From Marc Bekoff's Ethological Ethics yahoo list....
February 20, 2004 The Times (London)
Love means that you really do feel each other's pain
By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
YOU really can feel another person's pain, experiments at the Institute of Neurology in London have shown.
Exactly the same regions of the brain are activated by knowing a close friend is experiencing pain as are activated by pain itself.
Tania Singer and colleagues at the institute, which is part of University College London, found 16 couples who were romantically involved and willing to take part in the experiment.
They put the female partner in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and watched her brain while a one-second electric shock was given either to her or to her partner.
She was not able to see his face, but could see from an indicator which of them was going to be shocked, and whether it would be a mild shock or a sharp and painful one.
The brain scans showed that the same areas of the brain were activated in both cases, with one exception. In real pain, the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, the thalamus, and the somatosensory cortices were activated, the team reports in Science. In imagined pain, the somatosensory cortices were not activated, but the other areas were. So while the sensation of pain was not present, the emotional aspects of it were.
This is the basis of empathy, Dr Singer said. When we feel another person's pain, we activate those areas of the brain that are involved with the emotional dimension of pain, not its physical effects.
'The results suggest that we use emotional representations reflecting our own subjective feeling states to understand the feelings of others', Dr Singer said. 'Probably, our ability to empathise has evolved from a system for representing our own internal bodily states.
'The significance is that, for the first time, we were able to study empathic processes in vivo in the usually unnatural scanning environment and show that emotional and not cognitive processess are triggered by the mere perception of a symbol indicating that your loved one is in pain.
'Our human capacity to "tune in" to others when exposed to their feelings may explain why we do not always behave selfishly in human interactions but instead engage in altruistic, helping behaviour.'
Helen Mayberg, a neuro-psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta, called the study 'brilliant'. The team had used a very fundamental system, pain,
and had captured both sensory and emotional aspects of the experience and
provided new insights into how they interacted, she said.
The London team, Dr Singer, Ben Seymour, John O'Doherty, Holger Kaube,
Raymond Dolan and Chris Frith, also investigated whether women who were
particularly empathetic showed higher brain activity when their partners
experienced pain, as one would expect.
They tested the female volunteers using two personality tests designed to
measure empathy, the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale and the Empathetic
Concern Scale, and showed that women who scored highly on these scales did
show stronger brain responses when their loved ones were given electric
shocks.
The research, says a news item in Science, is part of a growing field of
brain research that explores the creation of internal representation of what
another individual is thinking or feeling.
In monkeys, specialised brain cells have been discovered, called mirror
neurons, that are activated both by the act of doing something and by
watching some other individual doing it.
For example, such neurons might light up when an object is grasped, and
also when the monkey sees another monkey doing the grasping.
*
February 20, 2004 Times (London)
Empathy not just figment of imagination
By Dr Thomas Stuttaford
NEUROPHYSIOLOGISTS and neuropsychologists developed MRI scanning to show
which part of the brain became lit up when involved in various activities,
or was responding to different emotions or sensations. The pattern of the
response, and even the part of the brain that responds, has been shown to
vary with different psychiatric conditions.
Pain is one of the sensory experiences that has been widely studied but the
study has been advanced by an ability to map by using functional MRI which
part of the brain responds to what type of pain, discomfort or distrust, and
what influences this.
Whereas with many emotions a loved one may experience some of the
disturbance that their other half is feeling if they are watching them,
Tania Singer's experiment was different in that the woman was unable to see
her partner's face and hence his expression when he was hurt. She had been
told when it was the partneršs turn to receive the pain, knew if it was to
be severe and when the shock would be received.
The empathy she felt would be recognised by husbands who say they share
their wives' birth pains and by mothers taking a child to hospital, who
frequently complain that they are living through their child's pain during
any procedure that he or she endures just as if they were receiving it
themselves. They may even say that they don't have to see their child to
experience this, they only have to know it is happening.
Dr Singer's experiment has shown that although they may not cry out, for
they have not been physically hurt, their brain has felt the pain just as if
they had been. Every action of the doubting casualty officer is causing them
to share their child's anguish.
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