Understanding the empathy deficit
The article below by VIRGINIA TAPSCOTT is a long one but overlooks an important issue: Lack of care for the feelings of others is a feature of both autism and psychopathy. But the two syndromes are very different in other ways and the difference is important. I have argued that the difference is that the psychopath is aware of other people's feelings but doesn't care about them whereas the autistic is simply unaware of other peoples feelings. There may be more than one reason for an apparent "empathy deficit"
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/2024/04/do-autism-and-psychopathy-overlap.html
And muddling those two very different syndromes, as she appears to do below, renders her conclusions very dubious. She needs to re-work her thinking from the beginning, I suspect.But taking the research she presents into account does suggest that she is talking about psychopaths only, not autistics. Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen's submission that we should stop talking about autism and refer instead to the syndrome as "non-neurotypical" has generally been enthusiastically embraced both by the people concerned and by health professionals.
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.12703
But the implication of that view is that non-neurotypical people are born that way. And there are certain features of such people that support that conclusion. An unusually large cerebral cortex, for instance. I hear that autistics tend to take big hats!Ms TAPSCOTT, in contrast, is talking about an acquired condition, not an inborn one.
But do the findings she describes even fit psychopaths? Her implication is that non-empathetics are both unaware of how other people work psychologically and uncaring about any hardships that they inflict on others. But psychopaths are often very clever people manipulators. To be good at that they surely have to have a very good awareness of how other people work psychologically. So we are left with the claim that psychopaths are not empathetic but are nonetheless somehow very good at understanding and manipulating other people's feelings! That is probably not impossible but seems very unlikely.
So who is Ms Tapcott talking about? It seems that the non-empathetic people she describes don't fit neatly into any established psychiatric category. They are a new category of persons all of its own. A best fit to what she describes would probably be to say that egregious harm to others can emanate from more than one person type -- the non-empathic people she describes and classical psychopaths
An additional level of complexity may follow from my previous article on the subject referenced above. I am clearly a high functioning autistic but I noted that I have very little emotional response to reports of suffering in others. But as I have recently also pointed out, I have a not-insubstantial claim to being a philanthropist!
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2024/05/am-i-philanthropist.html
So, in autistics a non-empathic response can even go with pro-social behaviour! Autistics are confused and shut out but are not malevolent. Who said that people have to be simple?Rapists, murderers, religious extremists and even your garden variety nasty colleague have one thing in common: an empathy deficit. The part of their brain that imagines how others think and feel is anywhere from stunted to easily ignored. This allows them to dehumanise others to varying extents and prioritise their own gratification or agenda above all else, regardless of the pain this may cause those around them. They can be all charm one minute and conveniently deaf and blind to the suffering of another the next.
We all exist somewhere along the empathy spectrum from slightly selfish to complete psychopath. Harmful belief systems about women embedded in our culture can be tempered by healthy empathy function or become unbridled by an empathy deficit.
Empathy isn’t some vague feel-good notion of kindness; it is a specific part of our brain architecture. Neuroscientists understand in detail its place in our emotional brain circuits, how we come to develop empathy and to what extent.
A review of neurobiological research published in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in 2016 traced the emergence of empathy deficits in detail from birth right up to violent adult offending, specifically intimate partner violence. The authors describe how empathy development starts at birth, when newborns will do whatever it takes to engage a caregiver. They mimic movements, search for faces, reach for skin and cry as a last resort. They have mirror neurons that enable them to tune into caregivers’ behaviours as early as 72 hours old.
A baby’s earliest attempts to engage another normally elicits a positive response from the caregiver that results in the baby being held or fed and flooded with relaxing, feel-good hormones. The baby repeats the process of engaging a carer, building increasingly complex and well-trodden empathic neural pathways. It is from this biochemistry and brain architecture that they develop pro-social behaviours, emotional regulation and an intuitive understanding of how to relate to another.
Where things go wrong is if an infant’s attempts to engage are not rewarded and empathic neural pathways become underdeveloped. If your parents or carers don’t love you or have difficulty showing it you will have a hard time developing empathic abilities.
The neurobiology review analysed almost 200 of the most significant sources establishing a link between empathy deficit or dysfunction and violence. The authors argued the empathy patterns in offenders explained why far fewer women, with neurobiology that predisposes them to increased empathy, were perpetrators of violence.
Research in empathy development surged in 2001 when Yale University researchers worked out how to scan healthy infants and toddlers in magnetic resonance imaging machines that required them to be still. Instead of using sedation, which blunted brain activity and posed ethical problems, researchers scanned babies in natural sleep and flung open the doors on a whole field of unexplored territory.
While researchers had been using neuroimaging for decades to unravel the mysteries of adult brains, it is only in recent years that infant brains have come under the microscope and only since the 2000s that we began studying longitudinal cohorts. Perhaps the most striking finding has been that the emotional brain circuitry of infants is far more advanced and sensitive than initially thought.
“We know that brain circuits for mood, depression, anxiety, addiction and resilience are all built between conception and age three and last for life,” Canadian neuroscientist Greer Kirshenbaum writes in her book The Nurture Revolution. “After three years of age the most frequently used brain circuits are covered in protective cells and the circuits that were not used frequently are eliminated by pruning.”
As neuroimaging was applied in the fields of neurobiology, genetics and behavioural science, the lasting effects of early life stress became undeniable. While our emotional brain is influenced by genetics and continues to develop into early adulthood, the foundations of emotional health are laid by our earliest experiences and relationships. We know in chronic states of prenatal and infancy stress the brain develops abnormally. In 2019, researchers from the Infant Brain Imaging Study Network demonstrated that the amygdala, the part of the brain that identifies threats and controls emotional processes, had started to overgrow at six months of age in children who later would be diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders. It has been shown that environmental stress combined with a genetic vulnerability to stress can increase the risk of developing autism.
While we have not yet discovered genes for any specific mental illness, in the 1990s researchers began uncovering the relationship between genes that determine our dopamine receptivity, how much of the feel-good hormone we can access, and children characterised as ultrasensitive or resilient.
University of California, San Francisco pediatrics and psychiatry professor Thomas Boyce brought into the mainstream the theory that about four-fifths of all children were born “dandelions” with genes that increased dopamine receptivity and made them more resilient to stress.
Boyce found the remaining children carried a gene morphism that rendered them less receptive to dopamine and categorised them as “orchids” for their ultrasensitivity to growing conditions. Orchids can flourish in ideal conditions or be affected by poor conditions.
High-quality care and reliable early relationships have been found to mitigate the orchid and dandelion effect. Kirshenbaum explains nurturing care as a crucial way of “turning the volume down” on genes less favourable to psychological resilience. Nonetheless, orchid children are more sensitive to stress in infancy and face a greater likelihood of their brain being hypersensitive to stress later in life.
Stress is at the seat of the development of all mental illnesses because it interferes with normal brain development and the naturally resilient emotional circuits that come with it. If stress is shaping the brain from infancy, the makings of a narcissist, schizophrenic, addict or psychopath are well under way in the cradle.
Unthinkable acts such as those we have witnessed in recent weeks are undeniably rooted in terrible brain architecture and resulting poor moral formation. Emotional deficits impede moral formation, which usually develops through an intuitive understanding of our actions in relation to others. Being able to share or imagine the feelings of another is a deterrent for treating them horribly. A brain imaging study in The Netherlands in 2013 found psychopathic criminals lacked automatic empathic processes. The line between right and wrong becomes blurred if we lack an intuitive sense of how another may feel or to share the feeling.
In this way, empathy is a crucial moderator of our behaviour in real time but also shapes our humanity. It is a kind of panacea to societal ills. External moderators of behaviour such as judicial and governance guardrails can get us only so far before internal motivation to do the right thing must take over.
Empathic dysfunction is the breeding ground for a raft of mental disorders because our ability to connect with others is our lifelong emotional mooring. Without empathy and the relationships that spring from it the world becomes disorienting and meaningless. Without a web of healthy connection around us, people who can act as a sounding board or offer different perspectives, we also become more vulnerable to radicalisation and conspiracy theories. We fill the void created by lack of interpersonal relations with consumerism, extreme interpretations of religion and political outrage.
Empathy deficits are clearly an enabler when it comes to men being able to dehumanise women and subjecting them to shocking violence. We cannot hope to reduce violence against women without interrogating the formative experiences of perpetrators. This is not an excuse for the behaviour, this is cut-and-dried science. We must go back to the beginning.
The good news is empathy deficits are preventable. If we are raised in nurturing and responsive environments where empathy is modelled to us we are likely to develop healthy levels of empathy. Known inhibitors of empathy development include reduced face-to-face human interaction, caregivers who lack empathy and toxic stress. We have to feel safe and connected most of the time to be able to adopt empathic behaviours.
The bad news is empathy is difficult to teach later in life and deficits are difficult to reverse. We can train our empathy “muscles” later in life, but it is far less effective than having it in the first place. It may never be automatic or intuitive. It is unclear whether former prime minister Scott Morrison’s empathy consultant employed in 2019 had any lasting influence.
The availability of empathy training courses has accelerated in response to a well-documented decline in empathy levels across the board. A study of American students published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review found levels of empathy fell by 48 per cent between 1979 and 2009. It seems unlikely a one-hour online minicourse in empathy will do much to counter the broader trend.
Short-term emergency responses to public outcries about violence is warranted, but we are also missing the point. Prevention is much more effective. Our outrage should be equally, if not more so, directed at the way we deny children the basic conditions for healthy emotional development: social interaction, proper food and the presence of invested, loving and consistent caregivers.
Parents are often time poor and stressed, which means they lack the emotional resources to respond to their children. They increasingly rely on screens to regulate themselves and their children. You don’t have to be a behavioural scientist to see this is a chronically stressful arrangement.
Adult mental illness and resulting behaviours become a complex question when we consider that as a baby that offender was exposed to conditions they had no control over. We don’t get to choose our parents or circumstances. Our individual responsibility is to come to understand our emotional circuitry and manage it, but we will continue to contend with limitations posed by the brain circuitry laid in our earliest years. Some will be more disadvantaged by this than others. Some will be rendered incapable of helping themselves.
Without a complete overhaul in our cultural and policy approach to the early years we cannot hope to address mental illness effectively. If more people understood the significance of support to ensure the healthy development of babies and children we could transform society as we know it. We underestimate the importance of this at our peril.
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Not in my name or His: The wilful damage all in the name of faith
This is an old, old fallacy: Judging Christiaity by people who DON'T follow it. We all "fake good" to some extent and in our society that often takes the form of of a pretense to Christianity. In Japan alleged followers of the peaceful Buddha committed atrocities during WWII. And despite the very first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Hindus often attack Muslims.
Most people will do what they will regardless of their religion. The sad part is that those who do evil are often excused and justified by their priests and elders
In her poem Magdalene on Gethsemane, Marie Howe narrates an imagined interaction between Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth in the Garden of Gethsemane.
From Jesus’ agony on the night before his crucifixion, in the voice of the Magdalene, Howe writes:
“When he was in the garden the night beforeAnd fell with his face to the groundwhat he imagined was not his torture, not his own deathThat’s what the story says, but that’s not what he told me.”
The three lines that follow burn the reader. They resonate deeply with the un-power and non-violence of Jesus. The poet invokes Jesus’ anguish, claiming:
“He said he saw the others, the countless in his nameraped, burned, lynched, stoned, bombed, beheaded, shot, gassed,gutted and raped again.”
It is hard not to turn away from the ghastly list of verbs. The poet encapsulates the horror of what continues to happen “in his name” and other names by which the Holy One is known.
But in the telling of the poem, there is an implied witness to these atrocities – the suffering is seen. The term “the countless” freights blatant injustices repeated mercilessly. The three words “in his name” carry the weaponising of belief.
Often when I name myself as Christian, I recoil from the wilful damage caused by practitioners of my faith. And not just my faith tradition, others as well. So many things are not OK, are deeply wrong, are horrors in themselves. These violations occur under the watch of religions that espouse values of peace and human dignity in the name of the divine.
Theologian Gordon Kaufman suggested the most ethical thing a person can say is “I might be wrong”. When we are too sure that we are on the side of right, that we know the mind of God, there is a diminishing and hardening of hearts.
In his life and teaching, Jesus was far more interested in how people treated each other than in setting up institutional loyalty. Before his state-sanctioned murder he repeatedly feasted with, and offered healing to, people whom no one else valued. He ticked off the disciples when they tried to become influencers.
In the telling of the poem, there is an implied witness to these atrocities – the suffering is seen.
In Australia, periodically we hear voices of indignation championing Christianity as if defending a brand. This defensiveness is not necessarily a witness to faith, often it looks like posturing.
The life, death and risen life of Jesus of Nazareth were and are subversive. The task of re-imagining and understanding anew how the biblical stories can resonate allows an ongoing dialogue with them.
In Magdalene on Gethsemane, Marie Howe suggests a new possibility, that Jesus’ agony was on account of what would follow, “in his name”.
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Sorry, Team Biden: Lower capital-gains taxes aren’t racist — higher ones are
By Stephen Moore
I’ll bet you didn’t know that cutting the capital gains tax or the death tax is “racist.”
Believe it or not, that’s the latest contention by the Biden administration, which seems to view every policy issue through the prism of not what’s best for the American economy but race and victimhood.
In a new report, “Advancing Equity through Tax Reform,” the Biden Treasury Department examined stock and home ownership in America by race.
The study concludes lower tax rates on capital gains income “disproportionately benefited White families relative to Black, Hispanic, and other racial/ethnic groups.”
It found more than 90% of the benefits went to whites.
Why does the government need to know the race or ethnicity of who owns stock or businesses or homes?
The answer is obvious: The Biden administration is resorting to a blatant race-baiting argument so it can raise wealth and capital gains taxes in the name of “equity.”
Yet there are two good reasons why we’ve traditionally kept tax rates on investment low.
The first: Every time we’ve lowered the capital gains or corporate tax, we’ve seen a burst of investment, which helps everyone.
Just listen to John F. Kennedy, who endorsed a preferential tax rate on capital gains while president by declaring: “The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions. . . . the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.”
The second reason: A lower tax on capital gains is not a “giveaway” to the rich because taxes on investment income are levied not just once, but multiple times, via corporate income tax, the small-business pass-through tax, the dividend tax and even the death tax.
The Treasury study calculated that roughly two-thirds of white households own stock, but only 39% of blacks do, and 28% of Hispanics, to suggest lowering capital-gains taxes mostly benefits whites. (The Treasury conveniently omits stock owned by much larger numbers of Americans in pension and 401k plans.)
If so, though, let’s try to expand minority ownership.
That’s a worthy policy goal, allowing more Americans to become workers and owners.
And one way to achieve that would be to reduce the tax on investment and savings.
Another would be to allow young Americans of all races to put the 10% to 12% of their paychecks that now disappears into the black hole of the Social Security system into a personal 401k Own America account invested in an index fund of all stocks.
This plan would drive stock ownership in America up to perhaps 80% or 90%.
Many of the ownership disparities would then disappear.
Under this plan, the typical young black or Hispanic worker could accumulate millions of dollars of wealth over their working years and have much higher retirement benefits.
We would become a nation of worker-owners.
Yet Democrats strongly oppose such a share-the-wealth plan.
Instead, the Biden administration proposes to nearly double the capital-gains rate to 44% and introduce a new tax on unrealized capital gains.
This would raise the tax on the returns from stock ownership to well over 50%. How in the world would a higher tax on ownership expand minority ownership?
Recall that if you tax something you get less of it — which is why we tax cigarettes to get people to stop smoking.
Do we really want to encourage people to stop investing?
The Biden plan would deter blacks and Hispanics from becoming owners by making ownership more expensive and the reward lower.
Indeed, this scheme would only concentrate more of the wealth in the hands of the already rich, while making most of the rest of Americans — especially blacks and Hispanics — poorer and more dependent on government.
Sounds pretty racist to me.
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Protesters seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their own privilege by donning keffiyeh
Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? You remember that wacky idea. It involved blue-haired woke activists raging against anyone who dared to “appropriate” the culture of a different ethnic group. On campuses across the Anglo-American world, “cultural appropriators” were forever being called out.
Whether it was a white dude sporting dreadlocks or a drunk student putting on a sombrero, the cry would go up: “Stop stealing other people’s culture!” I’m not joking about the sombreros. Student officials at the University of East Anglia in England went so far as to ban non-Mexican students from donning Mexican headgear on the basis that it’s “racist”.
Pop singer Katy Perry was accused of “appropriating black culture” after wearing her hair in cornrows. Even the sainted Beyonce got it in the neck after sporting a sari in a Coldplay video. Is she “misusing Indian culture”, pondered the lunatic BBC?
Cultural appropriation, declared the Oxford Dictionary, refers to “Western appropriations of non-Western (culture)”. You must never do this, barked PC finger-waggers. Yet fast forward to today and cultural appropriation seems to be acceptable again. In fact, it’s all the rage.
Right-on campuses are awash with upper-class white kids wearing the garb of “non-Western” people. No, not the sombrero or forbidden Afro hairstyles but the keffiyeh. Everywhere you look, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney, students are adorned in these checkered scarfs from the Middle East.
The kind of people who just a few years ago would have harangued some white girl for getting a Japanese-style tattoo now spend their days decked out in Arab attire.
They call it solidarity, of course. We wear the keffiyeh to show our support for the beleaguered Palestinians, they say.
I’m not buying it. Since when did solidarity involve fancy dress? I don’t remember those 1960s kids who protested against the Vietnam war putting on bamboo conical hats in mimicry of the Vietnamese peasants who often felt the heat of US bombs. Or Western supporters of the Quit India Movement wearing white dhotis in the style of Mohandas Gandhi.
The keffiyeh craze feels more like radical chic than meaningful activism. The Arab cloth has become an essential fashion item for the woke, the mandatory uniform of the self-righteous. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to “you”. Pulling on a keffiyeh is a shortcut to the moral high ground. Hipsters will smile at you in the street. Your local craft coffee house may even give you your macchiato for free.
When I see students camping out for Gaza with keffiyehs wrapped around their necks and faces, I don’t think: “Now that’s solidarity” – I think: “Now that’s showing off.” It’s an act of moral distinction, a way for the educated elites to differentiate themselves from the supposedly indifferent throng.
These keffiyeh wearers are plundering foreign culture far more egregiously than some legless bloke in a sombrero propping up the student bar. For they don’t only dress up like Gazans, they creepily mimic their living conditions, too.
Witness the student leader at Columbia University in New York City – in a keffiyeh, of course – saying that she and her fellow campers required “humanitarian aid”. Do you want us to “die of dehydration and starvation”, she crazily asked university bosses.
There is something gross about privileged kids on an Ivy League campus cosplaying as victims of a humanitarian crisis. These people could have pizza Deliverooed at a moment’s notice.
In one truly cringe-worthy clip, a group of Columbia students could be seen receiving “humanitarian aid” through the college gates. I say humanitarian aid – it was probably just their Starbucks order or a blueberry muffin from a local bodega.
It came off as a crass re-enactment of the scenes we’ve seen in Gaza: hyper-privileged Ivy Leaguers masquerading as the wretched of the earth.
When mainly Jewish counter-protesters confronted the Gaza camp at the University of California, Los Angeles, the campers denounced them as “Zionist thugs”.
This is what life must be like for the Palestinians, some said. These people have no shame. It’s not enough to appropriate Palestinian scarfs – they want to appropriate Palestinian suffering, too.
This is a new, strange and unsettling kind of activism. It’s not ’60s-style solidarity with foreign struggles. And it actually goes beyond radical chic, beyond politics as fashion statement.
No, this is about coveting suffering. These activists, it seems to me, crave the moral rush of oppression, the thrill of persecution. They pull on the garb of a beleaguered people to escape, however fleetingly, the spoilt, pampered reality of their own lives, to taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era: victimhood. In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting.
It’s not politics – it’s therapy. They seek to wash away the “sin” of their own privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on earth: the Palestinians. It’s not Gaza they want to save but their own souls. It feels as if they’re more interested in what Palestine can do for them than in what they can do for Palestine. Palestine becomes little more than a source of meaning, a fountain of purpose, in the lives of bored youths on leafy campuses.
It’s a toxic mix of narcissism and racism, with Arabs reduced to the lowly role of soothing the white guilt of privileged Westerners.
Listen, that’s not solidarity, it’s the opposite – selfishness.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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