09 Mar Virtual Realty Clarifies Location of Empathy in the Brain
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Indrajeet Patil PhD
former PhD student at SISSA, Trieste and
currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Human societies are built on mutually beneficial cooperation, which relies on our prosocial and altruistic impulses to help each other out. Psychologists have been trying to understand the psychological basis of altruistic behavior for a while now, but studying costly altruism – a kind of helping behavior in which the altruist pays a heavy price to help others – has been difficult to study in lab settings given the ethical problems associated with creating any paradigm where participants stand to get hurt. Thus, the question is how do you study the motivation behind acts that involve a very high risk of physical injury to the self while helping others? Such situations are common in emergency contexts where people can be faced with the choice of either saving their own life or risking it to save someone else’s life.
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?
Response: In the current study, we sidestep this thorny ethical issues associated with studying costly altruism by developing a novel virtual reality that features an engaging and realistic environment where the participants need to evacuate a building on fire. While doing so, they are confronted with the choice of rescuing someone trapped in this building against rescuing their own life. Our results show that individuals who engaged in altruistic behavior self-reported to have greater dispositional empathic concern for others’ wellbeing. Interestingly, analysis of structural brain scans also revealed that these individuals had enlarged brain structure called right anterior insula, a region often implicated in trait-level compassion for others.
MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?
Response: It is often said that empathy is a good motivator for helping behavior. Our study provides an alternative perspective, but there is an issue of definition here that needs to be addressed first. Although a layperson may use the term “empathy” to mean something akin to sympathy or compassion, the way psychologists and neuroscientists use this term is very different: empathy involves sharing others’ feeling states (“I am anxious, because you are anxious”), while compassion or empathic concern involves tender and warm feelings for others’ wellbeing (“I am concerned about you because you seem anxious”). Our findings argue that an individual’s willingness to help others in need at a cost to the self is driven not by an urge to minimize self-oriented distress stemming from witnessing someone in need (empathy, i.e.), but by other-oriented caring motivation. We also show here that altruists and non-altruists differ at the level of brain structure.
MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Response: In this work, in addition to virtual reality scenarios, we also presented people with similar situations but in text format. Interestingly, when asked in the abstract and emotionally arid text settings if participants would risk their own lives to save someone else, 91% said yes. But this did not reflect in the more emotionally engaging and life-like settings of virtual reality where only 65% behaved in altruistic manner.
This means that using hypothetical vignettes to study altruism, prosociality, and helping behavior may not be an ideal methodological choice and the field should strive to come up with more ingenious paradigms to study more life-like behavior. This is a straightforward methodological recommendation we make based on our study.
In this study, we have argued that there are differences at the level of brain structure between altruists and non-altruists. Structural properties of the brain are partly physical manifestation of the information encoded in our genes and thus future investigations can try to investigate the genetic basis of costly altruistic behavior.
No disclosures
MedicalResearch.com: Thank you for your contribution to the MedicalResearch.com community.
Citation:
Note: Content is Not intended as medical advice. Please consult your health care provider regarding your specific medical condition and questions
More Medical Research Interviews on MedicalResearch.com
[wysija_form id=”5″]
Last Updated on March 9, 2017 by Marie Benz MD FAAD