47 laughing epidemics: Robert Provine’s Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000) describes kuru, a degenerative disease found among cannibals in the highlands of New Guinea. It is marked by excessive laughter (including laughing at one’s own stumbling and falling) even though the disease invariably has a fatal outcome.
48 when young apes put on their playface: In a frame-by-frame analysis of orangutans, Marina Davila Ross found involuntary facial mimicry. If one ape showed a playface—even in the absence of any tickling, wrestling, or jumping—its partner would within a second copy the expression (Davila Ross et al., 2007).
48 “paroxystic respiratory cycle”: From Oliver Walusinski and Bertrand Deputte (2004). Charles Darwin already commented on the yawn as a universal reflex: “Seeing a dog & horse & man yawn, makes me feel how much all animals are built on one structure” (Darwin’s Notebook M, 1838). Our own chimpanzee study is being conducted by Matthew Campbell and Devyn Carter. Like other forms of basic empathy, however, catching a yawn is not limited to primates: Human yawns make dogs yawn (Joly-Mascheroni et al., 2008).
49 copying of small body movements: Strictly speaking, we don’t copy yawns, because yawning is an involuntary reflex. All we can say is that yawning by one person induces yawns in another. From an interview with Steve Platek: “[T]he more empathetic you are, the more likely it is that you’ll identify with a yawner and experience a yawn yourself” (Rebecca Skloot, New York Times, December 11, 2005).
50 baboon troop gathered: This incident happened in April 2007 at Emmen Zoo, in the Netherlands. Another “mass hysteria” occurred when six newly arrived penguins introduced a strange habit to a colony at the San Francisco Zoo, with all birds swimming in circles for weeks. They started every morning until they staggered totally exhausted out of the pool at dusk. “We’ve lost complete control,” complained the penguin keeper (Associated Press, January 16, 2003).
50 horses were trapped: This spectacular horse rescue was set to music on the Internet: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6vSvOw-4U4.
51 husky named Isobel: Struck by blindness, this dog had been removed from her team, but was returned when she stopped eating (Canadian Press, November 19, 2007). Isobel’s story reminds me of Darwin’s (1871, p. 77) account of “an old and completely blind pelican, which was very fat.” Darwin speculated that other birds might have been feeding the blind one, but I wonder if it couldn’t have been that this bird, like Isobel, accompanied others to feeding grounds relying on hearing and air flow in the tight formations that pelicans are known for. But then the question still remains how a blind bird catches fish.
52 “Three times when this happened”: Jane Goodall (1990, p. 116).
53 children with autism: Eleven-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder yawn as much as other children of the same age, but don’t yawn more while watching videotaped yawns, whereas typically developing children show a marked increase (Senju et al., 2007).
53 neural resonance: Obviously, mirror neurons could play a role in the copying of mouth movements and facial mimicry (e.g., Ferrari et al., 2003), but this still does not solve the correspondence problem, which requires preexisting knowledge of which body part of another individual corresponds with one’s own.
53 dolphins mimicked people: Louis Herman (2002) described dolphin imitation, and Bruce Moore (1992) did the same for an African gray parrot. The bird not only mimicked sounds but also body movements. He’d say “Ciao” while waving goodbye with a foot or wing, or say “Look at my tongue” while sticking out his tongue, just as Moore had shown him. This bird thus solved the correspondence problem with a totally different species.
54 swagger with arms hanging: White House press release (September 2, 2004) quoting George W. Bush: “Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‘walking.’”
54 Arthur Miller: Cited in Emotional Contagion by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson (1994, p. 83), which book provides an excellent overview of mimicry and emotional contagion, and is the source of some of my human examples.
54 Give a zoo ape a broom: Anne Russon (1996) describes orangutans in a sanctuary imitating human caretakers, such as stringing up hammocks and washing dishes. They also mimic undesirable (i.e., unrewarded) activities such as siphoning gasoline from a drum.
54 white-coated experimenter: Apes have traditionally suffered from unfair comparisons with human children, such as when only the apes face a species barrier during testing (e.g., Tomasello, 1999; Povinelli, 2000; Hermann et al., 2007). It is time to move toward ape-to-ape testing, which has greater ecological validity and has produced remarkable breakthroughs in recent years (de Waal, 2001; Boesch, 2007; de Waal et al., 2008).
56 imitation is a way of reaching a goal: The classical definition of imitation is to learn an act by seeing it done (Thorndike, 1898). This definition covers the term’s common meaning—including the my-finger-got-stuck routine described in the text—but narrower definitions have gained popularity. So-called true imitation entails recognition of another’s goal as well as copying of the other’s technique to reach this goal (Whiten and Ham, 1992). I prefer the older, broader sense of the term, however, for the simple reason that I believe all forms of imitation to be evolutionarily and neurologically continuous.
56 Andy Whiten: A professor of psychology and primatology at St. Andrews University, Whiten developed the two-action paradigm to test ape imitation. He teamed up with our Living Links Center, in Atlanta, to apply this paradigm to group-living chimps. Results strongly support imitation in apes (e.g., Bonnie et al., 2006; Horner and Whiten, 2007; Horner et al., 2006; Whiten et al., 2005), and relate to the ongoing debate about animal “culture” (e.g., de Waal, 2001; Mc-Grew, 2004; Whiten, 2005).
58 Adult apes are potentially dangerous: Even a young, relatively small chimpanzee has the muscle strength of several grown men bundled into one. Adult chimpanzees are totally beyond unarmed human control, and have been known to kill people.
59 a ghost box: Lydia Hopper demonstrated 225 food deliveries from a box controlled by transparent fish lines, before giving the chimps a chance to manipulate the same box without the lines. They had no clue what to do (Hopper et al., 2007).
59 ask a pianist to pick out his own performance: Saying that mental processes run “via our bodies” is shorthand for saying that they run via neural representations and associated proprioceptive sensations of our bodies in our brain. The examples given are perception (Proffitt, 2006) and pianist self-recognition (Repp and Knoblich, 2004).
60 using a heavy rock as hammer: Video by Sarah Marshall-Pescini and Andrew Whiten (2008). What I mean by a “shortcut to imitation” is that not all imitation or emulation requires an actual understanding of the other’s goals, methods, and rewards. Unconscious motor mimicry bypasses such cognitive appraisals, producing rapid learning based on bodily closeness to the model (cf. Bonding- and Identification-based Observational Learning, or BIOL; de Waal, 2001).
61 “Once I saw an elephant mother”: Katy Payne (1998, p. 63) in Silent Thunder.
62 When a human experimenter imitates: Described by Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore (1995). Macaques, too, recognize when they are being imitated (Paukner et al., 2005), and apes even test out the imitator, as human children do (Haun and Call, 2008).
62 The Dutch may be notoriously stingy: Dutch restaurant bills include service charges, hence tips are small. They’re nevertheless higher for waitresses instructed by scientists to repeat orders (van Baaren et al., 2003).
62 Like chameleons: Human copycat tendencies are in fact known as the “chameleon effect” (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999).
64 “the most complicated opus”: Joe Marshall and Jito Sugardjito (1986, p. 155).
65 a good siamang marriage: Thomas Geissmann and Mathias Orgeldinger (2000). The quote comes from an interview in Spiegel Online (February 6, 2006). Similar vocal convergence occurs in pairs of male bottlenose dolphins that have formed an alliance: The stronger their bond, the more the
males’ vocalizations sound alike (Wells, 2003).
65 Einfühlung: The terminology came from an earlier German psychologist, Robert Vischer. In the phrasing of Lipps, Einfühlung permits us to gain knowledge about the other self (das andere Ich) or the foreign self (das fremde Ich). See also Schloßberger (2005) and Gallese (2005). The German language is rich in variations on this terminology, from feeling into, feeling with, and suffering with others—each process denoted by its own single word—but also opposites, such as Schadenfreude (literally: hurt-joy), that is, getting pleasure out of someone else’s pain.
66 subliminal presentation: Ulf Dimberg and co-workers (2000). Recent work by Stephanie Preston and Brent Stansfield (2008) shows that the leakage of facial information even includes the conceptual, semantic level.
67 emotional contagion: Defined as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (Hatfield et al., 1994, p. 5).
67 one baby crying: Studies on contagious crying report a stronger response in female than male infants. Some studies have explored a range of other sounds. Human infants respond strongest to real cries produced by other infants, not playbacks of their own cries, cries of older children, chimpanzee screams, or computer-generated wails (Sagi and Hoffman, 1976; Martin and Clark, 1982).
68 “We haven’t yet solved the problem of God”: From Tom Stoppard’s (2002) play The Coast of Utopia.
70 One rat’s distress: Joseph Lucke and Daniel Batson (1980) tried to determine if rats are concerned about the companions they give shocks to, and concluded that they are not. This does not deny, of course, that they can be emotionally affected by another’s distress.
71 The last mouse showed more signs: Jeffrey Mogil on National Public Radio (July 5, 2006). The study on commiserating mice was published by Dale Langford et al. (2006).
73 Oscar the Cat: David Dosa (2007), a geriatrician, published “A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat,” saying: “His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has provided companionship to those who otherwise would have died alone” (p. 329).
75 avoid unpleasant sights and sounds: Inasmuch as self-protective altruism seeks to reduce negative arousal caused by the state another finds itself in, it is based on empathy. I am using the altruism label here in the biological sense: behavior that benefits another at a cost to the self regardless of whether the effect on the other is intended (chapter 2).
76 “a much more skilled interpreter”: Quoted from Robert Miller (1967, p. 131).
76 I avoid causing pain: The ethics of animal research is subject to never-ending, often acrimonious debate. Since my own research doesn’t aim at solving pressing medical problems, I feel there is little justification for invasive procedures. My personal two rules of thumb are that (1) I work only with group-living (as opposed to singly housed) primates, and (2) I use relatively stress-free procedures, defined as procedures that I wouldn’t mind applying to human volunteers.
77 grooming slows down the heart: The monkey project was led and published by Filippo Aureli and co-workers (1999). A heart-rate study on geese by Claudia Wascher and co-workers (2008) found that birds implanted with transmitters would get emotionally aroused by the mere sight of their mate being in trouble with others, thus suggesting emotional contagion in birds.
78 empathy literature is completely human-centered: A notable exception was psychologist William McDougall (1908, p. 93), who did recognize empathy in gregarious animals, offering us the following insightful characterization of empathy: “The cement that binds all animal societies together, renders the actions of all members of a group harmonious, and allows them to reap some of the prime advantages of social life.”
78 automatic reactivation of neural circuits: Empathy rests on a property of the nervous system that (1) activates its own neural substrates for emotion and action upon perceiving emotions and actions in others, and (2) uses these activated states within the self to access and understand the other. This idea goes back to Lipps’s (1903) writing on innere Nachahmung (i.e., inner mimicry). Stephanie and I reformulated this as the perception-action mechanism of empathy (Preston and de Waal, 2002). Even while merely imagining another’s situation, humans automatically activate these neural substrates. Thus, when subjects are asked to put themselves into another’s shoes, their brain activation is similar to when they recall similar situations that involved themselves (Preston et al., 2007).
79 Pink Floyd: In “Echoes,” on the album Meddle (1971). Band member Roger Waters noted in an interview: “[It] has a lyric about strangers passing on the street that’s become a recurrent theme for me, the idea of recognizing oneself in others and feeling empathy and a connection to the human race” (USA Today, August 6, 1999).
79 The discovery of mirror neurons: Vilayanur Ramachandran: “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments” (Edge.org, June 1, 2000). How exactly mirror neurons translate into imitation and empathy remains unclear, however, but see Vittorio Gallese and co-workers (2004), and Marco Iacoboni (2005). Mirror neurons have also been found in birds, so that the perception-action mechanism probably goes all the way back to the shared reptilian ancestor of mammals and birds (Prather et al., 2008).
79 empathize with everybody: Commentaries on Preston and de Waal (2002).
80 Identification is such a basic precondition: In the monkey experiments mentioned before, too, familiarity enhanced empathic responses (Miller et al., 1959; Masserman et al., 1964).
80 when groups compete: For in-group biases in empathy, see Stefan Stürmer and co-workers (2005).
80 “dechimpized”: Jane Goodall (1986, p. 532).
81 entire body expresses emotions: Rhesus monkeys avoid pictures of conspecifics in a fearful pose, which arouse a stronger response than negatively conditioned stimuli (Miller et al., 1959).
81 the body posture won out: With emotionally congruent pictures (i.e., face and body express the same emotion), the reaction time was on average 774 milliseconds, whereas with emotionally incongruent pictures (i.e., face and body express opposite emotions) it was 840 milliseconds, both still under one second (Meeren et al., 2005).
82 Emotional contagion thus relies: Beatrice de Gelder (2006) contrasts the Body First Theory (also: the James-Lange theory) with the Emotion First Theory. The latter rests on two closely integrated levels: a fast, reflexlike process, not unlike the perception-action mechanism, and a slower, more cognitive appraisal of stimuli in context.
82 the face remains the emotion highway: The face is the seat of individual identity. Whom we are dealing with determines identification, which in turn affects our reactions.
83 empathy needs a face: This felicitous phrase as well as the example of Parkinson’s patients come from Jonathan Cole (2001).
83 “I live in the facial expression”: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 146).
83 “I have returned to the planet”: The anonymous woman with the face transplant: “Je suis revenue sur la planète des humains. Ceux qui ont un visage, un sourire, des expressions faciales qui leur permettent de communiquer” (“La Femme aux Deux Visages,” Le Monde, June 7, 2007).
CHAPTER 4: SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES
84 “Sympathy … cannot in any sense”: Adam Smith (1759, p. 317).
84 “Empathy may be uniquely well suited”: Martin Hoffman (1981, p. 133).
84 Nadia Kohts: Her full name was Nadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts. She lived from 1889 to 1963 and was the wife of Aleksandr Fiodorovich Kohts, founding director of Moscow’s State Darwin Museum.
85 among the stuffed animals in the basement: In 2007, Moscow’s Darwin Museum celebrated i
ts hundredth anniversary, displaying historical photographs that the staff had shown me of Kohts doing her pioneering research. Apart from her work with Yoni and other primates, I saw pictures of her accepting an object handed to her by a large cockatoo, and her holding out a tray with a choice of three cups toward a macaw. Her tests had a distinctly modern look, and Kohts often had a smile on her face, evidently liking her work. She tested ape tool use at the same time as Wolfgang Köhler, and may be the discoverer of the matching-to -sample technique still universally applied in visual cognition research. The only book (out of seven) by Kohts translated into English is Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child (2002), originally published in Russian in 1935.
86 “If I pretend to be crying”: Ladygina-Kohts (1935, p. 121).
88 “The definition of sympathy”: Lauren Wispé (1991, p. 68).
89 Abraham Lincoln: The story goes that Lincoln halted his carriage to attend to a squealing pig mired in the mud, and dragged it out while soiling his good pants. There even exists a children’s book, Abe Lincoln and the Muddy Pig (Krensky, 2002).
89 Good Samaritan: This experiment on constraints on human sympathy has become a classic. It was conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973).
90 thousands of consolations: Consolation behavior is so common in apes (de Waal and van Roosmalen, 1979) that at least a dozen studies now offer quantitative details. Recently, Orlaith Fraser and co-workers (2008) confirmed that consolation has a stress-reducing effect on its recipients. The large-scale analysis referred to in the text is being conducted by M. Teresa Romero on our computer records of more than two hundred thousand spontaneous social events among chimpanzees.
91 “Impressive indeed is the thoughtfulness”: The quote is from Robert Yerkes (1925, p. 131). Yerkes was so struck by the concern shown by Prince Chim for Panzee, his terminally ill companion, that he admitted, “If I were to tell of his altruistic and obviously sympathetic behavior towards Panzee I should be suspected of idealizing an ape” (p. 246).
The Age of Empathy Page 26