01 Feb Learning compassion can help prevent emotional burnout – Tania Singer
SCIENCE 12 JULY 12 by OLIVIA SOLON
Training people to be compassionate rather than empathic might help to solve problems such as depression, burnout and narcissism, according to Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
Singer is an expert in social neuroscience and investigates the neuronal, hormonal and developmental foundations of human social cognition, including emotions such as empathy, compassion, envy and fairness.
Speaking at DLD Women in Munich, she first outlined the difference between emotional contagion, empathy and compassion. Emotional contagion is when people “catch” an emotion from another person at an unconscious level. To illustrate this point, she showed a crowd-pleasing video of quadruplets laughing at each other. She said that this shows that “we are closely related at an unconscious level as we process the emotions of other people” but that it shouldn’t be confused with empathy because it is not conscious.
In order for it to be empathy a person would have to see that another was in pain and share that pain, while knowing that it’s not their own emotion. However, empathy isn’t intrinsically good and pro-social.
For Singer, empathy is “a precursor to compassion, but too much of it can lead to antisocial behaviour”. For example, healthcare workers or caregivers who are frequently faced with trauma victims can become intensely distressed themselves, feel overwhelmed and burn out. Brain scans have shown that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and the one who feels empathy. So empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.
In order to avoid this, we need to transform empathy into compassion. Compassion is a feeling of pity or a warm, caring emotion that does not involve feeling, say, sadness if the other person is sad. In order to better understand compassion, Singer has studied Buddhist monks — renowned for being experts in “pro-social” meditation and compassion. When they watched videos of other people suffering, fMRI scans of their brains showed heightened activity in areas that are important to care, nurturing and positive social affiliation. In non-meditators, the videos were more likely to trigger the brain areas associated with unpleasant feelings of sadness and pain.
One of the monks studied, Mattieu Ricard, was once a microbiologist in France, but has lived in the Himalaya region for more than thirty years. According to Singer, he described his mindset while meditating (and thinking of the suffering of those in the videos) as “activating the warm, loving caring feeling which a mother would activate towards a crying child”.
As a result, Singer is working on a study to help people learn to become more compassionate. Using techniques that centre on compassion or the Buddhist notion of loving-kindness, Singer and colleagues have managed to shift participants’ brain activity to cause less activation in areas of the brain supporting negative feelings about themselves. In the early stages of training, participants seem to show more empathy, but with more training this shifts so that their brain activity more closely resembles the expert meditators’.
Singer believes that this could be particularly useful training healthcare professionals and people under a lot of stress in order to prevent burnout.
She concluded: “People with a lot of empathy want to change that to compassion so they don’t get overwhelmed when confronted with suffering.” She added that she was launching a training programme in schools to help students learn how to cope with negative emotions and reduce their own stress.”