The sensation of both fear and physical pain are built into our defenses to warn us of danger, these feelings developed by our progenitor species’ in order to survive. The sensation of emotional and social pain have been developed evolutionarily within our species, not for our survival against the bigger, stronger and better predator in the wild, but for our social survival. This week’s readings focused on pain as well as one’s ability to empathize with another’s pain. The authors write about humans as social creatures, separate from our ancestors with our developed social structure and ability to attribute the mind states of others. Particular attention is paid to the idea of other minds and one’s ability to ‘mind read’ or mentalise another’s feelings.
This week’s readings struck a particular chord with me, due to the nature of my conference work regarding autism. Chris and Uta Frith’s report, “How we predict what other people are going to do” briefly overviewed our ability to infer things about others as well as applying this information to ourselves. We can watch someone encounter a certain stimulus and from their reactions to that stimulus, we can infer that that stimulus may elicit a similar response in ourselves. The particular part of this research overview that I found the most interesting was the topic of shared experiences or shared feelings. In this section they referred to the mirror neuron system, which seems to be responsible for our involuntary tendency to share another person’s experience. In the fairly disjointed reading specifically devoted to mirror neurons, the author seemed to imply that mirror neurons were a good deal of the basis for interactions between creatures with a highly developed social structure. Mirror neurons seem to have some connection to the learning process, specifically how we learn from others. Uta and Chris Frith connect this research to the “theory of mind,” which is a term I’ve found extensively in my research on autism. “The theory of mind,” without going into much depth, refers to our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others, regardless of what we know to be true or what we feel. Inferring the mental states of others is not just that, it helps extensively in our communication with them. In attributing other states we are able to sympathize and therefore empathize with others. This is a social ability, not a defense mechanism. This ability to empathize provides no protection to our physical well being, however it can protect our social status and social well being in our society. Has our social well being evolved to be just as important to us as our physical well being? In becoming a complex society have we added to our burdens in adding the burden of the importance of social interaction? Or has this only replaced the decreased need for protection from wild creatures that are less of a threat to us than they were to our progenitors?
“Why rejection hurts” talks about the growing importance and similarities between social pain and physical pain. The authors found that both social pain and physical pain share the same neural mechanisms for processing that pain. In this article they define physical pain as ‘unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage and emotion pain as when a social relationship is threatened, damaged or lost. We seem to have become incredibly dependent on social interaction from the very beginning. Our attachment to our parents seems to be incredibly important to our physical/brain developmental as well as our social development. The article implies that this type of social attachment is unique to mammals. When I was younger I used to be fascinated with sharks and their ability to live on their own from birth (regardless of whether they are hatched from eggs or not,) what makes sharks not need that social interaction with their parents as to say, dolphins who stay in schools and care for each other their entire lives? Do all mammals do this? What causes the variation in mammals and whether or not they stay in groups? In this article they also refer to a relative over exposure to social pain as infants. We experience social pain when we are apart from our mother. We are also a species of societies in which we rely to varying degrees on others to get about our daily life. Have we developed in a way that has cancelled out the need for other defense mechanisms? How will this effect the evolution of our species?
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Once again, this time in “Why Rejection Hurts,” our social nature is underscored as a central human characteristic. Like Alee I think it is notable the extent to which we rely on one another. But it is not just interpersonally that we benefit; our very societies are built upon communication of ideas. I even think it must be thanks to the ability to work together and share ideas that we have survived as a species so far, given the physical strength and size that many other animals have over us. For example, I have no idea how to build an apartment building but I live in one. The list of things created by other people we don’t even know that we rely on every day is virtually endless. Where our social natures will lead us from here is an interesting question as is the question of how understanding our social nature better may benefit us, individually and collectively.
In Frith and Frith’s article about how we predict what other people are going to do, in section 4 about bottom up and top-down processes, they write, “ Emotions aroused by social interactions tend to capture our tendencies to reward and punish others.” I thought that reward/punishment was a meaningful way to distill social interaction decisions that we make about how to respond to others to the most basic categories. Their sentence concluding this section is, “inhibition of impulses generated by negative emotions allows us to stop retaliation and to reinstate normal interpersonal relations.” I thought about how this relates to situations in people’s lives that might matter in working with someone clinically. The negative emotions that F&F discuss generally refer to are judgements about people’s untrustworthiness and it seems like we can extrapolate from the rather impersonal examples they give from studies to everyday interactions with those we are closest to. Trustworthiness may not an absolute requirement for us to like someone who say has a wicked sense of humor, but it is extremely important in our gut evaluations of others, especially, for most people, whom we choose to rely on. This reading made me think more about how high trust is on the list of what we value in others, and now I am realizing how often mistrust (of different varieties) is at the root of interpersonal conflict.
The concept of having a conscience came to my mind several times in these articles. Does having a conscience differ from empathy? Although autism and psychopathy are clearly very different empathy is implicated in both.
As for mirror neurons and 'Why rejection hurts', I wondered how the neural circuitry of being excluded from a group would compare to watching someone else be excluded or being the person doing the excluding. Also, the placebo effect(my conference work) is a great illustration of the relationship between social support and physical pain perception.
Ramachandran mentions the role of art, language, and mathematics (to name a few) in the evolution of the human mind and culture but leaves out religion. I'm not too sure what the implications are but I thought it was an interesting point.
I think you raise an important point here concerning how our social interactions can be just as vital to our survival than our other basic biological functions. However, I feel that your assumption that our ability to predict other’s behavior because of our capability to see from their perspective functions only to create sympathy/empathy is an oversimplification. Humans are incredibly complex social creatures, whose actions may occasionally harm each other in a variety of ways and often for reasons largely beyond us. Any process which enables us to even partially predict the actions of other individuals shouldn’t be devalued so easily.
It would be fascinating to find out how this differs in societies where social living & proximity is valued and other societies (like ours) where individualism and personal space is valued upon more? Does this distancing have anything to do with the high rates of psychological problems (ie depression) in 'Occidental' nations or is this simply due to the fact that psychology & its treatment is solely more accepted?
Two major themes in this weeks readings revolved around pain and mirror neurons. It was mentioned that similar neuronal activity can be activated from performing/experiencing a behavior as well as from observing others perform/experience the same behavior. While they acknowledged that the activity was not triggered by non-biological things, I wonder if we have to see this activity in another individual for these neurons to get fired up, or are our mirror neurons sensitive enough that simply hearing one experience the event is enough for them to become activated? And what about TV, a sort of joining of the biological and non biological, does that activate mirror neurons or is it too disconnected? Furthermore, do we have to share a similar perspective with an individual in order to experience a mirror response to their experience? How much versatility do our mirror neurons provide us? Would one observe mirror neuron activity from watching another individual experience something with which they were less familiar? (imagining someone get shocked is not too difficult) Furthermore, many of our social encounters are in groups (larger than one). If an individual were in a room with the person being shocked and the shocker, would their mirror neurons become activated toward the individual with whom thay empathized based on situation, or based on familiarity? (in other words, the person being shocked OR the shocker, what if their loved one was the shocker, that could be a confusing predicament) Could they show mirror activity for both/multiple people at once?
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