week 3 post 1
Post 1
The week overview
1)Spending money on others boosts happiness more than spending on one's self
2)Supportive behavior activates reward circuitry in the brain
3)Volunteering leads to better life satisfaction and health
What is compassion?
What motivates kindness?
-empathy
-social status
-gratitude
-COMPASSION!
Defining Compassion,
“The feeling that arises when you witness another suffering and want to help relieve that suffering”
Versus
empathy:Sense or understanding of others’ emotions, but don't necessarily feel moved to help
Mimicry: Imitate others’ emotions and/or behavior
Pity: concern for someone felt to be inferior to yourself
Compassion as a primary pathway to human happiness, idea starting around 2500 years ago when there was a great influx of writing and philosophy
-soldiers are overwhelmed with sympathy breakthroughs, that when they encounter face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their adversaries,their lives are on the line, instead of pulling the trigger, they often sort of break down with sympathy and weeping in a sense of common humanity.- jonathan glover compassion!
Alfred wallace felt that evolution was about physical structure and than emotions and morals and what not were instilled in us by God
Thomas Huxley felt that there was no way evolution could have crafted or designed compassion into the human nervous system
They had the idea that it was a cultural idea, set of norms society agrees to
Charles Darwin however felt that sympathy or compassion was in fact our strongest instinct because it allowed us to create and care for the largest number of offspring
Compassion was seen as weak through history
“War is inevitable” “competition is natural” “altruism is an illusion” “humans are selfish”
However
Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest
The biological basis of compassion
-psychologist Jack Nitschke found in an experiment that when mothers looked at pictures of their babies, they not only reported feeling more compassionate love than when they saw other babies; they also demonstrated unique activity in a region of their brains associated with the positive emotions. Nitschke’s finding suggests that this region of the brain is attuned to the first objects of our compassion—our offspring.
-Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University found that when subjects contemplated harm being done to others, a similar network of regions in their brains lit up. Our children and victims of violence—two very different subjects, yet united by the similar neurological reactions they provoke
-Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desire.
-The autonomic nervous system (ANS), regulates blood flow and breathing patterns for different types of actions, for example when we feel threatened our heart and breathing rates increase to prepare to confront or flee the threat
ANS profile of compassion-when young children and adults feel compassion for others, this emotion is reflected in very real physiological changes: Their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which prepares them not to fight or flee, but to approach and soothe.
-oxytocin promotes long-term bonds and commitments, as well as the kind of nurturing behavior, It may account for that overwhelming feeling of warmth and connection we feel toward our offspring or loved ones
breastfeeding and massages elevate oxytocin levels in the blood (as does eating chocolate). In some recent studies I’ve conducted, we have found that when people perform behaviors associated with compassionate love—warm smiles, friendly hand gestures, affirmative forward leans—their bodies produce more oxytocin.
Signs of compassion
According to evolutionary theory, if compassion is truly vital to human survival, it would manifest itself through nonverbal signals. Such signals would serve many adaptive functions.
-There is a particular facial expression of compassion, characterized by oblique eyebrows and a concerned gaze. When someone shows this expression, they are then more likely to help others.
-touch could be another nonverbal que, the touch experiment with the barrier in week 2 notes
Motivating altruism
-does compassion promote altruistic behavior?
-Daniel Batson has made a persuasive case that it does. According to Batson, when we encounter people in need or distress, we often imagine what their experience is like
-Batson exposed participants to another’s suffering. He then had some participants imagine that person’s pain, but he allowed those participants to act in a self-serving fashion—for example, by leaving the experiment.
-one study had participants watch another person receive shocks when he failed a memory task. Then they were asked to take shocks on behalf of the participant, who, they were told, had experienced a shock trauma as a child. Those participants who had reported that they felt compassion for the other individual volunteered to take several shocks for that person, even when they were free to leave the experiment.
Cultivating compassion
-Recent neuroscience studies suggest that positive emotions are less heritable—that is, less determined by our DNA—than the negative emotions. Instead, it’s a trait that we can develop in an appropriate context
-children securely attached to their parents, compared to insecurely attached children, tend to be sympathetic to their peers as early as age three and a half, according to the research of Everett Waters, Judith Wippman, and Alan Sroufe. In contrast, researchers Mary Main and Carol George found that abusive parents who resort to physical violence have less empathetic children.
-Pearl and Samuel Oliner found that children who have compassionate parents tend to be more altruistic.
Terms of happiness:
Kindness: everyday term describing behaviors that involve being friendly, generous, or considerate. Pro-social is the term favored by scientists to refer to kind, helpful behaviors or states, but it is also quite broad.
Compassion:Literally means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you witness another’s suffering and feel motivated to help relieve that suffering.
Altruism:when we act to promote someone else’s welfare, even at a risk or cost to ourselves.
Empathy: the ability to sense other people’s emotions (affective empathy), coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling (cognitive empathy).
Sympathy:means "to feel together," is sometimes used synonymously with compassion
Pity: Feeling sorry for the suffering or misfortune of someone else. Suggests to a power imbalance.
Why does compassion matter?
-images, experiences, and being presented with other people who are suffering is a trigger for compassion
Stages of compassion
1)empathy
2)feelings (distress or better caregiving response)
3)judgements about the self, others, and setting
How compassion can lead to happiness:
-empathy makes you more socially adept
-reduced distress, heightened caregiving is good for health and wellbeing
-judging yourself as capable which is linked to resilience and happiness
-causes reaction in vagus nerve/system
-compassion makes people feel more similar to vulnerable others, pride makes one feel more different to vulnerable others
-compassion olympians. So compassion olympians are people who have spent years, tens of thousands of hours, really trying to develop their strength at compassion. And these people are coming from a Tibetan Buddhist tradition and spend many many many many hours of life meditating on how to be as compassionate as possible.
-these people reacted more strongly to this distress.
-asking to extend compassion love and understanding, this caused systematic engagement of the caregiving circuitry that we talked about earlier in the course
-compassion training subdues stress levels, reduces amygdala response, can boost pleasure from helping others
Measuring Compassion in the Body
Is there a biological fingerprint for compassion?
-Zoe Taylor at Purdue and the other by Jenny Stellar at UC Berkeley, have found that the answer may lie in the Vagus nerve.
-parasympathetic branch (PNS) as the “rest and digest” branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls bodily functions that we’re not aware of when we’re relaxed and feeling content. The PNS is also called the “feed and breed” branch—and recently, social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson added the label “tend and befriend” to the PNS, suggesting that it also supports functions that enable social engagement and nurturing behaviors.
-Steve Porges of the University of Chicago pioneered PolyVagal theory, which suggested that the Vagus nerve fundamentally drives human social affiliation—the motivations and behaviors involved in approaching others in trusting, affectionate, and cooperative ways
-can measure this through an electrocardiogram related to vagus nerve.
-The Vagus may be key to the emergence of compassionate behavior during development as well as day-to-day experiences of compassion.
-Warm, sympathetic, and authoritative parents are like co-pilots for the Vagus nerve in helping children to develop their ability to feel sympathy and compassion—and then to act on that impulse.
Kindness
-volunteerism enhances your wellbeing and life expectancy
How kindness benefits wellbeing:
-less loneliness, stronger immune system, better health overall
-people who volunteer have fewer aches and pains, less depression, and better overall health
-helping others protects from heart disease-twice as much as aspirin
-ages 55 and up: volunteering for 2 or more charities reduces overall likelihood of death by 44%
-giving gives you a bigger happiness benefit than spending on the self.
Being Kind Makes Kids Happy
-toddlers who shared a toy with someone else appeared happier than toddlers who simply played with the toy
-Twenty toddlers, all a month or two shy of their second birthday, were introduced to a monkey puppet who, they were told, “liked treats.” Soon afterward, an experimenter “found” eight treats—either Teddy Grahams or Goldfish crackers—and gave them to the toddler, saying all the treats belonged to that child.
-he children appeared happier when they gave away a treat than when they received a treat, and they displayed the greatest happiness when they gave away one of their own treats; this “costly giving” even made them happier than giving away a found treat at no cost to themselves
-“It’s definitely plausible that children have learned that adults value kind behavior and therefore smiled more because they expected to get rewards from adults when they gave away treats,”
-“The practical implications of this positive feedback loop could be that engaging in one kind deed (e.g., taking your mom to lunch) would make you happier, and the happier you feel, the more likely you are to do another kind act,” says Lara Aknin, the study’s lead author. “This might also be harnessed by charitable organizations: Reminding donors of earlier donations could make them happy, and experiencing happiness might lead to making a generous gift.”
Evolutionary reasons for Kindness:
1)promotes survival of our offspring
2)reciprocal altruism
3)sexual selection processes
in these 37 different countries kindness, or good character, was the most important attribute in people’s basis or their self-reported basis of why they
Is kindness physically attractive?
-physically attractive people are perceived and treated more positively than physically unattractive people. But here’s the thing: I have definitely met attractive people who went from hot to not the second they opened their mouths!
-The researchers randomly assigned Chinese participants to one of three groups and had them rate 60 photographs of unfamiliar Chinese female faces, After two weeks, the participants rated the same pictures again. But this time, one group of participants were given positive personality descriptors of the people in the photographs, During the first rating, there were no significant differences in ratings of attractiveness among the three groups. But after the second rating, the group given positive personality descriptors of the people in the photographs rated them the most attractive, and the group given negative personality descriptors of the people in the photographs gave the lowest ratings to the photographs.
-lot of perception is based off of nonphysical traits.
-I agree with the researchers that we should be particularly wary of basing physical attractiveness strictly on ratings of photographs by strangers or even on first impressions of physical appearance without at least learning a bit more about their character.
Biological connection between kindness and happiness
what does pleasure in the brain do for behavior?
Well, a long history of science tells us that when we feel pleasure after something happens or after we behave in a particular way, we’re much more likely to behave in that way again. Associative learning , Reward circuit
Study that gave people money and it said well it is going to this charity you like instead of you and people didn't care where the money was going cause of kindness.
- the reward circuitry is turned to giving, in other words it comes online when we’re generous or altruistic in the same way that it does when we get things that are pleasurable
RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS 5 times a day
Many people don't agree that compassion is good for happiness because humans are selfish and it is a weak thing to do but obviously we know otherwise
We are born prematurely and our head grows which is why we need to be cared for so long but its also why we need compassion
What gets in the way of compassion and kindness?
-being busy, we have priorities
-videogames, can increase aggression, reduces your cooperative kind tendencies
-encountering people who feel they are from different groups than you, ex different political or ethnic groups. Transcend that us them idea
How to Increase Your Compassion Bandwidth
Why does compassion collapse
--people predict that they will feel more compassion when many are suffering than when a single victim is suffering. Moreover, some attach moral weight to this prediction: if there are more lives at stake, then we should feel more compassion and do more to help., Rather than feeling more compassion when more people are suffering, people ironically feel less—a phenomenon my colleague Keith Payne and I call “the collapse of compassion.”
-Compassion for many victims can be seen as an expensive proposition—one that will not make much of a difference. People may also become worried about being overwhelmed or burned out by compassion for many sufferers.
How do we increase compassion?
-increase the sense that helping will make a difference
-Streamline helping opportunities to make them seem less costly
-Train your brain for compassion over the long term
How to Make Giving Feel Good
-individuals who spent money on others—who engaged in what we call “prosocial spending”—were measurably happier than those who spent money on themselves, even though there were no differences between the two groups at the beginning of the day.
-How people spent the money mattered much more than how much of it they got.
-A survey conducted by the Gallup World Poll between 2006 and 2008 found that in 120 out of 136 countries, people who donated to charity in the past month reported greater satisfaction with life.
-But these findings don’t mean that people always experience pure, unmitigated happiness from helping others: Research shows that the nature of the giving situation matters
1)make giving a choice
2)make a connection
3)make an impact
WATCH HAPPINESS CINEMA: EVERY THREE SECONDS
Can fighting poverty make you happy?
Every Three Seconds, which chronicles the amazing stories of five everyday heroes involved in the anti-poverty movement:
- Seventy-one-year-old Gloria Henderson, who champions “gleaning”—collecting unused food from farms to give to the hungry—in Jacksonville, North Carolina;
- Lisa Shannon, who is raising money and lobbying Congress to combat the brutalization of women in the Congo;
- Seven-year-old Charlie Simpson of London, who organizes bike-riding fundraisers and has raised over 250,000 pounds for earthquake relief in Haiti;
- Ingrid Munroe, who gives micro-loans to poor people in Kenya to pull themselves out of poverty; and
- Josh Nesbit, who recycles used cell phones and provides them to health care workers in Malawi.
Their stories are remarkable, not only for showing how much one person can do to make a difference, but for demonstrating the natural human instinct for compassion.
Karslake’s film will be released on October 16-- World Food Day--and the singer Katy Perry, among other supporters, will help to raise awareness about it.
- ll of them decided to do one thing so that they could feel like they were helping. They all started small, very humbly, and followed wherever the next step led.
Nicholas Christakis in their wonderful book "Connected" from 2009 for really starting to make
the case that kindness, compassion, and generosity are contagious processes that can take hold
in social networks and communities and neighborhoods
Wired to be Inspired
- this feeling, which I call “elevation.” I have defined elevation as a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.
Beyond disgust
disgust should make us hypersensitive to contagion—that is, we feel disgust toward anything that touched something that we find disgusting.
-actually asked people in several countries to list the things they thought were disgusting, we repeatedly found that most people mentioned social offenses, such as hypocrisy, racism, cruelty, and betrayal. : while disgust may motivate people to distance themselves from physical threats, it is well-suited for dealing with social threats as well.
-Social disgust can then be understood as the emotional reaction people have to witnessing others moving “down,” or exhibiting their lower, baser, less God-like nature
The study of elevation
-The most commonly cited circumstances that caused elevation involved seeing someone else give help or aid to a person who was poor or sick, or stranded in a difficult situation.
-A common theme in most of the narratives is a social focus—a desire to be with, love, and help other people. The effects of these feelings appear to have potentially life-altering effects. One participant described how moved he was when so many people came to visit and support his family while his grandfather was dying. He said he still had those feelings seven years later, and that those feelings helped inspire his decision to become a doctor.
-This second study induced elevation in a laboratory by showing one group of participants video clips from a documentary about Mother Teresa
. Control groups saw other videos, including an emotionally neutral but interesting documentary, and a comedy sequence from the television show America’s Funniest Home Videos
. Compared to participants who watched the control videos, participants who watched the elevating video clip reported feeling more loving and inspired, they more strongly wanted to help and affiliate with others, and they were more likely to actually volunteer to work at a humanitarian charity organization afterwards.
-we found that participants in the elevation conditions reported different patterns of physical feelings and motivations when compared to participants in the control conditions. Elevated participants were more likely to report physical feelings in their chests—especially warm, pleasant, or “tingling” feelings—and they were more likely to report wanting to help others, become better people themselves, and affiliate with others.
Getting elevated
-a hallmark of elevation is that, like disgust, it is contagious. When an elevation story is told well, it elevates those who hear it. Powerful moments of elevation, whether experienced first or second hand, sometimes seem to push a mental “reset” button, wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.
Heroism
What makes a hero?
The interesting thing, what we do know about, is the very same situation that enflames
the hostile imagination in some people making them villains—war corruption, fraud—instills
the heroic imagination in other people to do heroic deeds.
Few people do evil; fewer people act heroically. Between these
extremes in the bell curve of humanity are the masses, the general population who do nothing,
who do no imagination at all. In thinking about it, I’m going to call these reluctant heroes,
who refuse the call to action, and we know by doing nothing when something is needed, they implicitly
support the perpetrators of evil.
Heroism is about one thing: It’s about a concern for other people in need, a concern
to develop, to defending a moral cause knowing there is a personal cause or risk. That’s the key.
The heroic imagination project
Focus on we not me
The Banality of Heroism
the Stanford Prison Experiment
` 1)wenty-four young men, who had responded to a newspaper ad calling for participants in a study, were randomly assigned roles as “prisoners” or “guards” in a simulated jail in stanford psychology department
2)he idea was to study the psychology of imprisonment—to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place. But within a matter of hours, what had been intended as a controlled experiment in human behavior took on a disturbing life of its own
3)he guards began using increasingly degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners became more and more passive. Each group rapidly took on the behaviors associated with their role
As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe
Many people observe bad acts and do nothing
What is heroism?
Heroism is different than altruism. Where altruism emphasizes selfless acts that assist others, heroism entails the potential for deeper personal sacrifice. The core of heroism revolves around the individual’s commitment to a noble purpose and the willingness to accept the consequences of fighting for that purpose.
1)First, heroism involves some type of quest, which may range from the preservation of life (Frank De Martini’s efforts at the World Trade Center) to the preservation of an ideal (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ’s pursuit of equal rights for African Americans).
2)Second, heroism must have some form of actual or anticipated sacrifice or risk.
3)Third, the heroic act can either be passive or active.
4)Finally, heroism can be a sudden, one time act, or something that persists over a longer period of time.
Very complete notes. Did you have to redo them when you reformatted?
ReplyDeleteVery complete notes. Did you have to redo them when you reformatted?
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