Empathy and compassion

Watching the slow moving pictures on the TV is making the humans sad. I try my best to make them feel better. And it works, at least for a little bit. I have recently heard a lot about anxiety and stress, and ways of reducing their impact.

Steven has recently been writing about compassion and how it is necessary for people to show compassion towards others and towards themselves. I want to write about compassion, because it is what I feel towards my humans. Also, understanding a situation, its basis and how we react allows us to cultivate effective coping mechanisms, help others and enhance our lives.

The world and our behaviors

Our central nervous system connects our bodies to our brain. Through our senses we collect information about our environment, send it back to our brains and process it into our responses. If while out for our walk Steven sees someone we like, he waves or says “Hello!” In turn they will wave and say “Hello!” if they like us. This pleasant exchange occurs because our brains recognize the other person and know they will not harm us. The results are very cool. I can’t say “Hello!”, but if I wag my tail at a human I know is carrying a treat, I get a milk-bone!

It is very confusing to talk about behaviors, especially our feelings for others. Therefore, I’m going to focus on two specific behaviors that arise when we see others experiencing pain or anguish.

These behaviors are the result of the same system that allows us to experience and analyze our environments. The same central nervous system that allows us to experience pain through hardship, is used to vicariously experience the anguish of others. We have the same cellular building blocks, the same cells and the communication between cells is dependent on the same neurotransmitters.

Empathy

Empathy, which a lot of people tend to confuse with compassion, is a natural feeling arising when we recognize that someone else is anguished or struggling. It allows us to share a frustrating and painful situation without having to experience it firsthand. Empathy balances our feelings and our thoughts towards another individual’s struggles. It is most likely a behavioral tool that aids with survival and it is an ancient behavior.

Empathy requires that we recognize the other, the cause of the struggle and ourselves. By doing this, we can remove ourselves from the situation and lend assistance.
It is important to know that empathy, does not automatically lead to helping someone, and that help is not always due to empathy. Empathy is about reducing the pain, anguish and stress of others. This feeling can be stressful and emotionally exhausting.
Depending on the level of discomfort that others are experiencing, we might lend a hand, not because we want to improve others’ lives, but because we want them to stop bothering us.

We all have a natural need to keep ourselves safe and help others be safe. We also want to improve the lives of others and help them through difficult times. For example, rats in a laboratory that are trained to push a lever to receive food, refuse to push the lever if they see another rat experiencing pain as a consequence of pushing the lever. Rats prefer hunger to causing others pain!

Compassion

These feelings of empathy are then combined with a desire to improve the situations of others. Compassion is a complex set of behaviors built upon empathy.

A hypothetical model of this behavior called the perception-action model (or PAM for short) suggests that seeing another undergo pain or anguish awakens feelings of empathy.
We can intervene in a variety of ways to dampen these feelings. We might take pleasure in their suffering, we might ignore their pain or we may try to help.
Deciding whether we should intervene and in which way, moves the decision-making upstairs. I mean this literally, it is higher parts of the brain carrying out these thoughts. Actively engaging the situation, we project the situation over our current emotional state, our state of mind, our past experiences and our ethnic/cultural framework.
If we decide that we want to help, that we are not putting ourselves in danger and that we have a combination of the mindset, experience and the resources to help, we will lend a hand to improve the circumstances of the suffering other. This is compassion.

This is all easy and intuitive to understand. That is because of how ancient this behavioral mechanism is, and how we have adapted to it. We see these two behaviors in most mammals and birds, organisms that last shared a common ancestor over 300 million years ago.

A little girl recognizes the discomfort in the face of another girl and offers a toy to make her feel better!

We also see compassion and kindness in the attempts of primates and human babies to comfort an adult feigning discomfort. My personal favorite, dogs can detect the levels of a humans stress hormones and offer a good tail wag or face-lick! As you can imagine these behaviors are not meant to resolve a situation causing stress, but to offer my personal touch and experience to comforting. Humans offer each other words of kindness and comfort, I wag my tail and cuddle.

The basis of our behavior

These behaviors remain in our lives and are passed down to our offspring because they enhance our lives, and occur at different levels: physiological, personal and societies. There are actual neurological consequences to helping others, such as activation of parts of the brain involved in experiencing rewards. Activation of these areas make us feel energized, happy and relaxed.

When another suffering, imaging studies show that our brains respond in a similar way as if we were experiencing the pain. We call this mechanism empathic pain. Of course, because we are using the same cells and neurons to “feel” anothers pain. When we take medications to dull our pain or anxiety (such as acetaminophen or anxiolytic drugs) we become less receptive, understanding or helpful to the distress of others.

The benefits of compassion

More widely, empathy and compassion may signal that an individual might be a good partner, allowing us to forge strong and lasting relationships. It may also indicate that a partner may be a good parent, contributing to a feeling of security.

Compassion may reward us with positive feelings and better integration into family and social networks, but it is hard work. We must recognize the discomfort and separate ourselves from the situation. Then we must project the situation onto our memories and experiences and our current state of mind. Finally, we must come up with an appropriate response to the situation that will not only remove the pain and discomfort but provide life improvement, and this is just compassion towards others. Compassion with ourselves requires self-examination, knowledge of ourselves and the situation that requires cultivation and practice.

Get to it! Be compassionate! If you would like to know more, here are the resources I used:

Reading is hard work. Writing is hard work. Self-compassion is hard work. It’s much easier to be compassionate to others. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have stressed humans whose faces need licking.

I have been recently thinking about the differences we have when viewing the world. But I don’t mean large philosophical differences. What I mean is my eyes let me see certain things and not others. My buddy Steven is a human, not his fault, that’s just the way he was born. Apparently his eyes are somewhat different than mine. Fundamentally our eyes work the same way. They take up reflected light from an object and special cells help us paint a picture of the world.

Special cells in our eyes called cone cells collect color information from the environment. Dogs have two types of cone cells that allow us to see things that are blue and things that are yellow. Humans have three of these cone-cells in their eyes which means that when my buddy and I go to the beach he sees things a little differently than me!

There is another important difference between my eyes and Steven’s. There are a second set of special cells in the eyes of all mammals. Cells called rod photoreceptors, which both dogs and humans have, act as receptors for light. There is a special type of protein in these cells called rhodopsin. Rhodopsin is the protein that captures light.

That is where similarities between dogs and humans come to an end. In my eyes rhodopsin absorbs dimmer light, which means light that has less energy. What this means in practical terms is that my eyes can pick up details in the dark. I wouldn’t call it night vision, but my eyes are better at distinguishing details in light humans may consider dim.

Dogs have a second trick to help us see better in the dark. There is a special structure in our eyes composed of a special protein. It works by reflecting light the same way as reflectors on a bike work. When light hits a reflector the light bounces off and scatters in many directions (including the eyes of a cars’ driver) allowing them to see the bicycle. In a similar manner the light that bounces off of the “tepetum lucidum”, that special structure, of my eye allows the rod photoreceptors to pick up light it might have otherwise missed. This allows me to get a more complete picture of my environment even when there is very little light.

Unfortunately, in very intense light something called photo-bleaching happens and the protein that absorbs light is depleted. This means that I am “blinded-by-the-light” temporarily. After some time my eyes will make more protein and I will be able to see again, but my eyes take twice as long as a human eye to make protein. I have asked Steven not to throw a ball at me when we come in from a walk, but he always seems very eager to play!

Some humans have been interested in how dogs are able to see and perceive the world and have carried out experiments using videos. Unfortunately, it is difficult for humans to understand that a dog’s eye is very sensitive to movement. This means that I don’t see a video in the same way that humans do. Notice how in the video below the clip on the right isn’t as smooth as the one on the left. The right panel is how I see programming on T.V. This means that my researcher friends have to be very careful in interpreting the data from their experiments, since they shouldn’t assume that dogs and humans see the same things.

There are many differences between humans and dogs and how we each see the world. There are also many differences between how different breeds of dog see the world. Over 500 breeds exist, and that’s not even counting mixed-breeds such as myself. Here are a couple of my friends at the park so you can see some of the differences in size and physical activity. The panel on the right shows you how I see other dogs!

There are important differences in how we each see the world based on how far apart our eyes are (think about a wide-eyed Chihuahua and a broad-faced pug). Dogs with longer snouts tend to have their eyes closer together and do better in motion perception tests. This means that humans relate more with how those dogs view the world. Still, it is important to remember that not all dogs will see the world in the same way.

Steven was recently working on something. It is amazing how resilient people can be during hard times. Also, he was commenting on how people adapt to their circumstances and make the best of them. I guess he must have also realized that although dogs don’t see the world the same way as humans our adaptations allow dogs to work well with humans. If he can learn how important it is to recognize and value the differences between each other, perhaps there is hope. Perhaps we will all be able to understand the world is a different place depending on your perspective.

This was fun! Maybe some other time I’ll tell you about elephants or ducks or maybe some more about dogs. In the meantime, if you would like to know more about how dogs see the world check this out. It’s time for my nap!

Bibliography:

Byosiere, S. E., Chouinard, P. A., Howell, T. J., & Bennett, P. C. (2018). What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 25(5), 1798–1813. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1404-7

Category: Cinza’s Corner