just thinking out loud

[ljgeoff]

well, yeah, that's most of what gets done in this space, but this post, kinda moreso.

So I was thinking about empathy as both an adaptive and learned behavior. Actually, this line of thought came from a post that I made for my Psych 441 class:

I have heard many people react very strongly against the idea that humans are animals. Don't get me wrong! I think that humans are amazing, fantastic, brilliant animals. But I do not believe that we are divine creatures of thought. I think that we are animals, and that, like other animals, we sing to the tune of our hormones, our brain chemistry, the food we eat and the water we drink, and to the strong music of our shared genetic heritage. I think that when we can say "All humans do *this*" that the *this* is something we might want to look at as biological instinct.

Nothing has come back from the class, I mean, no posts at all since this post I sent out on Friday afternoon. 'S makin' me paranoid.

A fellow worker asked the question I'm getting kinda tired of hearing, and I said "Ya know, I really doubt that the only reason you do the right thing is because you don't want to be punished." And I'm afraid that I irritated him -- I just didn't explain my thought well. But I've been thinking about empathy, about how automatic it is. I mean, when I see someone who is hurting, I don't take the time to consider if I will help them or not. I experience empathy as an automatic, subconscious process.

I think that empathy is something like language aquisition. Neuroscientists and biopsychologists theorize that there's an aquisition mechanism for launguage. I have a feeling that the same is true with empathy. An infant who experiences launguage, has adaquate reinforcement, and adequate physiology for language will speak.

But I'm kinda thinking, too, what is it beside empathy that guides us to do "the next right thing."

Comments

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

For myself, I believe it goes even deeper than this- empathy is part of a whole complex of psychic phenomena that is part of our animal heritage. Instead of helping us develop this ability, though, most of human cultural stuff is aimed at stunting this capacity, so that we can live in dense populations and be part of complex economies and in geneal be good citizens.

I see it most clearly with the family pet. The biggest difference between myself and him isn't intelligence, it's language. I'm constantly destracted by mine, and he isn't. It's not that surprising that he can read me so well.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I like that. I will think on this some more.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Just an interesting side note: schizophrenia seems (per one abnormal psych textbook I've read) to be a modern phenomena; while lots of people are called "insane" or other descriptors in the past, symptoms of schizophrenia aren't described. (Skeptical John says: we didn't have the DSM-IV back then, so who would have ruled those specific symptoms as interesting? But, take it for the sake of argument). It also says that it's much less known in the rural (less populated) areas.

Which makes this for an interesting thing to ponder.

(And, some schools of psychotherapy agree that language can cause a great many difficulties.)

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

"better diagnostics" can explain away *anything* you care to name. Higher cancer levels downwind of something nasty? We're just looking harder. The buried assumption with that one, is that nothing important has changed in terms of disease causing stuff: Life is better now than it was then in every way, including health. Which of course is bullshit, but it doesn't make it any easier to quantify the difference between then and now.

I have noticed one thing- in coming out of the hospital, my brain feels soft and I can't make decisions with any nuance... I've noticed how many 'sharp edges' the world has, that we're expected to learn and work around on our own. I think that's the main difference between a more 'primative' culture where difference in sanity could get you promoted to shaman, versus this one. There aren't as many linguistic minefields to tiptoe through.

These days I'm convinced that most of this linguistic minefield has to do with embedded violence in the language. If everyone spoke fairly, if violent intent had to be expressed directly and formally instead of being hidden in layers of sarcastic nuance.... our mental illness rate would go down quite a bit.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Re: "Better diagnostics", sure. But my skepticism was just, okay, let's assume the textbook was right. It could be that no one saw fit to outline those *specific* symptoms.

So, let's not assume that schizophrenia *did not exist* in the past. Maybe it didn't... but maybe it did.

It still seems to have a strong correlation to certain levels of crowding, crowding that only became really possible in the modern age. Sure, there were crowded cities in the past, but we can make them more crowded now.

So, yes, I think there might be a great deal of pressure to squeeze people into "good citizen" molds, and we might, in fact, be seeing the effects of that in a problem that seems to be unknown in the past, i.e., schizophrenia. (Assuming the textbook was right, etc..)

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

empathy is part of a whole complex of psychic phenomena that is part of our animal heritage.

Now, see, I did most of my psych undergraduate work back in the early 80's, and back then, the idea that animals had emotion was just crazy; any emotion that we saw in animals was considered animorphism.

Now, not only are there whole new fields like psychobiology, but neuroethology.

"...a basic neural process, first developed in our animal ancestors, underlies even the fancy kinds of empathy that only we humans are capable of. Seeing another person in a certain situation re-activates neural representations of when we were in similar situations ourselves; this brain activity in turn generates a bodily state resembling that of the object of our attention."

Which brings me back to the kind of lack of empathy that's seen in sociopaths and, to a lesser extent, in narcissists. Are we looking at an empathic system that's been destroyed, or one that never developed? If destroyed, how; if never developed, why?

For some reason, I'm thinking of james_nicoll's cats.