In the study, co-authored by neuroscientist Sarina Rodrigues when she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center, along with GGSC Graduate Fellow Laura Saslow, nearly 200 participants took tests that measured their ability to identify and feel the emotions of others; they also provided DNA samples. When the researchers, who also included Center Faculty Director Dacher Keltner, examined the participants’ DNA, they zeroed in on a particular gene that’s the receptor for oxytocin, which is known as the “love hormone.” People can have one of three variations of this gene—either AA, AG, or GG—depending on the genetic information they receive from each parent.

The researchers found that participants who had the GG variation scored significantly higher on the empathy tests than those who had either of the other two variations. What’s more, people with the GG variation seemed less reactive to stress, which the researchers gauged in part by measuring the participants’ heart rate as they anticipated a loud burst of noise.

The study, published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on why some people may have a harder time connecting with others.

“I think the most useful information we can take from this study is that some people are going to be a bit more naturally closed off and unable to really understand what other people are feeling,” says Rodrigues, “and this could be in large part due to the fact that they’re so consumed by their own stress—that it’s somehow impairing them from connecting with others and reaching out.”

One encouraging implication of the study is that empathy is part of humans’ biological legacy. At least for some people, empathy is innate, something that’s rooted in the genetic makeup they get from their parents.

But what about those who have the AA or AG variation—are they doomed to go through life emotionally cut off from others?

Not at all, says Rodrigues, who’s quick to point out that our genes do not determine our destiny. Our genome may predispose us to certain behaviors, but ultimately, our lives are shaped by the interaction between our genes and our experiences.

“Sure, our genes give us a natural predisposition to the way we might want to socially connect with people or handle stress,” says Rodrigues, now an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University. “But through nurturing and social connectivity and understanding, people can overcome these obstacles.”

© Jason Marsh for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: empathy, oxytocin, stress

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Hughes and Waite analyzed data on a diverse sample of people between the ages of 51 and 61, looking at their marital and health history. While they did find that people with a strong and happy marriage showed health benefits, they also found that a disruption to a marriage—either through divorce or the death of a spouse—can harm someone’s health for even years afterwards

Among the currently married, people who had previously been divorced or experienced multiple disruptions showed worse health than those who had never divorced—and than those who had never been married at all. Both the divorced and widowed who did not remarry had worse health across the board than the continuously married; even if they had remarried, they were still at greater risk for health problems that develop over long stretches of time, such as cancer and mobility limitations. But their risk for some other problems, such as depressive symptoms, decreased if they had remarried and stayed married.

Those who were never married fared better than those who had been widowed or divorced. However, the never-married showed significantly more mobility limitations and significantly worse self-rated health than continuously married people.

Although being married is sometimes championed as the key to a healthy life, this study suggests that getting married for the sake of being married can potentially cause more harm than good. Overall, the authors write that this study suggests (emphasis theirs) “being married may protect or even improve health, getting divorced or becoming widowed may damage health, and being divorced or widowed may damage health.”

© Katie Goldsmith for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: divorce, health, marriage

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Her modest request? To unite the world around compassion.

Now, one year later, she’s helped us all take one step closer toward making that wish come true.

Today, Armstrong unveiled the Charter for Compassion, a call to restore compassion to the center of our values, our religious traditions, and our daily lives. The release of the Charter is being accompanied by events around the world meant to celebrate and promote acts of compassion. The Greater Good Science Center is honored to be among the groups that have partnered with the Charter to help spread its hugely important work and message.

The Charter itself was developed over the course of a year, soliciting input from people worldwide before a Council of Conscience–composed of thinkers representing the world’s major religions–channeled that input into six elegant, effective paragraphs.

You can read the Charter below, and affirm it on the Charter’s website. I encourage you to get involved in other ways as well: attend a Charter for Compassion event, spread word of the Charter to others, or just go out of your way to perform an act of compassion–then let others know about it through the Charter’s website, so that it might inspire others to follow suit.

The Charter for Compassion:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.

Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others–even our enemies–is a denial of our common humanity.

We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women
* to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion.
* to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate
* to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures
* to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity
* to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings ~ even those regarded as enemies

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries.

Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

© Jason Marsh for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: altruism, compassion

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In the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers William Maddux and Adam Galinsky had people participate in a variety of tasks meant to measure their creativity, including a word association task, a drawing exercise, a test of their “insight creativity”—their ability to see problems from different perspectives and find hidden solutions—and a measure of their “interpersonal creativity,” meaning their ability to negotiate a deal with someone else in which both parties come away with some gain.

More than half of the participants were American students; the rest were students from foreign countries like Bangladesh, Mexico, and Switzerland. In addition to the creativity exercises, each person filled out a questionnaire that asked whether the person had lived and/or traveled abroad and for how long.

© Rob Millenaar

Maddux and Galinsky found that people who had resided in a foreign country scored significantly higher on the creativity tasks than the other participants. More specifically, though, it was the extent to which a person reported having assimilated into the new culture, more than the actual time spent living abroad, which was linked to creativity. Simply traveling abroad was not associated with creative thinking.

Maddux and Galinsky admit that it is hard to determine whether living abroad actually causes creativity. They note that many studies on creative personality types reveal that creative people share traits such as openness to experience, self-confidence, and cognitive flexibility—characteristics that may make someone want not only to travel, but to live in and adapt to foreign places. In other words, living abroad may not boost creativity; instead, it is possible that creative people are more likely than others to live abroad and assimilate into their new culture.

Still, the researchers consider that people who spend portions of their lives in a foreign country, and allow themselves to be absorbed into the host culture, may become practiced at seeing other perspectives and comparing different possible solutions to life’s challenges, thus boosting their skills at creative thinking. In that light, Maddux and Galinsky argue, their study underlines the importance of having diverse experiences and of understanding cultures very different from our own, especially as the world becomes more interconnected.

“It may be that those critical months or years of turning cultural bewilderment into concrete understanding may instill not only the ability to ‘think outside the box,’” they write, “but also the capacity to realize that the box is more than a simple square, more than its simple form, but also a repository of many creative possibilities.”

© Joy Suzanne Grazer for The Greater Good Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Creativity, perspective taking, travel

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