Actually doing Something
An act of implicit automaticity, the product of a childhood in which doing the right thing was ingrained as an automatic, moral imperative, light-years away from the Frontal Cortex calculating costs and benefits.
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Look at someone in pain with the instruction to take a self-oriented perspective, and the Amygdala, Anterior Cingulate Cortex and insular cortex (insula) activate, along with reports of distress and anxiety. Do the same with an other-oriented perspective, and all are less likely. And the more extreme the former state, the more likely that someone’s focus will be to lessen their own distress, to metaphorically look the other way.
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Expose subjects to evidence of someone else in pain. If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else’s need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.
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Thus, if feeling your pain makes me feel awful, I’m likely to just look out for number one, rather than helping you.
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when people are hungry, they are less charitable—hey, quit bellyaching about your problems; my belly is aching. Make people feel socially excluded and they become less generous and empathic.
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if you feel highly distressed, whether due to resonating with someone else’s problems or because of your own, tending to your own needs readily becomes the priority.
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⇒ unter anderem deswegen ist Papa ist egozentrisch
When instead he did his Buddhist thing, focusing on thoughts of compassion, a totally different picture of activation emerged—the Amygdala was silent, and instead there was heavy activation of the mesolimbic Dopamine system. He described it as “a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation.”
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⇒ dopamine circuit (dopamine reward system)
In other studies volunteers underwent either empathy training (==focusing on feeling the pain of someone in distress) or compassion training (focusing on a feeling of warmth and care toward that distressed person). The former would generate the typical neuroimaging profiles, including heavy Amygdala activation, and a negative, anxious state. Those with compassion training== did not, showing heavy activation instead in the (cognitive) ==dorsolateral PFC==, coupling of activation between the dlPFC and dopaminergic regions (dopamine circuit (dopamine reward system)), more positive Emotions, and a greater tendency toward prosociality.
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there’s the danger that the empathic pain is so intense that you can only come up with solutions that would work for you, rather than ones that might help the sufferer.
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Yet, as we’ve seen, a fair degree of detachment is just what is needed to actually act.
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see also
Peers, Social Acceptance, and Social Exclusion
Feeling someone else’s pain
Empathy
Zivilcourage und der nötige Abstand
Tags: neuroscience science
Superlink: 050 🧠Neuroscience
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Chapter 14 Feeling Someone’s Pain Understanding Someone’s Pain Alleviating Someone’s Pain
Erstellt: 31-05-22 20:50