by Alan Alda
A WEEK LATER
I arrived at the lab early again, eager to see how high on the empathy scale I had gone after a week of labeling other people’s emotions. I was fitted with the EEG cap and took the empathy tests again. Then I sat down with Matt and looked at my results. A small stone started forming in my stomach when I saw that I had scored as slightly less empathic than the week before. Matt didn’t seem fazed by this. He was happy to see results, no matter what they were; whereas I was beginning to realize I was probably not going to win the Nobel Prize for my clever idea. He reminded me that the study was still going on and told me he was being very careful about not committing the error of peeking at the results before all the data were in. So, he hadn’t begun to tabulate the results of the people who were truly being studied. I was, of course, just an observer. Still, Stockholm was drifting farther away.
Matt mentioned that the harder it is for someone to read their own emotions, the harder it is for them to read the emotions of others. Maybe I should have been working on becoming better aware of my own emotions.
I left the lab hoping Matt would have better results with the actual volunteers in the study. There still was hope because just a few days earlier I had read something Daniel Goleman, the pioneer in emotional intelligence, said: “The more sharply attentive we are, the more keenly we will sense another person’s inner state.” The volunteers would certainly be put through a week of being more sharply attentive. So maybe they would be a little more empathic.
And if not, I took comfort in the idea that I would be able to write an account of an experiment that took an interesting hypothesis and proved it wrong. This would be a helpful thing to do. It would be a service to mankind. In other words, I was slightly depressed.
NAMING EMOTIONS: DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK?
I began to wonder: What if I’m kidding myself? Then I got an email from Matt. He had some preliminary results.
I got to his office building early on a cold November day and found the door locked. I stood out in the icy wind for twenty minutes until I realized I was at the wrong building. I called him and in a few minutes he came smiling around the corner to fetch me. As we walked to the office, I was hoping I’d understand his results better than I understood his address.
We sat down in his office and I couldn’t hide my wish for good news.
“To be clear,” he said, “these are just the preliminary results. We still have more folks coming in. I’m not willing to etch them in stone, so to speak.”
“Right.”
“We have enough of the sample now that we’re able to at least see some of the patterns that are emerging. A few of them really did surprise me.”
“Like what?”
“One thing that was nice was that most people actually did the task,” Matt said. “The range is really quite broad. One person reported in only twice during the week, but somebody else did it 132 times….The average was 48. I would have been happy if we got once a day.”
He reviewed the study with me. The participants were divided into three groups. The first group was asked to mentally figure out the emotion of the person they were talking to and use the smartphone app to name the emotion and send it in, the second group would just note the hair color of the other person and then send that in, and the third group would simply report that they had interacted with someone.
“I’m thinking about it as three different conditions that are decreasing in intensity in terms of what we’re asking them to do. The improvement we saw was greater for the first two than for the third. Remember, the first two are really the more active ones. In the first two, you’re saying, ‘I want you to notice the person you’re interacting with.’ In both of those conditions, we saw greater improvement than the third condition, which was just noting there was an interaction.”
So, the more active they were in studying the other person, the better they did on the empathy test at the end of the week.
And that brought him to another finding. “This is the one that really blew me away and surprised me,” Matt said. “Let me show you this graph.” He took out a piece of graph paper. “There’s this wide range in terms of how much people actually logged in—how much they did this thing at all over the course of the week. The question is: If people do more of it, do they do better than the people who did the same thing but did less of it?”
“For instance,” I said, “somebody who paid attention to someone’s emotions 132 times…would they be expected to do better in the empathy test than somebody who did it only twice?”
“Exactly,” Matt said. “And the answer is, they did.”
The more they practiced it, the better they got at it: a “dose response relationship”—but only in the condition where they paid attention to emotions and faces.
THE BENEFITS OF PAYING ATTENTION
And then Matt noticed something else in the data. At first, he had assumed that identifying emotions and noticing hair color were two very different states of mind. But what if he considered them as similar? After all, both groups were being asked to do something that the third group wasn’t: simply to pay attention to the person they were talking to. To notice something about them.
“The question that arose,” Matt said, “was, is there something special that comes simply from that orientation, simply attending to the other person?”
The answer was yes.
His graduate student, Cara Keifer, analyzed the results and found that by deliberately paying attention, participants do improve in one aspect of empathy—their subjective sense of their emotional connection to others, or, as Matt said, “how much you feel that you’re affected by other people’s feelings.” At the end of the week, when participants answered questions on how affected they were by others’ feelings, without being told how they rated at the beginning of the week, their scores were higher.
In addition, something interesting emerged from the study about the two-way nature of communication. When someone speaks to us, we need to be alert to that person. And this readiness for communication was speeded up among the participants when they practiced paying attention. When Cara combined the data from Groups 1 and 2 (where they noted both emotions and hair color), the participants were ready to attend to the other person more quickly. As Matt described it, “This early, obligatory, social perception process [being alert to the other person] seems to happen faster after one week of [the experiment].”
This all sounded pretty good to me, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t reading more into it than I should. I asked Matt to put it as plainly as he could.
“To try to spell it out,” he said, “noting and attending to emotions does seem to benefit one’s ability to accurately read others’ emotions after a single week, so long as you practice it every day (like with a muscle). On the other hand, simply paying attention to other people at all seems to make you feel more emotionally connected to them, and even primes your ability to quickly attend to social interactions as soon as they come your way.”
So this idea of actively paying attention to the people we’re communicating with not only makes intuitive sense, the results from this small study suggest it’s actually not such a bad idea to give it a try.
There are even some simple tests you can take on the Internet to see if it’s working.
CHAPTER 13
Working Alone on Building Empathy
THE “READING THE MIND IN THE EYES” TEST
In order to determine a person’s level of empathy, Simon Baron-Cohen, the British psychologist, developed a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes. You’re shown a series of pictures of people in the throes of one emotion or another. You have to choose, from a list of four emotions, which one the person in the picture is feeling. Simple enough. Except that all you see is the person’s eyes. It’s not so easy when the emotions are subtle.
Researchers at Emory University used this test to see if meditation would improve people’s ability to read emotions in other people’s faces. P
articipants took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, then half of them received meditation training and the other half simply attended lectures on general well-being. After the first group had studied meditation, both groups took the emotion-reading test again. Those who had studied meditation had scores that were 4.6 percent higher than before meditation training. That didn’t sound like much to me, although those who had not studied meditation showed no improvement at all. And, interestingly, while participants were reading emotions in the eyes, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans revealed that the meditators were more likely to show activity in the regions of the brain thought to be linked to empathy. It was a small study, but it suggested that more studies would be useful. So I decided to do an even smaller study and try it on myself.
I realized that a study involving one participant is not actually a study; it’s more like a mental aberration, like taking your temperature every hour. But that’s my style and I’m stuck with it. Unfortunately, we don’t have an fMRI machine at our house, although if they were cheaper, I’m sure I’d have bought one. Instead, I would check my results just using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.
I took the test online, which anyone can do, and which is a lot of fun. There were thirty-six pictures of eyes expressing different emotions, and I identified thirty-three correctly. I was actually disappointed by this result, because I didn’t see how a week or two of meditation was going to raise my score. It was probably already as high as it was going to go.
MEDITATION
There was another slight hitch. I didn’t actually know how to meditate. Most of the meditation I had read about describes the process in strong religious or mystical language, none of which I was prepared to accept or even understand. One description of meditation began with a list of benefits that would accrue to my chakras. I had only a vague notion of what chakras were, and the description didn’t help: “The chakra centers are like energetic motors within the mental/emotional/physical energy field we usually identify as ‘me.’ ” This wasn’t for the me I identify with as me.
I’ve never seen my liver, but I have an easier time believing I have one than that I have a chakra. No offense to people who are in touch with their chakras; it’s just not for me.
I was going to need the help of somebody who meditated and who could describe it in terms I could understand. I needed a purely secular version of meditation.
In talking about it with friends, I discovered I already knew two people who meditated secularly. One was the actress Marlo Thomas and the other was the Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer. They were from two different worlds, but they were ideal people to learn from.
Not only is Marlo a skilled actress, an occupation that requires empathy, she’s also one of the country’s top fundraisers. She and her staff raise almost a billion dollars a year for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. To raise that much money, she has to be an expert communicator, able to explain the scientific dimensions of the hospital’s research and to understand and appeal to the hearts of her donors. And their hearts’ desires. Like salesmanship, fundraising only works when you keep in mind the other person’s needs and not your own.
Stephen Breyer speaks openly about the need for empathy in judicial decisions. As he said in one interview, “When you’re a judge and you spend your whole day in front of a computer screen, it’s important to be able to imagine what other people’s lives might be like, lives that your decisions will affect.” In conversation, he’s clear in maintaining that the awareness of how decisions will affect people doesn’t diminish a judge’s attention to the law. Rather, I get the impression he feels that a dose of empathy enhances the law and moves it closer to the greater good. This is what he means, I think, when he says, “This empathy, this ability to envision the practical consequences on one’s contemporaries of a law or a legal decision, seems to me a crucial quality in a judge.”
So, if there were two people from whom I could learn something about meditation, I couldn’t do better than Marlo and Stephen. I talked with them separately and in each case the lesson was surprisingly short and to the point: Pay attention to your breathing. That was pretty much it, with a little advice on returning to concentrating on the breathing when my thoughts wander. I decided to sit quietly every morning for twenty minutes and concentrate on breathing in and breathing out. I’d see if a few weeks of that increased my empathy when I took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test again.
Then I saw something online that made me think about trying to name other people’s emotions again.
In a talk by Helen Riess, the psychiatrist who trains doctors to be more empathic, she suggested that we could increase our empathy by mentally labeling the emotions of others—just what I had begun doing. “When you’re with someone,” she said, “try labeling…is Jack upset? Is Jane excited?…It’ll change how you hear what they’re saying.” This was almost exactly what I had come up with myself, and she was saying it makes a difference. I decided to keep doing it.
And there were other exercises that sounded promising.
In another part of her TED talk, Helen explores the importance of gazing into another person’s eyes and the need we all have to be seen, to know we’ve been seen. The gaze changes us.
That struck a chord with me, because I know how important it is to look into the eyes of an audience when I’m giving a talk. I don’t just scan the audience; I catch the eye of individual people and hold their gaze for a few seconds. When I do that, something happens between us. I’m actually talking to someone, not just saying the words I’ve prepared, and as a result something changes in my tone of voice. It becomes more personal and direct. And I get reinforcement from the warmth I see in their faces.
OXYTOCIN AND BONDING
I was beginning to see in what I was reading that eye gaze has an effect on brain chemistry that may be important to communication. Hundreds of papers published in the last few years have dealt with a molecule called oxytocin and its positive effect on us, some of which is specifically tied to eye gaze.
Oxytocin influences how much we trust other people and bond with them. The oversimplified moniker for oxytocin is “the love hormone.” The most startling research (at least, the most startling to me) showed that when dog owners gaze into the eyes of their pets, the oxytocin levels in both the owners and the dogs increase. Does the jump in the level of oxytocin increase your overall willingness to trust in general? I don’t know; but of all the possible ways to bring about a close connection, there would be none much odder than gazing lovingly at your dog in order to communicate better with your spouse. Still, there’s something about gazing into the eyes of another person—or a friendly dog—that seems to be tied to bonding.
I was coming across an interesting collection of suggestions for how to raise your empathy level by doing everyday things—some backed by research and others just by intuition.
The magazine Psychology Today has recommended this: “Watch TV with the volume down and practice your nonverbal interpretation by reading what each character is feeling and talking about. This is best done with subtle dramas, not action movies.” I was already doing something a lot like this. I was watching crime shows from Scandinavia. Unlike our crime shows in the United States, series like Wallander and The Bridge from Sweden have characters with a rich emotional life. Even the villains have families they care about and sometimes cry over. Watching those shows, I was spending an hour a day studying the actors’ faces, reading their emotions and generally trying to figure out what’s going on with them internally: Who’s lying? Who’s truly suspicious, or just a Swedish red herring? I rated my success by how early in the show I could figure out who was up to no good.
I do know how strange this sounds. And possibly useless. But it’s fun. What’s harder for me is the suggestion a number of people have made that a good way to increase one’s empathy is by reading fiction—not potboilers, but good, solid, literary fiction, where the author delves into the
emotional life of the characters with depth and sensitivity. And studies have shown that reading literary fiction improves Theory of Mind, as well.
This sounds like it ought to work, but I’m impatient reading fiction. So much so that, in order to force myself to read it, I belong to a book club that only reads novels. Otherwise, I would probably stick with books about science and history. The other members of the club, who are all highly articulate and literary, can’t understand this blind spot of mine.
“Why don’t you like novels?” they ask me.
“Because,” I say, “you can just tell they’re making it up.”
This is usually followed by a compassionate pause while they rearrange their silverware.
Certainly, there’s fiction I love, and I ought to read more of it. Novels give us the chance to enter into another person’s life, to feel what they feel, to see life through their eyes, to enter their inner world. It’s probably for this reason that Justice Stephen Breyer loves Proust. He told the New York Review of Books, “It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the different character types, but also every emotion, every imaginable situation. Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone.”
If this is true, and if to be touched is to be enabled to touch others, I ought to give in and try it. In fact, I decided to try all these suggestions at once.