The Age of Empathy (37 page)

77
grooming slows down the heart
: The monkey project was led and published by Filippo Aureli and co-workers (1999). A heart-rate study on geese by Claudia Wascher and co-workers (2008) found that birds implanted with transmitters would get emotionally aroused by the mere sight of their mate being in trouble with others, thus suggesting emotional contagion in birds.

78
empathy literature is completely human-centered
: A notable exception was psychologist William McDougall (1908, p. 93), who did recognize empathy in gregarious animals, offering us the following
insightful characterization of empathy: “The cement that binds all animal societies together, renders the actions of all members of a group harmonious, and allows them to reap some of the prime advantages of social life.”

78
automatic reactivation of neural circuits
: Empathy rests on a property of the nervous system that (1) activates its own neural substrates for emotion and action upon perceiving emotions and actions in others, and (2) uses these activated states within the self to access and understand the other. This idea goes back to Lipps’s (1903) writing on
innere Nachahmung
(i.e., inner mimicry). Stephanie and I reformulated this as the perception-action mechanism of empathy (Preston and de Waal, 2002). Even while merely imagining another’s situation, humans automatically activate these neural substrates. Thus, when subjects are asked to put themselves into another’s shoes, their brain activation is similar to when they recall similar situations that involved themselves (Preston et al., 2007).

79
Pink Floyd
: In “Echoes,” on the album
Meddle
(1971). Band member Roger Waters noted in an interview: “[It] has a lyric about strangers passing on the street that’s become a recurrent theme for me, the idea of recognizing oneself in others and feeling empathy and a connection to the human race”
(USA Today,
August 6, 1999).

79
The discovery of mirror neurons
: Vilayanur Ramachandran: “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments” (
Edge.org
, June 1, 2000). How exactly mirror neurons translate into imitation and empathy remains unclear, however, but see Vittorio Gallese and co-workers (2004), and Marco Iacoboni (2005). Mirror neurons have also been found in birds, so that the perception-action mechanism probably goes all the way back to the shared reptilian ancestor of mammals and birds (Prather et al., 2008).

79
empathize with everybody
: Commentaries on Preston and de Waal (2002).

80
Identification is such a basic precondition
: In the monkey experiments mentioned before, too, familiarity enhanced empathic responses (Miller et al., 1959; Masserman et al., 1964).

80
when groups compete
: For in-group biases in empathy, see Stefan Stürmer and co-workers (2005).

80
“dechimpized”
: Jane Goodall (1986, p. 532).

81
entire body expresses emotions
: Rhesus monkeys avoid pictures of conspecifics in a fearful pose, which arouse a stronger response than negatively conditioned stimuli (Miller et al., 1959).

81
the body posture won out
: With emotionally congruent pictures (i.e., face and body express the same emotion), the reaction time was on average 774 milliseconds, whereas with emotionally incongruent pictures (i.e., face and body express opposite emotions) it was 840 milliseconds, both still under one second (Meeren et al., 2005).

82
Emotional contagion thus relies
: Beatrice de Gelder (2006) contrasts the Body First Theory (also: the James-Lange theory) with the Emotion First Theory. The latter rests on two closely integrated levels: a fast, reflexlike process, not unlike the perception-action mechanism, and a slower, more cognitive appraisal of stimuli in context.

82
the face remains the emotion highway
: The face is the seat of individual identity. Whom we are dealing with determines identification, which in turn affects our reactions.

83
empathy needs a face
: This felicitous phrase as well as the example of Parkinson’s patients come from Jonathan Cole (2001).

83
“I live in the facial expression”
: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 146).

83
“I have returned to the planet”
: The anonymous woman with the face transplant: “Je suis revenue sur la planète des humains. Ceux qui ont un visage, un sourire, des expressions faciales qui leur permettent de communiquer” (“La Femme aux Deux Visages,”
Le Monde,
June 7, 2007).

84
“Sympathy … cannot in any sense”
: Adam Smith (1759, p. 317).

84
“Empathy may be uniquely well suited”
: Martin Hoffman (1981, p. 133).

84
Nadia Kohts
: Her full name was Nadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts. She lived from 1889 to 1963 and was the wife of Aleksandr Fiodorovich Kohts, founding director of Moscow’s State Darwin Museum.

85
among the stuffed animals in the basement
: In 2007, Moscow’s Darwin Museum celebrated its hundredth anniversary, displaying historical photographs that the staff had shown me of Kohts doing her pioneering research. Apart from her work with Yoni and other primates, I saw pictures of her accepting an object handed to her by a
large cockatoo, and her holding out a tray with a choice of three cups toward a macaw. Her tests had a distinctly modern look, and Kohts often had a smile on her face, evidently liking her work. She tested ape tool use at the same time as Wolfgang Köhler, and may be the discoverer of the matching-to -sample technique still universally applied in visual cognition research. The only book (out of seven) by Kohts translated into English is
Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child
(2002), originally published in Russian in 1935.

86
“If I pretend to be crying”
: Ladygina-Kohts (1935, p. 121).

88
“The definition of sympathy”
: Lauren Wispé (1991, p. 68).

89
Abraham Lincoln
: The story goes that Lincoln halted his carriage to attend to a squealing pig mired in the mud, and dragged it out while soiling his good pants. There even exists a children’s book,
Abe Lincoln and the Muddy Pig
(Krensky, 2002).

89
Good Samaritan
: This experiment on constraints on human sympathy has become a classic. It was conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973).

90
thousands of consolations
: Consolation behavior is so common in apes (de Waal and van Roosmalen, 1979) that at least a dozen studies now offer quantitative details. Recently, Orlaith Fraser and co-workers (2008) confirmed that consolation has a stress-reducing effect on its recipients. The large-scale analysis referred to in the text is being conducted by M. Teresa Romero on our computer records of more than two hundred thousand spontaneous social events among chimpanzees.

91
“Impressive indeed is the thoughtfulness”
: The quote is from Robert Yerkes (1925, p. 131). Yerkes was so struck by the concern shown by Prince Chim for Panzee, his terminally ill companion, that he admitted, “If I were to tell of his altruistic and obviously sympathetic behavior towards Panzee I should be suspected of idealizing an ape” (p. 246).

91
a little duckling
: Peter Bos (personal communication).

92
man’s best friend
: The Belgian study was conducted by Anemieke Cools and co-workers (2008).

93
The ancestor of the dog
: For wolves we do not as yet have the same evidence on consolation (i.e., reassurance of a distressed party by a bystander), but there are observations of wolf reconciliation (i.e., a reunion between former opponents) by Giada Cordoni and Elisabetta Palagi (2008).

93
“We are about to die”
: Anthony Swofford (2003, p. 303).

94
famous images
: A 1950 photograph by Al Chang, which inspired my drawing.

94
nightmare of losing a child
: Interview with Paul Rosenblatt by Kate Murphy (
New York Times,
September 19, 2006).

94
“no-hug policy”
: “School Enforces Strict No-Touching Rule” (Associated Press, June 18, 2007).

94
young rhesus monkeys
: For a decade, I studied two large troops of rhesus macaques at the Vilas Park Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin. Rhesus are seasonal breeders. Every spring, about twenty-five infants were born at about the same time. This created a mass of same-age peers, which were very much in tune with one another in playfulness, sleepiness, and distress (de Waal, 1989).

96
It develops out of a primitive urge
: Nature is full of inborn tendencies that help members of a species acquire critical skills. For example, capuchin monkeys are born with an insuppressible tendency to bang small objects that they can’t open, which they’ll do with gusto for hours. Cats have been endowed with an insuppressible tendency to lock their eyes onto any moving object small enough to pounce on. Combined with experience and learning, such tendencies are gradually incorporated into skills such as nut cracking with stones, which capuchins do in the wild (Ottoni and Mannu, 2001), or stalking and hunting, which all cats do. Preconcern is another inborn tendency that promotes further learning.

96
Most mammals show some
: Empathy is like a multilayered Russian doll with the ancient perception-action mechanism and emotional contagion at its core, around which ever greater complexities have been constructed (de Waal, 2003; chapter 7).

97
“If Rock was not present”
: Emil Menzel (1974, pp. 134—135).

97
theory of mind…
:
Emil Menzel’s work (e.g., Menzel, 1974; Menzel and Johnson, 1976) combined with Nicholas Humphrey’s (1978) notion of animals as “natural psychologists” (i.e., modeling the other’s mind) preceded or coincided with David Premack and Guy Woodruff’s (1978) influential “theory of mind” concept, published a few years after Menzel started working with Premack at the University of Pennsylvania. Theory of mind refers to the ability to recognize the mental states of others.

98
champion mind readers
: Since Maxi’s belief is incorrect, this is known as the “false belief” task. This task relies so heavily on language, though, that language skills affect its outcome. If the role of language
is reduced, children of a younger age show evidence of understanding beliefs, suggesting simpler processes than hitherto assumed (Perner and Ruffman, 2005).

99
Ravens have large brains
: From an interview with Thomas Bugnyar in
The Economist
(May 13, 2004). See Bugnyar and Bernd Heinrich (2005). Further evidence for perspective-taking in birds was provided by Joanna Dally and co-workers (2006).

100
mental states of others
: The first experimental dent in claims that only humans possess theory-of-mind came from a study with our chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center by Brian Hare and co-workers (2001). They showed that low-ranking apes take the knowledge of a dominant competitor into account before approaching food. Further successful ape studies have been reviewed by Michael Tomasello and Josep Call (2006), but note also evidence for perspective taking in birds (above), dogs (Virányi et al., 2005), and monkeys, (Kuroshima et al., 2003; Flombaum and Santos, 2005).

100
“changing places in fancy”
: Adam Smith’s (1759, p. 10) classical description referred to sympathy. Cold perspective-taking, on the other hand, may be closer to what is commonly known as theory-of-mind, even though the word “theory” falsely implies abstract thinking and extrapolation from self to other by means of reasoning, for which there is no evidence (de Gelder, 1987; Hobson, 1991). More likely, perspective-taking develops out of the sort of unconscious bodily connections discussed in chapter 3.

100
When a juvenile orangutan
: Reported in
The Sydney Morning Herald
(February 14, 2008).

100
Swedish zoo
: The chimp -and-rope incident occurred at Furuvik Park, in Gavle, and was described to me by the primate curator, Ing-Marie Persson.

101
I snared Emil for an interview
: Emil was born in 1929. The interview took place in 2000. A few years later, one of his former students wrote me: “I am presently a professor of developmental psychology. Once, on my way to the greenhouse where we kept our marmoset colony, I had to walk through a hallway where Emil’s chimps had been let out, and were roaming around. I was somewhat fearful of walking past them, and the young one, Kenton, walked up to me and gently took my hand, leading me through the hallway past the other chimps. I observed chimps’ capacity for empathy firsthand!” (Alison Nash, personal communication).

102
Since all animals rely
: The lecture took place at Wesleyan College, and the overbearing chairman was Richard Herrnstein (1930—94), one of the foremost Skinnerians at the time. Herrnstein felt that pigeons could easily take the place of chimpanzees, similar to B. F. Skinner’s opinion: “Pigeon, rat, monkey, which is which? It doesn’t matter” (Bailey, 1986).

102
a spectacular escape
: The chimpanzee escape was published as “Spontaneous Invention of Ladders in a Group of Young Chimpanzees” by Menzel (1972). In
Chimpanzee Politics,
I describe a very similar cooperative escape (de Waal, 1982).

104
“Mother Number One”
: “Officer Breast-Feeds Quake Orphans” (CNN International, May 22, 2008).