A Course Correction for Positive Psychology

A review of Martin Seligman’s latest book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being.

- By Jill Suttie

As president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, Martin Seligman challenged the psychological community to radically change its approach. For too long, he charged, psychology had been preoccupied solely with relieving symptoms of mental illness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just survive it. He called for a psychology that would uncover what makes people creative, resilient, optimistic, and, ultimately, happy. The “positive psychology” movement was born.

Yet in his latest book, Flourish, Seligman tries to provide something of a course correction for positive psychology. Seligman, the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also directs the university’s Positive Psychology Center, argues that positive psychology has been too focused on the goal of promoting happiness alone. He proposes a shift, both to increase overall personal well-being—what he calls “flourishing,” which is not as dependent on one’s mood or momentary feelings as happiness—and to improve one’s community, not just one’s self.

While Seligman still considers happiness to be important, in Flourish he offers a more holistic take on well-being, which he summarizes with the acronym PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Each of these elements, he argues, is crucial to a full, well-lived life, even if it sometimes involves struggle and leads, in the short term, to unhappiness.

For example, relationships can be a source of joy, but they can also involve conflict and sacrifice. Yet having close relationships is an important life goal for most people and contributes to one’s overall well-being. Indeed, research shows that people with close relationships enjoy all kinds of physical and mental health benefits, including greater longevity.

Seligman believes that psychologists should focus on increasing these aspects of well-being using positive psychology interventions—like keeping a gratitude journal to increase positive emotion—rather than prescribing psychotropic medications, which he claims fail to cure people. He is critical of social scientists who emphasize the study of environmental influences—like poverty and upbringing—on behavior and don’t pay enough attention to the study of individual character. This breeds a victim mentality, he claims, which hampers the individual’s opportunity to grow.

“Human beings are often, perhaps more often, drawn by the future than they are driven by the past,” he writes, “and so a science that measures and builds expectations, planning, and conscious choice will be more potent than a science of habits, drives, and circumstances.”

In this idea are echoes of Seligman’s seminal work on “learned helplessness,” where repeated experiences lead a person to believe that he or she is powerless to avoid emotional suffering, and so stops trying. To prevent this, Seligman suggests teaching patients coping skills, which they can use to better control their emotional responses to difficult situations and help avert depression and anxiety. These same skills, he argues, can be taught in our public institutions—including schools, hospitals, and the military—in order to inoculate whole communities against emotional distress.

In the book, he highlights the work of social scientists who have tried to do just that, including Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham, who study character-building. Reivich and Gillham have developed a classroom intervention that helps children increase their optimism, flexibility, and assertiveness in order to prevent them from developing depression later on. In addition, they’ve created a program that helps students identify their character strengths (e.g., creativity, self-control) and use them more effectively. When applied to schools, these programs have been shown to decrease depression, anxiety, and conduct problems among students, and to increase positive social skills, like empathy and cooperation.

In another example, Seligman worked with the military to create a character-based program that combats PTSD in veterans. Before soldiers are deployed, they are taught resiliency, or the ability to adapt to different circumstances, thereby reducing their chances of returning home with post-battle mental illness. Though some critics have accused Seligman of brainwashing soldiers to accept intolerable conditions, he counters with data showing his program reduces later suffering.

Seligman’s work is inventive, but his writing can sometimes ramble. The beginning of the book is nearly unreadable, with a convoluted comparison between his theories of “authentic happiness” and “flourishing.” Still, for those who can get past its faults, Flourish is a thought-provoking read, filled with insights into Seligman’s thinking and personality, as well as inside stories of positive psychology’s early beginnings, its occasional detractors, and its many successes.

— Jill Sut­tie, Psy.D., is Greater Good’s book review edi­tor and a free­lance writer. Copy­right Greater Good. Greater Good, based at UC-Berkeley, is an online mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tific research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

Editor’s Note

Ever wonder why some people have more friends than others? Why some run in large and complex social circles while others have a small group of acquaintances? There are no doubt a variety of factors that influence the extent of our social networks. New research shows, however, that one factor we may not have considered before is right inside our head.

In a paper published recently in Nature Neuroscience, researchers showed that the number of friends we have could be predicted by the size of our amygdala—a small, almond-shaped region located deep inside our brains.

As I have blogged about before, the amygdala is a major player in our emotional reactions. Because of this, it makes sense that the amygdala would be at the center of a brain network important for socializing. This network helps us recognize whether somebody is a stranger or an acquaintance, a friend or a foe—all important factors in maintaining social relations.

To get at the relation between amygdala size and social networks, researchers began by measuring the size and complexity of about 60 adults’ social networks. In terms of size, the researchers were interested in the total number of people with whom a person was in regular contact. In terms of complexity, the researchers looked at the number of different groups these friends could be divided into (e.g., book club, childhood friends, running group, etc.). The size and complexity of each person’s social network was then compared to the size of their amygdala. Sure enough, the bigger the amygdala, the larger and more complex a person’s social network tended to be.

Importantly, amygdala volume was not linked to a person’s life satisfaction or the amount of social support they felt in general, suggesting that it’s not that the bigger the amygdala, the happier a person is. Rather, amygdala size was specifically related to the makeup of one’s social network.

Researchers have known for some time that non-human primates who live and operate in larger social groups tend to have greater amygdala volume relative to those primates that don’t, even after controlling for overall body and brain size. This new research shows that, even within the same species, the bigger the amygdala, the larger and more complex one’s social networks tend to be.

This finding is exciting because it opens a window into exploring how abnormalities in the amygdala may impair social functioning or contribute to certain psychiatric disorders. In short, it sets the stage to further our understanding of how particular brain networks guide our social interactions.

Of course, one big unanswered question centers around the direction of this amygdala-social network relation. Are some people born with a bigger amygdala that helps them to forge more complex social networks, or does amygdala size increase as we gain more friends? The jury is still out on this one, but given our knowledge of evolutionary influences on the brain and the ever increasing evidence that experience can change the brain—even later in life—it’s probably some of both.

— Sian Beilock is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. This article originally appeared on her Psychology Today blog. More on her work can be found at sianbeilock.com

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I consider myself something of a prospective meditator—meaning that a serious meditation practice is always something I’m about to start… next week. So for years, I’ve been making a mental note of new studies showing that meditation can literally change our brain structure in ways that might boost concentration, memory, and positive emotions.

The results seem enticing enough to make anyone drop into the full lotus position—until you read the fine print: Much of this research involves people who have meditated for thousands of hours over many years; some of it zeroes in on Olympic-level meditators who have clocked 10,000 hours or more. Pretty daunting.

Well, a new study offers some hope—and makes the benefits of meditation seem within reach even for a novice like me. The study, published in January in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, suggests that meditating for just 30 minutes a day for eight weeks can increase the density of gray matter in brain regions associated with memory, stress, and empathy.

The researchers tracked 16 people who were participating in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, the training program developed more than 30 years ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Over eight weekly meetings, the program leads participants through meditation exercises meant to build the skills of mindfulness—a moment-by-moment awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. Participants are supposed to try these practices on their own between classes.

For decades, people who’ve completed the MBSR training have reported feeling less stress and more positive emotions; participants suffering from chronic illnesses say they experience less pain afterward.

But in this study, the researchers weren’t just asking the participants how they felt. They were examining their brains, two weeks before and right after the eight-week program. Over the same period, they also scanned the brains of people who didn’t receive the MBSR training.

The MBSR participants, none of whom were experienced meditators, reported spending just under half an hour per day on their meditation “homework.” Yet when their brains were scanned at the end of the program, their gray matter was significantly thicker in several regions than it was before.

Brain scans of the hippocampus, showing the regions the researchers determined were affected by meditation. Image adapted from B. Hölzel, et al., Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging Vol. 191 (1), January 30, 2011, pp. 36–43.

One of those regions was the hippocampus, which prior research has found to be involved in learning, memory, and the regulation of our emotions. The gray matter of the hippocampus is often reduced in people who suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The researchers also found denser gray matter in the temporo-perietal junction and the posterior cingulated cortex of the meditators’ brains—regions involved in empathy and taking the perspective of someone else—and in the cerebellum, which has been linked to emotion regulation.

These brain changes may suggest that meditation improves people’s ability to regulate their emotions, control their stress levels, and feel empathy for others, says Britta Hölzel, the study’s lead author and a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Geissen in Germany. However, she stresses that these conclusions are still very speculative.

The group that didn’t receive the MBSR training didn’t show any of these positive changes in brain structure.

Previous research has shown that the structure of very experienced meditators’ brains is different from non-meditators in certain regions, but it couldn’t prove that the meditators didn’t have exceptional brains to begin with. This is the first study to document a difference in brain structure from before someone starts a meditation practice to after they’ve gotten underway—and after only eight weeks, at that.

While other research, notably a 2003 study led by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has shown that people’s brain activity changes after the eight-week MBSR course, there hadn’t been evidence that the effects of meditation can go so deep as to change the structure of the brain.

The results of this new study offer further evidence for the “plasticity” of the brain, meaning it can change its shape over time. That suggests we’re not simply stuck with the neural cards we’re dealt; we can fundamentally improve our cognitive and emotional capacities.

“I think what’s really positive and promising about this study is that it suggests our well-being is in our hands,” says Hölzel. “What I find fascinating is that just paying attention in a different way and being more aware can have such an impact that it even changes the structure of our brain.”

It’s important to note that meditation isn’t the only research-tested way to produce these changes in the brain. A study published last week, in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the hippocampus of people in their 60s increased in volume after they’d walked around a track three times per week for a year; in peers who did less aerobic exercises, the hippocampus actually got smaller.

The upshot of all this research seems to be: Small steps matter. Many of us can bring about positive effects on our brains and overall well-being—without an Olympic effort.

It’s enough to turn a prospective meditator like me into an actual one.

––  Jason Marsh is the editor in chief of The Greater Good Mag­a­zine. The Greater Good, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quar­terly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tific research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

Related arti­cle:

• Meditation: Different Techniques, Different Effects on the Brain

(Photo: Tatiana Gladskikh)

.Why Other People’s Good News Could Be Good for You

How often does this happen to you: You come home ecstatic about some great news—a job promotion, a victorious tennis match, or maybe just the latest Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor—and you immediately relate the experience to your romantic partner, roommate, or anyone within earshot. But instead of sharing your enthusiasm, they greet your news with indifference. Does this quell your excitement, or even make you enjoy the event less?

A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that when we share positive events with others and are met with genuine interest, we tend to enjoy those events more and feel closer to our confidant.

In the study, University of Rochester psychologist Harry T. Reis and colleagues examined the benefits of retelling one’s good fortune to another person. They asked undergraduate students to recall one of the best things that had happened to them over the past few years to someone else (who was actually a confederate, someone working with the researchers).

As the participants told their stories, the confederates reacted either with enthusiasm or disinterest. Afterwards, the researchers had participants rate their moods, their attitude toward the event they’d described, and their feelings of closeness toward the confederate.

Over a series of experiments, Reis and his colleagues found that when confederates reacted positively to the participants’ stories—when they smiled, for instance, or made statements like “I’m really happy for you,” or “That’s great!”—the participants felt better about the original event itself and seemed to be in a better mood. What’s more, enthusiastic feedback not only made the original event more enjoyable but led to greater feelings of closeness, trust, and intimacy toward the listener.

In fact, at the end of one of the experiments, the participants were told they would receive one dollar as a reward for participating, but they actually “mistakenly” received two dollars. The researchers found that participants whose stories were received with enthusiasm were more likely to return the extra money.

These results suggest that responding positively to someone else’s news isn’t just important when dealing with close friends or romantic partners. Enthusiastic responses elicit trust and affinity even from people with whom we have very brief interaction, such as job interviewers or people we meet in line at the grocery store.

So the next time your spouse is excited to tell you about his amazing day at work, or a stranger on the bus is eager to share the details of a delicious lunch she just had, don’t just politely nod and move on. Sharing this kind of news is an important part of building and maintaining close relationships. So smile, congratulate them, and enthusiastically shake their hand.  Perhaps their happiness will rub off on you.

– Matthew Brim is a Greater Good editorial assistant. The Greater Good Mag­a­zine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quar­terly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tific research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

Related arti­cle:

• Why social engagement can boost brain function: the case for “walking book clubs”

We’ve all been there: obsessing over a faux pas we committed at a party, infuriated by an unkind word from a colleague, ruminating over a tough break-up with a spouse or friend. We suffer some misfortune—big or small, real or imagined—and the pain or humiliation sticks with us for hours, days, or even years afterward.

“The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences,” psychologist Rick Hanson is fond of saying, “and Teflon for positive ones.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Drawing on some of the latest findings from neuroscience, Hanson has spent years exploring how we can overcome our brain’s natural “negativity bias” and learn to internalize positive experiences more deeply—while minimizing the harmful physical and psychological effects of dwelling on the negative.

For years, research has shown that, over time, our experiences literally reshape our brains and can change our nervous systems, for better or worse. Now, neuroscientists and psychologists like Hanson are zeroing in on how we can take advantage of this “plasticity” of the brain to cultivate and sustain positive emotions.

In his recent book, the best-selling Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, Hanson describes specific practices that can promote lasting joy, equanimity, and compassion—and backs it all up with sound science.

Hanson recently spoke with host Michael Bergeisen about some of these very practical, research-based steps we can all take to rewire our brains for lasting happiness. Below we present a condensed version of the discussion.

Michael Bergeisen: Most of us think of the human brain as either unchanging or losing power and strength as we get older, but the central theme of your new book is that we each have the capacity to change our brain for the better to make ourselves happier, more peaceful, and more kind. How can we do this exactly?

Rick Hanson: We’ve all known as we’ve gone through life that our minds have changed. In other words, we’ve learned things as we go through life, we picked up new skills, we’ve had experiences, we remember them. All that mental activity means that we’ve changed our brain. That’s not breaking news. In other words, it’s long been known that as the mind changes, the brain must be changing as well.

What is breaking news is that in the last 20 years, the scientific understanding of the brain has literally doubled. And that has given us much more clarity about the linkages between the mind and the brain, which then gives us this amazing possibility to change our brain to change our mind—so that we feel better, we’re happier, we’re less prone to suffering, we’re kinder, we’re better to people around us, we’re more effective at home and work, and we have more sense of a kind of inner peace and connectedness with all things.

MB: Can you give us an example of a practice that has this effect on the mind and hence the brain?

RH: Whenever you are aware of your own body sensations. For example, when you pay attention to your breathing, or if you golf, or if you’re a dancer, or if you do something like yoga, or Tai Chi, or if you meditate—in all those cases, you’re paying attention to the internal sensations of your body. Well, as it turns out, a part of the brain called the insula—there are two of them actually—track the internal state of the body, which means also that they’re intimately involved in sensing your feelings.

Research has shown that as people activate their insula more, such as through meditation, the insula actually gets thicker. In other words, neurons make more and more connections with each other, which actually measurably thickens your insula.

MB: And what is the benefit of that?

RH: It’s a demonstration that they are making more connections with each other. So as a result, people then become more in touch with themselves, which is good. But even beyond that, research has shown that the insula is also crucial for empathy. Because when we get a sense of the emotions of other people, we actually light up the same neural circuits in our own brain—they light up as if we’re accessing those feelings ourselves.

So the point is, that if you can strengthen the insula, that will both make you more able to be aware of yourself and also help you be more empathic toward others.

The classic line in neural psychology is, “As neurons fire together they wire together.” The seemingly immaterial and ephemeral flow of the thoughts and feelings through your mind leaves behind traces in your brain. So the takeaway point is to be very thoughtful about what you think about all day long. A lot of us think about crud all day long. We’re worrying about this, we’re planning that, we’re obsessing over something bad that might happen that hasn’t even happened, whatever. Or we’re thinking about what a loser we are, how we just never get anywhere in life, or people don’t love us, or we get mistreated—and there’s a place for that if it’s productive.

But much of the time, we’re just running those movies in the mental simulator. The problem is, as we run those movies, they’re leaving behind traces of neural structure that are negativistic, depressive, pessimistic, and very self-critical.

MB: So we initially talked about the more positive aspects of the brain. Now you’ve started identifying parts of the brain that have a more negative slant. And in your book, you do talk about this negativity bias in our brains. Can you describe that a bit more?

RH: Our ancestors, the ones who lived to pass on their genes, got better and better and better at making a crucial decision many times a day about whether to approach something or avoid it. Approach the pleasant, avoid the unpleasant. Approach the carrot, duck the stick.

Alright, now the problem is that sticks are much more important to pay attention to in the wild than carrots because if you miss a carrot today, you’ll get another chance at one tomorrow, but if you don’t avoid a stick today—Wham!—you’re not gonna get a crack at a carrot tomorrow.

So we’ve developed what’s called in science a “negativity bias,” which means that the brain, to help us survive, preferentially looks for, reacts to, stores, and then recalls negative information over positive information. For example, there’s a pretty famous finding in the realm of relationship psychology from John Gottman, of the University of Washington, that it takes at least five positive interactions to make up for just one negative one. In other words, in effect, a negative interaction in an important relationship is five times more powerful than a positive interaction. That’s an example of the negativity bias at work.

So then the really interesting question becomes: How can you overcome it? That’s why, for me, taking in the good is an absolutely crucial skill to develop, and a wonderful way to balance this unfair tilt embedded in your own nervous system.

MB: What do you mean by “taking in the good”?

RH: The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive experiences.

For most of us, as we go through the day, most of the moments in life are either neutral or positive. The problem is that neutral or positive moments get remembered with standard memory systems, which is to say they’re mostly in-and-out. But negative experiences are instantly registered and intensely focused on, based on the negativity bias of the brain. Then they get stored in what’s called “implicit memory”—not so much memory for events, like what I did on my summer vacation, but rather the feeling of being alive. And that implicit memory bank gets shaded in a darker and darker way by the slowly accumulating residue of negative experiences.

To counteract that, we need to actively build up positive implicit memories to balance this unfair accumulation of negative implicit memories. And the way to do that is three steps for sure with an optional fourth step.

The first step is to turn positive events into positive experiences. All kinds of good things happen in our daily life that we hardly notice at all, and if we do, we don’t feel it. Someone pays us a compliment, we hardly pay attention to it, or we deflect it. So instead of thatm you turn positive events into positive experiences.

Second, really savor it. In other words, the way to remember something is to make it intense, felt in the body, and lasting. That’s how we give those neurons lots and lots time to fire together so they start wiring together. So rather than noticing it and feeling good for a couple of seconds, stay with it. Relish it, enjoy it, for 10, 20, or 30 seconds, so it really starts developing neural structure.

The third step is to sense and intend that this positive experience is sinking into you and becoming a part of you. In other words, it’s becoming woven into the fabric of your brain and yourself.

For bonus points, if you’re so inclined, it’s often very powerful to take a current positive experience and have it kind of go down inside to an old place of pain. Do not do this if you have a trauma history and you get flooded if you think about old pain. The method is to have the old painful material be in the background of awareness while the current positive experience that is its antidote is prominent and strong in a foreground of awareness, and hold both those things in mind for 10 or 20 or 30 seconds straight. If you can’t do that, don’t worry about this fourth step. But if you can do that, wow, this fourth step is really powerful. Honestly over many years, it’s how I filled my own hole in the heart.

MB: Your book is filled with practices that people can try to boost their feelings of love and happiness and equanimity. Do you use any of these practices on a regular basis?

RH: Oh yeah. My wife wishes I used more, but anyway.

MB: Can you identify one and perhaps describe the effect that you’ve seen it have on your mind and brain?

RH: Yeah, I’ll mention two, actually.

One is the importance of focusing on positive experiences, because of the negativity bias of the brain, and also because positive experience has so many benefits. It’s so good for the immune system. It’s so good for concentration. Positive emotional states help steady the mind for a complex reason involving dopamine. So in daily life, I look for positive emotion and I really try to allow it to be there and to kind of sink into it, to welcome it.

Second, I’ve really come to appreciate how extremely sensitive we are to threat. If you think about it, in life there are two big mistakes you can make: You can either think there is a tiger there when there is not. Or you can think there is no tiger, but there really is one. Of those two mistakes, which one do most people make most the time? It’s the first one. We think there’s a tiger there when there really is no tiger. Or it’s a baby tiger, or it’s a paper tiger, or it’s a tiger in chains. And we go through life feeling threatened all the time.

So I’ve become very alert to needless threat. I don’t want to make the second mistake—in other words, I want to see clearly and be discerning about what is truly a threat over there. But I don’t want to be bamboozled or misguided either by my own mental processes or by external messages into thinking that there’s a threat there when there really isn’t one.

And related to that, I’ve also become much more thoughtful about not being threatening to other people needlessly. I don’t mean walking on egg shells, avoiding telling the truth when it’s appropriate and useful and all the rest of that. But what I do mean is being thoughtful about how I give people an alarm signal sometimes when I don’t really mean to.

MB: Let me come back to another very concrete aspect of your book, and that’s something that you call “the two darts of suffering.” Can you talk a little bit about what those two darts are and whether they’re tied to our nervous system in any way?

RH: Sure. Well, the metaphor is the Buddha. He said that things happen in life that are painful and difficult. At a physical level, we’re all exposed to aging and disease and death, and because we’re intensely social animals who love, we’re also exposed to sorrow when people we love die or are threatened or are in pain. Those are the first darts of life; you can’t escape them.

Then the Buddha pointed out that we compound the pain through self-inflicted wounds, in other words, that we throw “second darts” at ourselves. For example, we get upset that we’re in pain or somebody says something cruel to us, which is a first dart, and it pierces us and hurts, but then we brood over it for the rest of the day, inflicting all kinds of second darts upon ourselves.

When a first dart lands, it’s really important to try to automatically start activating the parasympathetic wing of the nervous system, because first darts trigger the stress response—the “fight or flight” wing of the nervous system. So as much as you can, start trying to get automatic around taking deep breaths, calming yourself down, imagining that you’re safe, or as safe as possible, bringing to mind other resources, reminding yourself you’ve gotten through these situations in the past, calling to mind positive emotions that are the antidote to whatever has happened right then and there—whatever works for you.

It’s deceptively simple, but if one takes in the good a handful of times everyday, related to really small things, that’s going to make a permanent change in your nervous system, probably in a matter of days.

–  Michael Bergeisen is the host of “The Greater Good Podcast.” The Greater Good Mag­a­zine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quar­terly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tific research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

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Gaming for Good
Research suggests that games like Lemmings, where the goal is to help others, inspire real-life acts of altruism.
– By Kyle Smith

For years, video games have been linked to aggression and violence, with researchers and media reports suggesting that violent games have inspired or even caused violent acts.

But a new study suggests that video games can be a force for good, finding that games with positive objectives can actually inspire people to perform acts of altruism.

Over four experiments, Tobias Greitemeyer and Silia Osswald, researchers at the University of Sussex in England and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany, respectively, had participants play either a “prosocial” game—a game where the goal is to help others—or a “neutral” game, meaning it has no characters with whom to interact positively or negatively, like Tetris. Then the researchers placed the participants in situations where they had the opportunity to help others, ranging from low-risk situations, such as seeing a dropped cup of pencils, to high-risk ones, like witnessing an angry ex-boyfriend harass an experimenter.

Greitemeyer and Osswald wanted to see if the participants wee more likely to intervene after playing a prosocial game such as Lemmings (pictured), which tasks players with ensuring the safety of a group of fatally stupid creatures.

The results, published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, show that those who had played a game like Lemmings were much more likely to help in low– and high-risk situations than were those who had played a neutral-themed game.

The authors also investigated why they might have seen this link between prosocial games and prosocial behavior. Essentially, they suggest that playing video games with prosocial objectives fosters a prosocial mindset that makes people more willing to help others.

According to a study cited in the paper, 70–85 percent of games involve some kind of violence. So, although the content of games can cause behavioral shifts in either an aggressive or altruistic direction, gamers are much more likely to experience the former.

The authors’ response to this disparity is a simple one. “There is clearly a need for prosocial video games that are highly attractive to customers,” they write. “Convincing the video game industry to create such games would be an important first step.”

– Kyle Smith is a Greater Good editorial assistant. Greater Good Magazine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

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• Playing the Blame Game: Videogames Pros and Cons
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The Evolution of Empathy

Empathy’s not a uniquely human trait, explains primatologist Frans de Waal. Apes and other animals feel it as well, suggesting that empathy is truly an essential part of who we are.

Once upon a time, the United States had a president known for a peculiar facial display. In an act of controlled emotion, he would bite his lower lip and tell his audience, “I feel your pain.” Whether the display was sincere is not the issue here; how we are affected by another’s predicament is. Empathy is second nature to us, so much so that anyone devoid of it strikes us as dangerous or mentally ill.

At the movies, we can’t help but get inside the skin of the characters on the screen. We despair when their gigantic ship sinks; we exult when they finally stare into the eyes of a long-lost lover.

We are so used to empathy that we take it for granted, yet it is essential to human society as we know it. Our morality depends on it: How could anyone be expected to follow the golden rule without the capacity to mentally trade places with a fellow human being? It is logical to assume that this capacity came first, giving rise to the golden rule itself. The act of perspective-taking is summed up by one of the most enduring definitions of empathy that we have, formulated by Adam Smith as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.”

Even Smith, the father of economics, best known for emphasizing self-interest as the lifeblood of human economy, understood that the concepts of self-interest and empathy don’t conflict. Empathy makes us reach out to others, first just emotionally, but later in life also by understanding their situation.

This capacity likely evolved because it served our ancestors’ survival in two ways. First, like every mammal, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring. Second, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates. Taking care of them is just a matter of enlightened self-interest.

Animal empathy

It is hard to imagine that empathy—a characteristic so basic to the human species that it emerges early in life, and is accompanied by strong physiological reactions—came into existence only when our lineage split off from that of the apes. It must be far older than that. Examples of empathy in other animals would suggest a long evolutionary history to this capacity in humans.

Evolution rarely throws anything out. Instead, structures are transformed, modified, co-opted for other functions, or tweaked in another direction. The frontal fins of fish became the front limbs of land animals, which over time turned into hoofs, paws, wings, and hands. Occasionally, a structure loses all function and becomes superfluous, but this is a gradual process, and traits rarely disappear altogether. Thus, we find tiny vestiges of leg bones under the skin of whales and remnants of a pelvis in snakes.

Over the last several decades, we’ve seen increasing evidence of empathy in other species. One piece of evidence came unintentionally out of a study on human development. Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, visited people’s homes to find out how young children respond to family members’ emotions. She instructed people to pretend to sob, cry, or choke, and found that some household pets seemed as worried as the children were by the feigned distress of the family members. The pets hovered nearby and put their heads in their owners’ laps.

But perhaps the most compelling evidence for the strength of animal empathy came from a group of psychiatrists led by Jules Masserman at Northwestern University. The researchers reported in 1964 in the American Journal of Psychiatry that rhesus monkeys refused to pull a chain that delivered food to themselves if doing so gave a shock to a companion. One monkey stopped pulling the chain for 12 days after witnessing another monkey receive a shock. Those primates were literally starving themselves to avoid shocking another animal.

The anthropoid apes, our closest relatives, are even more remarkable. In 1925, Robert Yerkes reported how his bonobo, Prince Chim, was so extraordinarily concerned and protective toward his sickly chimpanzee companion, Panzee, that the scientific establishment might not accept his claims: “If I were to tell of his altruistic and obviously sympathetic behavior towards Panzee, I should be suspected of idealizing an ape.”

Nadia Ladygina-Kohts, a primatological pioneer, noticed similar empathic tendencies in her young chimpanzee, Joni, whom she raised at the beginning of the last century, in Moscow. Kohts, who analyzed Joni’s behavior in the minutest detail, discovered that the only way to get him off the roof of her house after an escape—much more effective than any reward or threat of punishment—was by arousing sympathy:

If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his plays 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.

These observations suggest that apart from emotional connectedness, apes have an appreciation of the other’s situation and show a degree of perspective-taking. One striking report in this regard concerns a bonobo female named Kuni, who found a wounded bird in her enclosure at Twycross Zoo, in England. Kuni picked up the bird, and when her keeper urged her to let it go, she climbed to the highest point of the highest tree, carefully unfolded the bird’s wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing it as hard as she could toward the barrier of the enclosure. When the bird fell short, Kuni climbed down and guarded it until the end of the day, when it flew to safety. Obviously, what Kuni did would have been inappropriate toward a member of her own species. Having seen birds in flight many times, she seemed to have a notion of what would be good for a bird, thus giving us an anthropoid illustration of Smith’s “changing places in fancy.”

This is not to say that all we have are anecdotes. Systematic studies have been conducted on so-called “consolation” behavior. Consolation is defined as friendly or reassuring behavior by a bystander toward a victim of aggression. For example, chimpanzee A attacks chimpanzee B, after which bystander C comes over and embraces or grooms B. Based on hundreds of such observations, we know that consolation occurs regularly and exceeds baseline levels of contact. In other words, it is a demonstrable tendency that probably reflects empathy, since the objective of the consoler seems to be to alleviate the distress of the other. In fact, the usual effect of this kind of behavior is that it stops screaming, yelping, and other signs of distress.

A bottom-up view of empathy

The above examples help explain why to the biologist, a Russian doll is such a satisfying plaything, especially if it has a historical dimension. I own a doll of Russian President Vladimir Putin, within whom we discover Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Kruschev, Stalin, and Lenin, in that order. Finding a little Lenin and Stalin within Putin will hardly surprise most political analysts. The same is true for biological traits: The old always remains present in the new.

This is relevant to the debate about the origins of empathy, especially because of the tendency in some disciplines, such as psychology, to put human capacities on a pedestal. They essentially adopt a top-down approach that emphasizes the uniqueness of human language, consciousness, and cognition. But instead of trying to place empathy in the upper regions of human cognition, it is probably best to start out examining the simplest possible processes, some perhaps even at the cellular level. In fact, recent neuroscience research suggests that very basic processes do underlie empathy. Researchers at the University of Parma, in Italy, were the first to report that monkeys have special brain cells that become active not only if the monkey grasps an object with its hand but also if it merely watches another do the same. Since these cells are activated as much by doing as by seeing someone else do, they are known as mirror neurons, or “monkey see, monkey do” neurons.

It seems that developmentally and evolutionarily, advanced forms of empathy are preceded by and grow out of more elementary ones. Biologists prefer such bottom-up accounts. They always assume continuity between past and present, child and adult, human and animal, even between humans and the most primitive mammals.

So, how and why would this trait have evolved in humans and other species? Empathy probably evolved in the context of the parental care that characterizes all mammals. Signaling their state through smiling and crying, human infants urge their caregiver to take action. This also applies to other primates. The survival value of these interactions is evident from the case of a deaf female chimpanzee I have known named Krom, who gave birth to a succession of infants and had intense positive interest in them. But because she was deaf, she wouldn’t even notice her babies’ calls of distress if she sat down on them. Krom’s case illustrates that without the proper mechanism for understanding and responding to a child’s needs, a species will not survive.

During the 180 million years of mammalian evolution, females who responded to their offspring’s needs out-reproduced those who were cold and distant. Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, carried, comforted, and defended their young, we should not be surprised by gender differences in human empathy, such as those proposed to explain the disproportionate rate of boys affected by autism, which is marked by a lack of social communication skills.

Empathy also plays a role in cooperation. One needs to pay close attention to the activities and goals of others to cooperate effectively. A lioness needs to notice quickly when other lionesses go into hunting mode, so that she can join them and contribute to the pride’s success. A male chimpanzee needs to pay attention to his buddy’s rivalries and skirmishes with others so that he can help out whenever needed, thus ensuring the political success of their partnership. Effective cooperation requires being exquisitely in tune with the emotional states and goals of others.

Within a bottom-up framework, the focus is not so much on the highest levels of empathy, but rather on its simplest forms, and how these combine with increased cognition to produce more complex forms of empathy. How did this transformation take place? The evolution of empathy runs from shared emotions and intentions between individuals to a greater self/other distinction—that is, an “unblurring” of the lines between individuals. As a result, one’s own experience is distinguished from that of another person, even though at the same time we are vicariously affected by the other’s. This process culminates in a cognitive appraisal of the other’s behavior and situation: We adopt the other’s perspective.

As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed. At heart, it is a hard-wired response that we fine-tune and elaborate upon in the course of our lives, until it reaches a level at which it becomes such a complex response that it is hard to recognize its origin in simpler responses, such as body mimicry and emotional contagion.

On a leash

Biology holds us “on a leash,” in the felicitous words of biologist Edward Wilson, and will let us stray only so far from who we are. We can design our life any way we want, but whether we will thrive depends on how well that life fits human predispositions.

I hesitate to predict what we humans can and can’t do, but we must consider our biological leash when deciding what kind of society we want to build, especially when it comes to goals like achieving universal human rights.

If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon, rather than going against, our nature.

For instance, in 2004, the Israeli Minister of Justice caused political uproar for sympathizing with the enemy. Yosef Lapid questioned the Israeli army’s plans to demolish thousands of Palestinian homes in a zone along the Egyptian border. He had been touched by images on the evening news. “When I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines, I did think, ‘What would I say if it were my grandmother?’” he said. Lapid’s grandmother was a Holocaust victim.

This incident shows how a simple emotion can widen the definition of one’s group. Lapid had suddenly realized that Palestinians were part of his circle of concern, too. Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia.

Empathy is fragile, though. Among our close animal relatives, it is switched on by events within their community, such as a youngster in distress, but it is just as easily switched off with regards to outsiders or members of other species, such as prey. The way a chimpanzee bashes in the skull of a live monkey by hitting it against a tree trunk is no advertisement for ape empathy. Bonobos are less brutal, but in their case, too, empathy needs to pass through several filters before it will be expressed. Often, the filters prevent expressions of empathy because no ape can afford feeling pity for all living things all the time. This applies equally to humans. Our evolutionary background makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We’ve evolved to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.

This is the challenge of our time: globalization by a tribal species. In trying to structure the world such that it suits human nature, the point to keep in mind is that political ideologues by definition hold narrow views. They are blind to what they don’t wish to see. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people kill each other, we call them “animals.” But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being “humane.” We like to claim the latter tendency for ourselves. Yet, it will be hard to come up with anything we like about ourselves that is not part of our evolutionary background. What we need, therefore, is a vision of human nature that encompasses all of our tendencies: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Our best hope for transcending tribal differences is based on the moral emotions, because emotions defy ideology. In principle, empathy can override every rule about how to treat others. When Oskar Schindler kept Jews out of concentration camps during World War II, for example, he was under clear orders by his society on how to treat people, yet his feelings interfered.

Caring emotions may lead to subversive acts, such as the case of a prison guard who during wartime was directed to feed his charges only water and bread, but who occasionally sneaked in a hard-boiled egg. However small his gesture, it etched itself into the prisoners’ memories as a sign that not all of their enemies were monsters. And then there are the many acts of omission, such as when soldiers could have killed captives without negative repercussions but decided not to. In war, restraint can be a form of compassion.

Emotions trump rules. This is why, when speaking of moral role models, we talk of their hearts, not their brains (even if, as any neuroscientist will point out, the heart as the seat of emotions is an outdated notion). We rely more on what we feel than what we think when solving moral dilemmas.

It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality clearly predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo ape and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial.

– Frans B. M. de Waal, Ph.D., a Dutch-born primatologist, is the C. H. Candler Professor at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. This essay is adapted from his book, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. His latest book is The Age of Empathy. Greater Good Magazine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

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100 is the New 65
– Why do some people live to 100? Researchers are trying to find out, reports Meera Lee Sethi, and they’re discovering how we might live better lives, not just longer ones.

Will Clark, 105, recently bought a van for a 5,000-mile road trip across the Midwest with his wife, Lois, who is 102.

Elsa Brehm Hoffmann loves bridge and is always ready for a party. Rosa McGee enjoys singing hymns to herself all day long. Will Clark makes a mean spaghetti and meatballs. What connects these three? They belong to the single fastest growing segment of the United States population: people over a hundred years old.

Hoffmann, McGee, Clark, and the nearly 100,000 other centenarians in the U.S. provide inspiration to the rest of us. But they also provide researchers with a tantalizing puzzle: Why do some people live so long? For years, medical researchers have been studying this select group, identifying some key factors to a long life. Now, a growing body of research is suggesting that longevity isn’t just linked to good genes and a healthy lifestyle; it’s also tied to cultivating a positive, resilient attitude toward life. These results validate a simple idea: that centenarians can teach us how to live not just longer lives, but better ones.

At the fore of this research is the New England Centenarian Study (NECS), which has enrolled more than 1,500 centenarians from around the world over the past 15 years. The study’s director, Thomas Perls, says these participants dispel the belief that the older someone gets, the sicker he or she becomes. Instead, he says, “the older you get, the healthier you’ve been.” In other words, people who demonstrate exceptional longevity tend to have had a lifelong history of good health.

Indeed, people who die in their 70s or 80s are plagued by degenerative illnesses in the years before their death; in contrast, Perls has found that nearly two thirds of centenarians either delay the onset of diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes—or escape them altogether. Plus, a substantial proportion of centenarians who survive such age-related illnesses do so without developing physical disabilities, enabling them to remain socially, mentally, and physically active. As a result, in a culture that romanticizes youth, Perls argues that centenarians embody “a thoroughly optimistic view of aging”—one that shows that prolonging life and enjoying it go hand-in-hand.

How do they do it?

To reach 100, research suggests that it definitely helps to have the right genes. Longevity clusters in families; Perls has documented as many as eight siblings in one generation who lived to 100. He’s also found that the children of centenarians have only one-third the risk of dying from cancer as the rest of us, and one-sixth the risk of dying from heart disease. Although specific genetic mechanisms behind long life are notoriously difficult to prove, there is some evidence that centenarians may be less likely to possess specific genetic variations that predispose people to problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol. Perls is currently studying the entire human genome, searching for genetic variations associated with other diseases that centenarians lack, as well as variations that may actively promote longevity.

But long life isn’t just a lucky break. Scientists’ best estimate, largely based on a landmark Swedish study of identical and fraternal twins, is that genetic factors account for only 20 to 30 percent of a person’s lifespan. Environmental and behavioral factors dictate the other 70 to 80 percent.

Much of what researchers know about how to reach extreme old age sounds like basic public health advocacy: Don’t smoke. Drink in moderation. Eat healthy. Exercise regularly. “What we can do to live longer is no secret,” says Peter Martin, who directs the Gerontology Program at Iowa State University and was a key contributor to a study of centenarians in Georgia, the Georgia Centenarian Study, which ran from 1988 to 2006.

But what is new is the growing evidence that our personalities affect our longevity. It’s easy to know what it takes to stay healthy. More difficult is believing we have the power to control our lifespans, mustering the will to make good choices, and simply loving life enough to make long-term investments in our health. “It’s personality,” says Martin, “that turns these things on.”

Though every centenarian is unique—they vary widely in terms of education, socioeconomic status, religion, and ethnicity—Martin reports that, as a group, they exhibit a distinct constellation of personality traits. For instance, they tend to display relatively high levels of what psychologists label “competence”—the ability to achieve goals—and “conscientiousness,” or self-discipline. These qualities may make it easier to follow through on the healthy habits the rest of us resolve to keep each New Year’s Eve but abandon by the end of January.

“It’s amazing how cognizant they are of the need to exercise and not just leave it to chance or nature,” says Lynn Peters Adler, who runs the National Centenarian Awareness Project, an advocacy group that celebrates the pleasures and accomplishments of aging. “One woman I know walks a mile every morning, no matter the temperature.” This may sound like a strict and dreary regimen, but Adler notes that there’s an exciting reason for it: This woman loves hiking the Grand Canyon, which she has done nearly a dozen times since her 75th birthday.

Martin’s research suggests that centenarians also seem to be more inclined to embrace new skills and experiences, defying the stereotype of the elderly as stuck in their ways. Will Clark is living proof. Now 105, he just acquired his first computer, which he uses to email friends and to research authors and golfers in which he’s interested. He’s even taken to Googling family members. “I can’t believe the things you can call up on this gadget,” chuckles the former dentist and military man.

Elsa Hoffmann, 102, with her great granddaughters.

Elsa Hoffmann, 102, epitomizes two other traits centenarians display at relatively high levels: extraversion and trust. “I love people and I like to find out their interests in life,” she says. “We get to be intimate almost when we meet.” Hoffmann’s schedule includes lunch dates, theater outings, fundraisers, shopping excursions, bridge and gin tournaments, and—every year for the past few years—a cruise with fellow country club members.

Though she derives boundless joy from all this social activity, it also happens to be good for her: A considerable body of epidemiological research has linked low levels of social connection with higher risks for mortality. (See Jill Suttie’s Greater Good article this month for more on the cognitive benefits of social connection.)

But even when life isn’t all about world travel and intellectual discovery, centenarians still seem to have a leg up on the rest of us: Their results on personality tests show that they may be better equipped to handle difficult situations without literally worrying themselves to death. Rosa McGee, for instance, has lived through cancer, the death of her husband of 25 years, and a foot condition that renders her essentially homebound. Yet her daughter Clara Jean describes her personality simply as “sweetness. She never fusses, never argues, never complains. It’s a contentment that is beautiful.”

Indeed, research also shows that centenarians are more likely than younger adults to engage in “cognitive coping,” using mental strategies to tackle difficult situations. Martin says he has seen centenarians take a variety of approaches to combating stress and negative emotions. Some write poetry about the loneliness of old age or the misery of illness; others replace lost physical pursuits with mental ones, like reading, or take comfort in deep religious beliefs.

None of these coping strategies are particularly innovative. But Perls, Martin, and their colleagues argue that they can add up to a lifetime’s worth of healthy stress-management. Centenarian research shows that avoiding anxious or neurotic behavior may not only help us increase our lifespans but better enjoy those extra years.

A higher bar for aging

Given how “fantastically well” he has seen his study participants doing in the later stages of their lives, Perls is frustrated by what he sees as our culture’s obsession with youth. He laments the fact that “we have an entire industry that tries to stop aging—it’s all nonsense.”

Leonard Poon, who heads the Georgia Centenarian Study and is a professor of public health and psychology at the University of Georgia, says it’s not just popular culture but politicians who are short-sighted in this regard. Poon bemoans the lack of congressional support for the fields of gerontology and geriatrics. “The White House Conference on Aging is held every 10 years to get grassroots recommendations,” explains Poon. “In the last one, President Bush did not show up.”

Their lack of political clout is ironic; in his interviews with centenarians, Martin has found that many are acutely interested in politics, and love discussing issues like the national debt. He says this vigorous involvement in community life is a joy that old age shares with youth.

But there are also new joys that take shape as one gets older. There is, for instance, the pleasure of what Martin calls “weaving your own life story and making sense of why we’re here.” It’s a pleasure that McGee clearly enjoys when she talks about her role orchestrating a year’s supply of food for a church in Mexico, and that Hoffmann feels when she fixes broken toys for her great-grandchildren and speaks to elementary schoolchildren about her life’s experiences. And there is, still, the pleasure of exploration. Clark reveled in it recently, when he bought a van and went on a 5,000-mile road trip across the Midwest with his wife, herself 102.

Rising life expectancy rates mean that most of us will live longer than previous generations. What remains in question is the quality of life we’ll have at 80, 90, or 100. Martin contends that the answer lies in the attitude we cultivate in our younger years. “Imagine that you’re 95,” he says. “You can’t see, you can’t hear, you’re lonely and dependent on other people—and it’s because of the anxious, disagreeable attitude you had all your life.”

On the other hand, he says, developing a positive attitude towards life while we’re young, though challenging at times, can set us up to be happy, healthy, and independent in old age.

In other words, aging well isn’t just a project for the elderly. It’s something we can work toward our entire lives.

“For our parents, the standard was aging gracefully,” says Adler. “The bar has been raised. Let’s aspire instead to age excellently.”

– Meera Lee Sethi is a Chicago-based freelance writer who reports on current issues in biomedicine, public health, social psychology, and neuroscience. She is a contributing editor for Utata.org. Copyright Greater Good. Greater Good Magazine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

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Changing our Minds

By imagining many possible worlds, argues novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley, fiction helps us understand ourselves and others.

–By Keith Oatley

For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies.

But is the idea of fiction being good for you merely wishful thinking? The members of a small research group in Toronto—Maja Djikic, Raymond Mar, and I—have been working on the problem. We have turned the idea into questions. In what ways might reading fiction be good for you? If it is good for you, why would this be? And what is the psychological function of art generally?

Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn’t just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves.

Possible selves, possible worlds

People often think that a fiction is something untrue, but this is wrong. The word derives from the Latin fingere, to make. As something made, fiction is different from something discovered, as in physics, or from something that happened, as in the news. But this does not mean it is false. Fiction is about possible selves in possible worlds.

In terms of 21st-century psychology, we might best see fiction as a kind of simulation: one that runs not on computers, but on minds. Such mental simulation unfolds on two levels.

The first level involves simulating the minds of other people: imagining what they are thinking and feeling, which developmental psychologists call “theory of mind.” The theory-of-mind simulation is like a watch, which is a small model that simulates the alternation of day and night as the earth rotates. Often we can’t see sun or stars, so we refer to a little model that we can carry with us, a wristwatch, which, as it happens, is more accurate than a device like a sundial that offers a direct read-out from the heavens.

Similarly, although sometimes we know what other people are thinking and feeling because they have just told us, for the most part we have to construct a mental model of the person to know what’s going on inside their heads. When we do this for emotions, the process is called empathy, and neuro-imaging studies suggest that when we recognize an emotion in someone else, our brains generate the same emotion. In effect, we are simulating the other person’s emotional state.

Fiction, as Lisa Zunshine has emphasized in her 2006 book, Why We Read Fiction, engages our theory-of-mind faculties and gives us practice in working out what characters are thinking and feeling. Indeed some genres of fiction—for instance, the mystery novel—are entirely concerned with working out what characters are up to when they are trying to conceal it.

The second level of simulation is about what happens when people get together. Just as computer simulations of atmospheric pressure, winds, and humidity are used to generate weather forecasts, so novels can be thought of as simulations of how people react to combinations of social forces. Near the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, for example, Jane Austen describes a ball. The novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, and her sisters are excited because they might meet potential husbands. But one of the most eligible men, Mr. Darcy, finds the proceedings provincial, and thinks they will be tedious. Austen is running a simulation in order to understand what happens in social groups when expectations clash in this kind of way. She’s offering insight into people’s lives and manners—insight that’s just as relevant to our world as to Elizabeth Bennet’s.

Understanding others

So if fiction is a kind of simulation of our emotional and social worlds, could it be that people who read a lot of fiction are more empathic and socially intelligent than those who don’t? This is the question that Raymond Mar, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, Jordan Peterson, and I asked in a 2006 study.

First we measured whether 94 participants read predominantly fiction or non-fiction. Then, to estimate their social abilities, we used two tests. One is a measure of empathy and theory of mind: Simon Baron-Cohen’s “Mind in the Eyes” test. The participant looks at photos of people’s eyes—as if seen through a mail slot—and tries to guess the mental state of the photographed person. In the second test, the Interpersonal Perception Test, participants view 15 video clips of people interacting, then answer a question about each one—for instance, “Which of the two children, or both, or neither, are offspring of the two adults in the clip?”

Our results confirmed that reading fiction is associated with increased social ability. We found that people who read predominantly fiction were substantially better than those who read predominantly non-fiction at the Mind in the Eyes test, and somewhat better at the Interpersonal Perception Test.

But could it be that the personality characteristics of more socially intelligent people incline them to read fiction?

To help find an answer to that question, Raymond Mar used a fiction story and a non-fiction article from The New Yorker, and randomly assigned people to read one or the other. Mar gave all the readers an analytical reasoning task in a multiple choice format, derived from the LSAT exam for entrance to law school, and a social reasoning test in the same format with questions about the emotions, beliefs, and intentions of characters in social scenarios.

The result: The two sets of readers had similar analytical reasoning skills, but the short-story readers showed a stronger understanding of social situations than the essay readers.

How do we explain these results? My colleagues and I think it’s a matter of expertise. Fiction is principally about the difficulties of selves navigating the social world. Non-fiction is about, well, whatever it is about: selfish genes, or how to make Mediterranean food, or whether climate changes will harm our planet. So with fiction we tend to become more expert at empathizing and socializing. By contrast, readers of non-fiction are likely to become more expert at genetics, or cookery, or environmental studies, or whatever they spend their time reading and thinking about.

Changing ourselves

So there is evidence that reading fiction improves our social abilities. But does it affect our emotions and personality?

This was the question behind a different kind of study by Maja Djikic, Sara Zoeterman, Jordan Peterson, and myself, due to be published this year. We randomly assigned 166 people to read either a literary short story or a version of the same story rewritten in a non-fictional format. Before and after they read the text, we measured readers’ personalities using a standard personality test.

The literary story was “The Lady with the Little Dog,” by Anton Chekhov, who is generally acknowledged as the world’s greatest short story writer. It is about Dmitri Gomov, and a lady, Anna Sergueyevna, whom he sees walking with her little dog. They are both alone, on vacation at a seaside resort. They are both married to other people, but they begin an affair. At the end of their vacation they part. But their feelings for each other grow, and both are shocked to discover how much more important these feelings are than anything else in their lives. They encounter many difficulties, and overcome some of them. The story ends with this: “… their hardest and most difficult period was only just beginning.”

The version in a non-fiction format was written by Djikic as a courtroom report of divorce proceedings. It has the same characters and events, and some of the words, of Chekhov’s story. It is the same length and reading difficulty. Importantly, the readers of the non-fictional account reported that they found it just as interesting, though not as artistic, as Chekhov’s story.

We found that the personality traits of readers of Chekhov’s story changed more than those of the readers of the courtroom account. The changes in personality were not large, but they were measurable. They were different from the changes of belief spurred by a piece of writing meant to be persuasive, which tend to be all in the same direction as intended by the writer. Instead, Chekhov’s readers changed in different directions, with each change unique to the particular reader, mediated by the emotions that each individual felt while reading.

Why? We believe that as people read Chekhov’s story, they experienced empathy with the protagonists and identified with them so that each reader, in his or her own way, became a bit more like them, or decided not to think in the same ways as the characters. When we read “The Lady with the Little Dog,” we can be both ourselves and Gomov or Anna. Through stories, selfhood can expand.

My colleagues and I also believe that readers of Chekhov’s story were taken out of their usual ways of being so that they could connect with something larger than themselves, beyond themselves. This is an effect that goes beyond fiction. All art aspires to help us transcend ourselves.

Bittersweet creatures

So what is art, that it can enhance social abilities and transform the self? First of all, art is something that lasts and can spread to others. So although one can imagine a lover whispering an improvised poem into her lover’s ear, for the most part a poem will travel in time and space, and last beyond the moment of its conception.

Second, art is something made by humans that is both itself and something else. Archaeologist Steven Mithen argues that the first unequivocal works of art appeared relatively recently, between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. For instance, a wooden flute has been discovered from 43,000 years ago, and the earliest cave paintings, at Chauvet in France, are from 31,000 years ago. In this same period, ornaments such as bracelets started to appear, as did sites of human burial. In all these cases, the thing produced was both itself and something else. A piece of wood was also a flute capable of sounding notes. Charcoal on a cave wall was also a rhinoceros. A piece of bronze was also an adornment. A burial site was something constructed to show that someone was dead and also alive on some other plane.

Mithen proposes that until this period, our prehistoric ancestors were knowledgeable, but their knowledge was confined within domains. One domain was interactions in the social group, another was, say, the properties of plant foods, and so on. But at some point in the evolution of the human brain, 30,000–50,000 years ago, the domains of our cognitive structures started to interpenetrate, and metaphor was born: marks on the wall of a cave could become a rhinoceros.

This later allowed the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho to write, “Love shakes me again, that bittersweet creature.” Love is itself, and also something else. The domains of emotion and taste interpenetrate through Sappho’s poem, in a phrase that was so memorable that the idea of love being bittersweet has lasted 2,600 years. Such crossings of domain boundaries still surprise us. It is that surprise which can help expand our understanding of ourselves and the social world.

– Keith Oatley, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He is the author of six books of psychology and two novels, the first of which, The Case of Emily V., won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. Copyright Greater Good. Greater Good Magazine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

Related articles by Greater Good Magazine:

- Arts and Smarts: Test Scores and Cognitive Development

- Cognitive and Emotional Development Through Play

- Mindfulness and Meditation in Schools for Stress Management

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Yes, You Can:

New research suggests we can build our willpower

– By Daniel Goleman

Those of us who struggle to resist junk foods or otherwise suffer a lack of willpower will be heartened by some good news from neuroscience. But there’s some bad news, too.

First, the bad news. A slew of studies suggest that we each have a fixed neural reservoir of willpower, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for others. Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes willpower.

In a typical experiment on this effect, one group of people was made to watch a video of a boring scene; another was not. Then both groups had to circle every “e” in a long passage of writing. The result? The people who had to first sit through the boring video gave up faster. The same loss of persistence has been found when people try to resist tempting foods, suppress emotional reactions, or even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all suggests we have a fixed willpower budget, one we should be careful in spending. Some neuroscientists suspect that self-control consumes blood sugar, which takes a while to build up again; thus, the depletion effect.

But the good news is that we can grow our willpower; like a muscle, the more we use it, the more it gradually increases over time. But doing this takes, of all things, willpower.

As the muscle of will grows, the larger our reservoir of self-discipline becomes. So people who are able to stick to a diet or an exercise program for a few months, or who complete money-management classes, also reduce their impulse-buying, junk food consumption, and alcohol intake. They watch less TV and do more housework. And this ability to delay grasping at gratification, much data shows, predicts greater career success.

This round-up of thinking on willpower comes courtesy of Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, whose recent book, Welcome to Your Brain, details the evidence about willpower. But, writing in The New York Times, the duo poses a puzzle: While it’s clear that willpower has limits, what brain mechanisms let us build it up?

That question brought to mind a recent conversation I had with Richard Davidson, the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Davidson’s research these days focuses on neuroplasticity—how our experience shapes the brain throughout life. One surprise: though most of us learned that we have a fixed number of brain cells when we are born, and that we lose them steadily until we die, brain science now tells us the brain makes about 10,000 new cells every day, and that they migrate to where they are needed. Once there, each cell makes around 10,000 connections to other brain cells over the successive four months.

Davidson’s research finds that the left prefrontal cortex—the brain’s executive center located just behind the forehead—is a key site for helping us build willpower. Our plans and goals hatch here, and impulses are executed via this zone. There is a neural circuit in the prefrontal cortex that inhibits emotional impulse, and can be strengthened by a range of methods.

One of these methods, Davidson explained to me, is mindfulness training, a secular form of meditation widely used in settings from businesses to outpatient clinics. This is confirmed by a great deal of research. My own doctoral dissertation found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressful event. A string of studies have now established that more experienced meditators recover more quickly from stress-induced physiological arousal than do novices.

Research shows that other kinds of training can have similar effects, and the more time we devote to any of these trainings, the greater the result in the targeted areas of the brain. Brain imaging studies show that the spatial areas of London taxi drivers’ brains become enhanced during the first six months they spend driving around that city’s winding streets; likewise, the area for thumb movement in the motor cortex becomes more robust in violinists as they continue to practice over many months. A seminal 2004 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that, compared to novices, highly adept meditators generated far more high-amplitude gamma wave activity—which reflects finely focused attention—in areas of the prefrontal cortex while meditating.

And so it makes perfect sense that we can build our willpower over time if we are committed to doing so, a process that changes our brains right down to the cellular level. Simply being consistently self-disciplined seems to help—going to the gym every day for months, or completing projects you begin—and so does mindfulness meditation. There are ways, it seems, to make it easier to “just say no” when we need to.

– Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., is the author of the bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence. His website is www.danielgoleman.info. Goleman’s full conversation with Richard Davidson can be heard as part of the audio series Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence, available through More than Sound Productions.

We bring you this post thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

Previous columns by Daniel Goleman:

- Should Social-Emotional Learning Be Part of Academic Curriculum?

- When Empathy moves us to Action-By Daniel Goleman

- The Power of Mindsight-by Daniel Goleman