Humans, Evolution, and the Universality of Empathy

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Emotions were once thought to be a high order cognitive function associated with superior human capabilities.  Frans de Waal dispenses with that notion convincingly in his book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.  Simple animals have simple lives and instinctual responses in which a stimulus generates a programmed reaction often suffice to allow the species to survive long enough to propagate itself.  But as animals and their environments became more complicated a different type of mechanism was required.  Evolution developed emotions as a means of alerting the animal that a response was required, but the optimal response was not specified.  The emotion of fear, for example, automatically alters the body to prepare it to take action, but the course of action is determined by a decision based on the animal’s cognitive capabilities and its stored experiences.  The appearance of a dangerous predator would generate options for fight, flight, hide, or ignore, providing a more nuanced response than mere instinct.  The book was discussed more generally in The Human Animal: Emotions Are Critical in Animal Evolution.  Here, the focus will be on empathy.  What has been learned about it tells us much about ourselves and about other animals.

Empathy can be defined as the ability to interpret and share the feelings of another.  This emotion will clearly affect how animals interact with each other, but the empathic response is not predetermined.  Generally, this knowledge of another’s feelings will be used for pro-social results, but it can also be used to take advantage of another.  What de Vaal wishes to make perfectly clear is that the emotion of empathy is not restricted to humans, and that empathy is a physical phenomenon—our bodies are designed to participate in the process, and its activities often take place subconsciously.

One thing that research has made clear is that emotions are conveyed by facial expressions and animals are excellent at interpreting these signals, particularly within their own species.  Part of the mechanism of empathizing is the unconscious mimicking of observed expressions of another.

“The Swedish psychologist Ulf Dimberg identified the empathic connection within our own species in the 1990s, when he pasted electrodes onto human faces that allowed him to register even the tiniest muscle contractions.  He found that people automatically mimic the expressions shown them on a monitor.  Most remarkably, they don’t even need to know what they’re seeing.  The pictures of faces can be flashed subliminally (for only a fraction of a second) between pictures of landscapes, and people will still mimic them.  They think they are just looking at beautiful scenery, unaware of the faces on the screen, but they feel good or bad afterward depending on whether they were exposed to smiles or frowns.  Seeing smiles makes us happy, while seeing frowns makes us angry or sad.  Unconsciously, our facial muscles copy these faces, which then feeds back into how we feel.”

This facial mimicry turns out to be essential to the development of an empathetic response.

“The body is now front and center to any account of empathy.  New brain imaging studies support the involuntary physical process proposed by Dimberg.  And research has found that empathy suffers when facial mimicry is blocked, such as when human subjects hold a pencil between their teeth so that their cheek muscles can’t move.  Our faces are much more mobile than we think, which helps us connect with others by mimicking their movements.  This has become a problem for people whose faces have been injected with Botox.  Their muscle relaxation keeps them from mirroring the faces of others, which robs them of feeling what others feel.  Botoxed people may look wonderful, but they have trouble empathizing.”

People seem to derive satisfaction or pleasure from being imitated by others.  This includes the facial mimicry, but it also includes the mimicry of gestures, laughter and so on.

“Botoxed faces look frozen, missing the stream of micro-expressions employed in daily interactions.  Their facial unresponsiveness makes others feel cut off, rejected even.”

“Who hasn’t cried when others cried, laughed when others laughed, jumped for joy when others jumped.  We feel what others feel by making their postures, movements, and expressions our own.  Empathy jumps from body to body.”

Who hasn’t observed a mother and her infant staring into each other’s face, with the mother trying to elicit a smile from her baby?  Is the child being taught to smile, to mimic other’s faces, or are the two just having fun together?  De Vaal believes the mimicry is inherent and the mother is merely enjoying the moment.  He tells us that people who have been blind and deaf from birth will express emotions just as the rest of us do.  Empathic responses are observed in infants very early in life before any social prompting is likely.

“Emotional contagion, as it is known, begins at birth, such as when one baby cries upon hearing another baby cry.  On airplanes and in maternity wards, babies sometimes chorus like frogs.  You might think they cry in reaction to any kind of noise, but studies have shown they respond specifically to the cries of same-age babies.  Girl babies do so more than boy babies.  That the emotional glue of society emerges so early in life reveals its biological nature.  It is a capacity we share with all mammals.”

One of the most curious conclusions derived from observations of young animals is that they seem drawn to one of their own who appears to be in trouble.  This has been observed in mice and other animals.  De Vaal has observed this phenomenon in young monkeys.

“Once an infant accidently landed on a dominant female, who bit him.  He screamed so incessantly that he was soon surrounded by other infants.  I counted eight of them in the baby pile, all climbing on top of the poor victim, pushing, pulling, and shoving each other aside.  That obviously did little to alleviate the first infant’s fright.  But the monkeys’ response seemed automatic, as if they were just as distraught as the victim and sought to comfort themselves as much as the other.”

Limited understanding of “survival of the fittest” and natural selection led to the characterization of humans as being motivated by self-interest, but humans and many other animals are intensely social and usually altruistic when it comes to aiding others in distress, particularly when they are known to us.  If de Vaal’s monkeys were wired to be driven by self-interest, they should have recognized the distress of another as a sign of possible danger.  The safer thing to do would have been to seek the comfort of their mothers or to move away from the victim.

“It is as if nature has endowed children and many animals with a simple rule: ‘If you feel another’s pain, get over there and make contact!’  It is good to realize, however, that any theory of strict self-preservation would predict the exact opposite…That mice, monkeys, and many other animals actively seek out those in trouble…proves the fundamental flaw of the sociobiological theories popular in the 1970s and ‘80s.”

What was observed was the beginnings of empathic behavior which would persist and grow with maturity.

“The early development of this behavior has been studied in our species by filming children in their homes.  The investigator asks an adult family member to pretend to cry or act as if they are in pain, in order to see what the children do.  In the film the children look worried while approaching the distressed adult.  They gently touch, stroke, hug, or kiss the adult.  Girls do so more than boys.  The most important finding was that these responses emerge early in life, before the age of two.  That toddlers already express empathy suggests it is spontaneous, because it is unlikely that anyone has been instructing them how to proceed.

This attempt to provide comfort is common in other animals, and chimps respond in ways quite similar to humans.  An example is provided by Nadia Ladygina-Kohts of a pet chimp’s response to the perceived distress of his mistress.

“If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his play or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties.  He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists.”

“Many animals, from dogs to rodents, and from dolphins to elephants, exhibit comforting behavior, even though each species uses its own gestures.  In fact, in the same homes where the children were filmed, the psychologists accidently discovered that dogs responded to the distressed person as well, putting their heads in their lap or licking their face.”

Empathy also expresses itself throughout our lives by tending towards pro-social behavior in which others are generally treated with kindness and respect unless there is a reason for not doing so.

“When people in a neuroimaging experiment were given a choice between a selfish and an altruistic option, most opted for the latter.  They went with the selfish choice only if there were good reasons to avoid cooperation.  Many studies support this view, saying that we tend to be kind and open to others unless something holds us back.”

It would seem that nature has intended us to develop into socialists.  Libertarianism appears to be a recent pathology that developed among humans.

“The default mode of the human primate is intensely social, as reflected in our favorite activities, from attending sports matches and singing in choirs to partying and socializing.  Given that we derive from a long line of group-loving animals, which survived by helping one another, these tendencies are entirely logical.  Going it alone has never worked out for us.”