{"id":845,"date":"2004-03-02T18:46:55","date_gmt":"2004-03-02T18:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=845"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:13","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:13","slug":"empathy-more-than-a-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=845","title":{"rendered":"empathy more than a feeling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">When your girlfriend tells you she feels your  pain, she&#8217;s not lying. British researchers from University College  London have found that feeling empathy activates regions of the brain  involved with processing pain. Tania Singer and her colleagues used 16  heterosexual couples for their study, published in the Feb. 20 <em>Science.<\/em> They scanned the brains of the women as they were given an electrical  shock, and then again as the women watched their loved ones undergo the  same painful jolt. Pain has sensory and emotional components, and when  the women were physically hurt, the researchers found that areas of the  brain involved with processing both components were active. But even  when the women were merely spectators, the parts of their brains that  processed the emotion of pain were just as active as when they were  shocked themselves. &#8220;The results suggest that we use emotional  representations reflecting our own subjective feeling states to  understand the feelings of others,&#8221; Singer stated in a press release.  &#8220;Our human capacity to `tune in&#8217; to others when exposed to their  feelings may explain why we do not always behave selfishly in human  interactions but instead engage in altruistic, helping behavior.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Discoveries column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 3\/02\/2004.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When your girlfriend tells you she feels your pain, she&#8217;s not lying. British researchers from University College London have found that feeling empathy activates regions of the brain involved with processing pain. Tania Singer and her colleagues used 16 heterosexual &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=845\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}