Empathy is a rather faint concept. Scientists do not
agree what it exactly involves and they haven’t succeeded yet to define it
clearly. For this blog that’s not important. Let’s say that empathy is feeling
what someone else feels; that it is a kind of feeling that makes that one
understands and feels the emotions of another person, because one imagines the
situation he or she is in. Then one gets the same emotion as the other,
although usually in a lesser degree. One sees that the other is sad or just
happy, which makes that you feel sad or happy as well. It’s the same for other
feelings or emotions, like pain, regret, fear, anger and so on. It can even
work that way that only seeing a happy or sad person makes you becoming happy
or sad. Everybody has such experiences, but how does it work?
Empathy has been studied at least since the end of the
nineteenth century but the discovery of so-called mirror neurons in the brain
some hundred years later has thrown a new light on it. Mirror neurons are a
kind of neurons that become activated, when someone sees another person performing
an action. However, they have also another function, for mirror neurons become
also activated when you yourself perform an action. So mirror neurons both help
recognize actions and they are motor neurons in the sense that they play a role
in moving your muscles for performing the same actions. They have a double
function. Even more, when you see somebody performing an action, also then they
make that you start moving the related muscles. Often this happens unconsciously
and you don’t notice it and you keep sitting in your chair. But who hasn’t
experienced being present at a concert and seeing the drummer tapping his foot
and starting to tap your own foot? Or you see persons dancing in the street and
you stop to watch them and you start to move as well or even joins them? Mirror
neurons make that you tend to copy and simulate the behaviour of other persons;
openly or within yourself.
Mirror neurons play an important part in learning but
also in recognizing emotions. When you see an emotion on the face of another
person, your mirror neurons register the emotion and make that you start copying
it. When you see that someone is happy, you get a feeling of being happy, and
if she smiles or laughs, you start to smile or laugh, too. If you see that
someone is sad you also tend to feel sad, and maybe you start to cry with him
or her. Also your face expresses the emotion concerned.
It’s interesting that this process doesn’t work only
in one direction. It doesn’t work only from emotion to movement but also from
movement to emotion. For instance, make a smile and immediately you tend to
feel better; suppress smiles where you are supposed to be serious and you’ll
feel so. In other words, there is relation of interdependence between what you
see being done, what you do in relation to what you see then and to what you
feel.
It’s just a hypothesis but I think that all this has a
consequence for the relation between empathy and sex. In most cultures women
are free to express their emotions and feelings, at least to a large extent,
while men are supposed to keep them in check and not to show them too much.
However, suppressing showing your emotions means suppressing the movements of
the muscles related to these emotions. But if you suppress the movements of the
muscles that are related to certain emotions you tend to suppress the emotions
as such as well. If you don’t laugh you feel less cheerful than when you do, and
if you don’t cry you feel less sorrow than when you do cry. Anyway, this is so
compared to persons in the same circumstances who do perform all these physical
expressions of their feelings.
Above I described empathy as feeling what someone else
feels. As we just have seen, it belongs to having a certain feeling that you
move your muscles in the right way. Basically it is an automatic process but
you can steer it and just that’s what you do when you suppress to start crying
when you see someone else crying; or when you try to suppress that your face
becomes sad when you see someone in sorrow; and the same for happiness and for
other emotions. However, when you suppress the physical expression of an
emotion you suppress the related feeling as well, like, for instance, the
empathy you actually feel for someone, if something has happened to that person.
And since in most cultures men are allowed not to show their emotions as much
as women can, the upshot is that men feel less empathy than women do in the
same circumstances.
No comments:
Post a Comment