(Press-News.org) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding the fall of apartheid; during a 2001 trip to visit friends in Sri Lanka, he found himself in the midst of the violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military.
Those chance experiences got Bruneau, who taught high school science for several years, interested in the psychology of human conflict. While teaching, he also volunteered as counselor for a conflict-resolution camp in Ireland that brought Catholic and Protestant children together. At MIT, Bruneau is now working with associate professor of cognitive neuroscience Rebecca Saxe to figure out why empathy — the ability to feel compassion for another person's suffering — often fails between members of opposing conflict groups.
"What are the psychological barriers that are put up between us in these contexts of intergroup conflict, and then, critically, what can we do to get past them?" Bruneau asks.
Bruneau and Saxe are also trying to locate patterns of brain activity that correlate with empathy, in hopes of eventually using such measures to determine how well people respond to reconciliation programs aimed at boosting empathy between groups in conflict.
"We're interested in how people think about their enemies, and whether there are brain measures that are reliable readouts of that," says Saxe, who is an associate member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. "This is a huge vision, of which we are at the very beginning."
Before researchers can use tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to evaluate whether conflict-resolution programs are having any effect, they need to identify brain regions that respond to other people's emotional suffering. In a study published Dec. 1 in Neuropsychologia, Saxe and Bruneau scanned people's brains as they read stories in which the protagonist experienced either physical or emotional pain. The brain regions that responded uniquely to emotional suffering overlapped with areas known to be involved in the ability to perceive what another person is thinking or feeling.
Failures of empathy
Hoping to see a correlation between empathy levels and amount of activity in those brain regions, the researchers then recruited Israelis and Arabs for a study in which subjects read stories about the suffering of members of their own groups or that of conflict-group members. The study participants also read stories about a distant, neutral group — South Americans.
As expected, Israelis and Arabs reported feeling much more compassion in response to the suffering of their own group members than that of members of the conflict group. However, the brain scans revealed something surprising: Brain activity in the areas that respond to emotional pain was identical when reading about suffering by one's own group or the conflict group. Also, those activity levels were lower when Arabs or Israelis read about the suffering of South Americans, even though Arabs and Israelis expressed more compassion for South Americans' suffering than for that of the conflict group.
Those findings, published Jan. 23 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, suggest that those brain regions are sensitive to the importance of the opposing group, not whether or not you like them.
However, because the study did not reveal any correlation between the expression of empathy and the amount of brain activity, more study is needed before MRI can be used as a reliable measure of empathy levels, Saxe says.
"We thought there might be brain regions where the amount of activity was just a simple function of the amount of empathy that you experience," Saxe says. "Since that's not what we found, we don't know what the amount of activity in these brain regions really means yet. This is basically a first baby step, and one of the things it tells us is that we don't know enough about these brain regions to use them in the ways that we want to."
Bruneau is now testing whether these brain regions send messages to different parts of the brain depending on whether the person is feeling empathy or not. He hypothesizes that when someone reads about the suffering of an in-group member, the brain regions identified in this study send information to areas that process unpleasant emotions, while stories about suffering of a conflict-group member activate an area called the ventral striatum, which has been implicated in schadenfreude — taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
INFORMATION: END
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A newly published paper from Rhode Island Hospital reports on the impact to patients if five personality disorders are removed from the upcoming revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (DSM-5). Based on their study, the researchers believe these changes could result in false-negative diagnoses for patients. The paper is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and is now available online in advance of print.
The DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders work group made several recommendations to change the approach toward ...
COLUMBIA, Mo. – While it may appear that infants are helpless creatures that only blink, eat, cry and sleep, one University of Missouri researcher says that studies indicate infant brains come equipped with knowledge of "intuitive physics."
"In the MU Developmental Cognition Lab, we study infant knowledge of the world by measuring a child's gaze when presented with different scenarios," said Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science. "We believe that infants are born with expectations about the ...
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Prejudice is linked to aggression for men and fear for women, suggests new research led by Michigan State University scholars.
The researchers report that, throughout history, men have been the primary aggressors against different groups as well as the primary victims of group-based aggression and discrimination.
"There is evidence going back thousands of years of bands of men getting together and attacking other bands of men, eliminating them and keeping the women as the spoils of war," said Carlos David Navarrete, evolutionary psychologist at ...
A recently published academic study set out to examine differences in staffing levels and the quality of resident care between for-profit nursing home companies and government-owned facilities. The study, headed by a professor at the University of California-San Francisco's School of Nursing, sheds interesting light on nursing home neglect problems in the U.S.
The study focused on the ten largest nursing home chains in the country, and found that they all had lower staffing hours for registered nurses and other nurses than public facilities. In addition, facilities owned ...
Division of labour is not only a defining feature of human societies but is also omnipresent among the building blocks of biological organisms and is considered a major theme of evolution. Theoretical Biologists Claus Rueffler and Joachim Hermisson from Vienna University in collaboration with Günter P. Wagner from Yale University identified necessary conditions under which division of labour is favoured by natural selection. The results of their study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Most animals and plants consist of a set ...
Montreal January 24, 2012 – A saliva test used to diagnose the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is comparable in accuracy to the traditional blood test, according to a new study led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University. The meta-analysis, which compared studies worldwide, showed that the saliva HIV test, OraQuick HIV1/2, had the same accuracy as the blood test for high-risk populations. The test sensitivity was slightly reduced for low risk populations. The study, published in this week's issue of The Lancet ...
Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life.
A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York have re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world.
Working with colleagues at the University of Nottingham, they have made the first step towards showing how simple sugars –threose and erythrose—developed. The research is published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.
All biological molecules have an ...
Evidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk is present in the blood of adolescents who consume a lot of fructose, a scenario that worsens in the face of excess belly fat, researchers report.
An analysis of 559 adolescents age 14-18 correlated high-fructose diets with higher blood pressure, fasting glucose, insulin resistance and inflammatory factors that contribute to heart and vascular disease.
Heavy consumers of the mega-sweetener also tend to have lower levels of cardiovascular protectors such as such as HDL cholesterol and adiponectin, according to researchers ...
For many people struggling with debt in Chicago, bankruptcy is a great way to get out of debt. After all, bankruptcy can be used to eliminate a number of troublesome debts, including high interest credit cards, medical bills, and loans while allowing most people to keep almost all of their assets.
What people may not realize is that they can get protection from wage garnishment through bankruptcy as well. A Chicago wage garnishment attorney can help stop these garnishments by utilizing an important feature of bankruptcy, the automatic stay. This article will describe ...
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Research by a team of Sandia National Laboratories chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.
The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. "This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture," said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia's Surface and Interface Sciences Department.
The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic ...
