tell themselves how to proceed and that their emotions are irrational, unproductive, and unnecessary. Yet, they remain depressed, anxious, or distressed. What they don't realize is that this kind of self-talk can be like speaking English to someone who only speaks Chinese. Similarly, when people are critical of, or try to talk themselves out of, their emotions, that emotional part of their experience responds to the inherent hostility. In contrast, kindness brings emotions in more closely. In trying to understand how this works, you might find it helpful to think about the natural course of grief . Dr. If you would like email notification of new blog postings by Dr.
Depression May Weaken Brain Circuits Tied to Hate, Reward By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on October 5, 2011 A new UK study suggests depression weakens neural connections in specific brain networks. Investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (brain scans) to scan the brain activity in 39 depressed people (23 female 16 male) and 37 control subjects who were not depressed (14 female 23 male). The researchers found the fMRI scans revealed significant differences in the brain circuitry of the two groups. Among depressed patients, the greatest difference was the reduced connection of the so-called “hate circuit” involving brain regions of the superior frontal gyrus, insula and putamen. According to lead researcher Jianfeng Feng, Ph.D., the hate circuit was first clearly identified in 2008 by Semir Zeki, Ph.D., who found that a circuit which seemed to connect three regions in the brain (the superior frontal gyrus, insula and putamen) when test subjects were shown pictures of people they hated.