In the movie “To Kill a Mocking Bird,” Gregory Peck’s character, Atticus Finch, famously states that, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” It turns out that considering things from other’s points of view is something we do all the time – as we try to understand our friends and families or emulate the behaviors of those we consider role models. And some professions - like being an actor or psychologist or detective – may require it. Consider any number of movies where an investigator tries to, ‘get into the mind,’ of the criminal they are tracking --and it seems to change the way detective herself feels? Is it fiction or fact that by mentally “walking in the shoes” of others we actually alter our own feelings to truly resemble those of the person whose mind we are trying to understand? Surprisingly, this important question has not yet been answered by scientific research.
According to new research led by Prof. Kevin Ochsner from Columbia University and his post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Michael Gilead of BGU, recently published in the journal PNAS, the attempt to understand the emotions of others alters the response of brain mechanisms involved in generating one’s own affective experience, providing evidence that taking the perspective of another person changes your brain to experience the feelings you are trying to simulate.
In the study, the neural activity of participants was measured as they observed gory images and tried to predict how two other individuals would react to these images. One of the individuals whose emotions were to be predicted was emotionally tough and resilient, whereas the other was sensitive and neurotic. The participants were given monetary incentives to be as accurate as possible in trying to figure out the emotions of these two target individuals.
The researchers looked at neural activity in the amygdala—a brain region that plays a crucial role in generating negative affective experience—and saw that it was less active when simulating the emotions of the tough individual vs. more active when simulating the negative emotions of the sensitive individual. The researchers also looked at a recently discovered pattern of whole-brain neural activity that accurately gauges participants’ current affective experience, and saw that this objective measure of how participants were feeling suggested that participants indeed “felt worse vs. better” when taking the perspective of the more sensitive vs. tough individuals.
In other words, these findings suggest that our brains mimic the presumed affective response of others whenever we try to understand their feelings, thereby leading to actually experience those feelings.
In the big picture, this could mean that our ability to “walk in someone else’s shoes” may bring with it desirable or undesirable affective consequences, depending on the individual and the emotions we are trying to simulate. On the positive side, it could support the ability of friends to empathically support one another, actors to be authentic in their roles, law enforcement individuals to understand the criminals they seek. And it may prove a useful tool for regulating our emotions as well – we could choose to harness the ability to take the perspective of others – for example, by asking what would a brave person do? – to help us cope in times of adversity.
Dr. Michael Gilead is a social psychologist who recently joined BGU's Department of Psychology. His fields of expertise include: social psychology and social neuroscience at large, with a specific interest in empathy and inter-group relations.
