Working in Movement

You've heard the sayings all your life: "This hurts me as much as it hurts you," or, worse, "I feel your pain." Easily dismissed as so much hot air, it turns out the idea of sharing painful experiences isn't far fetched at all. I Feel Your Pain in Nature Science Update briefly summarizes a small research study involving couples at the Institute of Neurology at University College London. To test the empathetic hypothesis, researchers placed women in a fMRI, a medical device that displays images of the brain during activity.

The women got a small electric shock on the hand as the imaging machine whirred. The resulting images showed the parts of the women's brains that became active, those in areas that process sensory information, but also those areas involved with emotion. Then the women watched as their partners got the same shock on the hand. Although they were screened from seeing their partner's face during the shock, the fMRI images showed the same emotion-processing areas that lit up when their own hands were shocked also became active when they watched their partner take the juice.

What to make of this? Not surprisingly, empathy has physical correlates in the nervous system. But it's not a universal experience, at least not as observed by research. This research involved couples, people already with emotional involvement. Even then, it the observation was restricted to women. It would be interesting to try other combinations, maybe people who don't know each other or those not noted for sincerity or empathy. Wonder what happens in those brains?