Understanding the neuroscience of compassion

What exactly is compassion, how does it differ from empathy and altruism and can we train ourselves to be more compassionate?

It had hardly been a week since the beginning of the unfolding of the COVID-19 crisis in Seattle, Washington, the first US state to record an outbreak and where I currently live. I came across a newspaper article about a group of volunteers who were making grocery runs for the elderly in their area. I distinctly recall thinking, "What motivates these people to get out of their comfort zones and do something to help someone they don’t even know? Would I do the same?"

I still don't have an answer to these questions, but neuroscience has been making forays into similar territory over the previous decade – how is empathy different from compassion? Are different regions of the brain activated by the two? Is compassion as beneficial to the ‘giver’ as to the ‘receiver’, and is it at all possible for this skill to be improved by training?

Compassion, Empathy and Altruism

Scientists define compassion as a sensitivity to the suffering of another, coupled with a desire to alleviate their suffering. This makes compassion a separate entity from its cousin, empathy, which is a general shared experience of another person's emotional state, be it anger, sadness, joy or suffering. Empathy usually does not involve a motivational or a ‘prosocial’ component – wanting to help another person is a purely compassionate response.

Compassion is also distinct from empathy in that the feelings generated by compassion could be totally different from those observed in the suffering person. I could feel anger at the injustice meted upon certain members of society, for instance. Empathy, on the other hand, is more of a ‘mirror system’. I see sadness, so I feel sad.

In addition to empathy, it is also important to distinguish compassion from another related construct – altruism. While compassion may be associated with caregiving, altruistic behaviours in themselves are not necessarily evidence that the person has experienced compassion. A person may, for instance, indulge in helping behaviour as an attempt to reduce their own feeling of distress. Studies have shown that the perception of suffering causes ‘empathetic distress’ in the person witnessing the suffering, and it is not hard to imagine that altruism driven by such distress can be detrimental – to both the giver and the receiver of the response. Altruistic behaviours can also originate from a need to feel good about oneself, a desire for social recognition, or to satisfy a sense of duty or obligation.

The neuroscience and evolutionary aspects of compassion

From a neuroscience point of view, healthy compassion seems to involve two components in a complex interplay – an arousal component, and a higher-order reappraisal or self-regulation component. Arousal on witnessing an event that elicits compassion involves increased heart rate and nausea, symptoms like those experienced during personal threat or pain. Left unchecked, this can soon turn into personal distress. The reappraisal component of compassion, however, which is mediated by higher-order brain areas in the prefrontal cortex, seems to protect from personal distress.

When I was wondering about how the Seattle volunteers were motivated enough to help someone they hardly knew, I might have, unbeknownst to myself, hit upon an important characteristic of compassion. Studies have found that, in general, similar and close others cause people to feel more compassion. This isn’t surprising, however, given its evolutionary origins – indulging in protective, self-sacrificial behaviour is a defining characteristic of maternal protection of vulnerable offspring.

But how does evolutionary theory attempt to explain compassion towards non-kin individuals? Why would someone feel moved by the experience of an individual they have no relation to and be motivated to want to alleviate their suffering? Evolutionary theory suggests that helping others has benefits to the individual themselves – by directly or indirectly strengthening the group they belong to and opening the doors to reciprocal helping behaviour.

At some point in our evolutionary history, it seems, the narrow view of protecting one’s own children from danger expanded to include compassion towards other individuals with whom people were likely to interact with repeatedly, and people considered to be in-group members. Like empathy, which has a distinct in-group preference, compassion too seems to be directed largely towards individuals we identify with, for whatever reason.

The broaden-and-build response

This has interesting, and often counterintuitive, implications. From a logical viewpoint, it may seem that someone with access to more resources would be more compassionate, given that they can help others at a lower cost to themselves, but the opposite has been found to be the case. Research has shown that people belonging to a lower social class rank tend to be more sensitive to others’ distress and need, and in turn more compassionate.

The team of scientists who performed the study on social rank and compassion relate their findings to a ‘broaden and build’ response to stress, in which people seek to build cooperation and relationships in the face of stress, rather than fight or flee. This broaden-and-build theory suggests that acting on positive impulses has several benefits for individuals - including building psychological resilience and reducing negative emotions – that ultimately help the individual survive better in the face of stress.

Can compassion be trained?

Educational institutions around the world are teaming up with experts on Buddhist compassion scriptures, to develop secular and contemporary compassion training programs. Eight-week compassion-based training programs from Emory and Stanford Universities use a combination of meditation practices and have shown some interesting findings. In addition to reduction in activation of brain regions responsible for the arousal component, compassion training also led to increased mindfulness and happiness, as well as decreased worry. Engagement of prefrontal cortex regions responsible for the self-regulation aspect of compassion also increases after compassion training. Interestingly, compassion training of parents found reductions in biomarkers of stress, such as cortisol, in their infants and young children.

Culture has been found to have an impact on compassion as well. Although research on this topic is in its infancy, cultures that emphasise collectivism and concern for the well-being of others are generally found to be associated with more instances of compassion and prosociality than other cultures.

This has implications for parents of young children as well. What is a family unit, after all, if not a mini culture in itself? Understanding our own motivations for wanting to help others, and weeding out the not-so-good reasons from the good ones has the potential to change the way we parent our children, and hopefully ensure that we bring up a new generation that is empathetic and compassionate, without being distressed by all the injustice that they see around them.

(Aditi Subramaniam is a neuroscientist turned writer who is fascinated by the workings of the brain and how we can ‘rewire’ it to our advantage. She enjoys writing about the neuroscience of everyday life, and its practical implications for parenting)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.