The reactions of others affect how we relate to another person's pain.
Empathy is often considered a permanent feature. Heredity affects how inclined each person is to compassion, but empathy can also spread from one person to another.
It can increase or decrease depending on how we perceive other people, according to a study published in the Pnas science journal research.
“It is essential to understand that adults can learn or forget empathy by observing people they don't even know,” says Professor of Translational Social Neuroscience at the University of Würzburg, Germany Grit Hein of the university in the bulletin.
Hein and his colleagues investigated the issue in four experiments, each of which involved more than 50 women. The researchers wanted to find out if compassion, or the lack of it, for another person's pain can be socially contagious.
Participants first watched videos of hands subjected to a painful stimulus, then rated their sensations.
They were then shown other people's reactions to the videos. Finally, they still evaluate the sensations caused by the painful experience of a new person.
Seeing other people's reactions shaped participants' judgments. The subjects became either more empathetic or less empathetic depending on how other people had reacted to the same pain videos.
The participants' brain activity was monitored during the experiments in functional magnetic resonance imaging. In the pictures, the attachment of empathy was seen in the functioning of the brain island dealing with compassion and its connections with other brain areas.
Researchers according to the brain images suggest that the participants specifically learned empathy from others and did not simply imitate them.
Based on brain images and computer modeling, they concluded that learning from others was the cause of increased or decreased compassion. It was not about imitating other people or that the participants showed empathy just to please other people.
According to Professor Hein, the results obtained from the tests can be applied to working life. If you want a good team, you have to create an environment that promotes it.
If there is no room for empathy in the work environment due to cost-saving or schedule reasons, or due to bad management, management must understand that this kind of behavior shapes employees in the longer term. It also affects their activities with, for example, customers or patients, Hein estimates.
Published in Tiede magazine 4/2024.
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