Most people can empathize when they see someone else in pain. But if the guy who's suffering has recently done you wrong, well, sometimes it's a little harder to feel bad for him. Now neuroscientists have found that brain activity related to empathy is indeed reduced when people have been treated unfairly. Surprisingly, the effect seems to be particularly strong in men.
Many researchers suspect that our ability to empathize depends in part on mentally recreating the experiences of others. One recent study, for example, found that certain brain regions that lit up when female subjects received a mildly painful shock also lit up when the women saw their boyfriends get zapped (ScienceNOW, 19 February 2004). In the new study, the same research team, led by Tania Singer of University College London, examined whether the relationship between the observer and the zap-ee influences this empathy-related brain activity.
A total of 32 volunteers played games in which they exchanged money with two other players, one who played fairly and one who didn't. The researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity while the volunteers watched their former playing partners receive a shock. The brain scans revealed evidence of empathy when volunteers saw the fair player get shocked. In particular, a region called the fronto-insular cortex lit up much as it did when the volunteers received a shock themselves. Not so when the unfair player received his just desserts: Empathetic activity in the fronto-insular cortex was slightly reduced in female volunteers and substantially reduced in males, the team reports online 18 January in Nature.
Singer says she was "very astonished" to find the gender difference and cautions that more work is needed to figure out what it means. She suspects the results would have turned out differently if the experiments hadn't involved physical punishment. Economic experiments have shown that women are as unforgiving as men when it comes to meting out fines for bad behavior, Singer says.
The study provides the first evidence that the neural circuits for empathy are influenced by social context, says Christian Keysers, a neuroscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Keysers thinks the findings may have important implications for understanding human social behavior. "Hitler in his propaganda stressed always that Jews were unfair, mean people," he says. It's possible that such propaganda was effective because it reduced empathy towards the pain of the Jews, Keysers says.
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