Arizona Public Radio | Your Source for NPR News
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Hungry for more stories on science, culture and technology?Check out Brain Food: Insights and Discoveries from Northern Arizona. From ground breaking scientific research to global music projects, Brain Food profiles some of the unique projects happening in the region and the interesting people behind them. While there are no new episodes of Brain Food, we will continue to maintain the archive here.

Brain Food: Measuring Compassion and Empathy

We all react differently to seeing someone in distress. Some feel empathy. Some don’t. Some feel the pain so strongly they take it on as their own. Flagstaff social neuroscientist Chad Woodruff is trying to measure compassion and empathy by recording the activity of “mirror” or “social neurons” in the brain. 

“These mirror neurons help us to rapidly understand one another, so in the lab, we will record electrical brain activity while participants are looking at others feeling emotions, and we will see how much does this person’s brain respond to seeing others in emotional distress. And then we’ll also show them pictures of themselves expressing distressful emotions. And if the brain makes a big difference between whether the participant is looking at himself or another person, that participant tends to be good with empathy,” he says.

Not every human brain is wired to feel compassion, however. Woodruff says people with certain brain dysfunctions, including anti-social personality disorder, may not experience empathy within what is considered the normal range, or at all.

“One thing we are learning in psychological sciences is that a person’s behavior is not under any real sense of free control. That is, the person you are is not someone you chose to be, but rather something your brain, your genetics, your environment, your upbringing, all these things conspire to make you precisely who you are at this precise moment,” he says.

Woodruff believes his research helps identify conditions that promote—and demote—empathy, and may help us engineer more compassionate societies in the future. 

Related Content