![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Conflict.jpg\" "\\"conflict\\"")
MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict \u2014 not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding the fall of apartheid; during a 2001 trip to visit friends in Sri Lanka, he found himself in the midst of the violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military.<\/p>\n
Those chance experiences got Bruneau, who taught high school science for several years, interested in the psychology of human conflict. While teaching, he also volunteered as counselor for a conflict-resolution camp in Ireland that brought Catholic and Protestant children together. At MIT, Bruneau is now working with associate professor of cognitive neuroscience Rebecca Saxe to figure out why empathy \u2014 the ability to feel compassion for another person\u2019s suffering \u2014 often fails between members of opposing conflict groups<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are the psychological barriers that are put up between us in these contexts of intergroup conflict, and then, critically, what can we do to get past them?\u201d Bruneau asks.<\/p>\n Bruneau and Saxe are also trying to locate patterns of brain activity that correlate with empathy, in hopes of eventually using such measures to determine how well people respond to reconciliation programs aimed at boosting empathy between groups in conflict.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re interested in how people think about their enemies, and whether there are brain measures that are reliable readouts of that,\u201d says Saxe, who is an associate member of MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. \u201cThis is a huge vision, of which we are at the very beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n Before researchers can use tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to evaluate whether conflict-resolution programs are having any effect, they need to identify brain regions that respond to other people\u2019s emotional suffering. In a study published Dec. 1 in Neuropsychologia<\/em>, Saxe and Bruneau scanned people\u2019s brains as they read stories in which the protagonist experienced either physical or emotional pain. The brain regions that responded uniquely to emotional suffering overlapped with areas known to be involved in the ability to perceive what another person is thinking or feeling. Hoping to see a correlation between empathy levels and amount of activity in those brain regions, the researchers then recruited Israelis and Arabs for a study in which subjects read stories about the suffering of members of their own groups or that of conflict-group members. The study participants also read stories about a distant, neutral group \u2014 South Americans.<\/p>\n As expected, Israelis and Arabs reported feeling much more compassion in response to the suffering of their own group members than that of members of the conflict group. However, the brain scans revealed something surprising: Brain activity in the areas that respond to emotional pain was identical when reading about suffering by one\u2019s own group or the conflict group<\/strong>. Also, those activity levels were lower when Arabs or Israelis read about the suffering of South Americans, even though Arabs and Israelis expressed more compassion for South Americans\u2019 suffering than for that of the conflict group.<\/p>\n Those findings, published Jan. 23 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences<\/em>, suggest that those brain regions are sensitive to the importance of the opposing group, not whether or not you like them<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Joan Chiao, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University, says those brain regions may be acting as a \u201cthermometer\u201d for conflict. \u201cIt\u2019s a really fascinating study because it\u2019s the first to examine the neural basis of people\u2019s behavior in longstanding conflicts, as opposed to groups that are distant and don\u2019t have a long history of intergroup strife,\u201d says Chiao, who was not involved in the research.<\/p>\n However, because the study did not reveal any correlation between the expression of empathy and the amount of brain activity, more study is needed before MRI can be used as a reliable measure of empathy levels, Saxe says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought there might be brain regions where the amount of activity was just a simple function of the amount of empathy that you experience,\u201d Saxe says. \u201cSince that\u2019s not what we found, we don\u2019t know what the amount of activity in these brain regions really means yet. This is basically a first baby step, and one of the things it tells us is that we don\u2019t know enough about these brain regions to use them in the ways that we want to.\u201d<\/p>\n Bruneau is now testing whether these brain regions send messages to different parts of the brain depending on whether the person is feeling empathy or not. He hypothesizes that when someone reads about the suffering of an in-group member, the brain regions identified in this study send information to areas that process unpleasant emotions, while stories about suffering of a conflict-group member activate an area called the ventral striatum, which has been implicated in schadenfreude \u2014 taking pleasure in the suffering of others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the MIT press release: MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict \u2014 not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[42,18,189,162,116,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nFailures of empathy<\/strong><\/p>\n