Such Stuff as Dreams by Keith Oatley

Author:Keith Oatley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Empathy and Identification

When we see someone smile, we tend to smile back. When we see someone frown we, too, tend to frown. This is called mirroring, a kind of imitation, and it is related to the idea of mirror neurons that I discussed in Chapter 1. Mirroring has been found experimentally to occur across a range of emotions. For instance, when adults looked at facial expressions of happiness or anger, they spontaneously made facial expressions of their own, which mirrored the expressions they saw. It has been found, too, that when people read words that indicate emotional expressions such as “smile,” “cry,” and “frown,” they activate in themselves the facial muscles for making the corresponding expressions.11 Experiments of this kind indicate that recognition of an emotion in someone else, and also when we read about it in a story, or see something of emotional significance in a film, typically involves mirroring. Mirroring involves empathy. We can recognize emotion by activating our own comparable experience and expression of a similar emotion.

Empathy – feeling with another person – is central to social interaction. Although the term is only about 100 years old, Adam Smith (250 years ago) included its characteristics in the more capacious term he used, “sympathy,” which he thought was the glue that held society together.

In modern times, and on the basis of recent research on brain imaging, empathy has been described as involving: (a) having an emotion, that (b) is in some way similar to that of another person, that (c) is elicited by observation or imagination of the other’s emotion, and that involves (d) knowing that the other is the source of one’s own emotion.12

The findings on empathetic mirroring of emotions suggests a perspective on perceiving others’ emotional expressions not as states that one simply sees out there in the world, as one might see a tree or a lamp-post, but as empathetic ways of attuning to others. Empathy did not develop recently in human beings. It is an ancient characteristic of social mammals.13 It is central to social life.

Alvin Goldman has described two routes to empathy. The first is the simple case of recognizing an emotional expression. This, he says, involves low-level mind-reading, that is to say, attributing a certain emotion to the person who has made an expression. Recognition is based, he says, on being able to feel (simulate) the corresponding emotion in oneself (as in mirroring).

As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:

We see emotion … We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe the face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features.14

In other words, mind-reading presents us immediately with experiences of a kind that are relevant to our interactions with others, not of components of facial muscle movements.

When we see a smile on the face of the person we are with, we tend to feel happy and smile back, disposed to cooperate. When we see tears, we tend to feel sad, and are prompted to help.

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