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Subscribe to RSSIf you seem to have a sign written on your forehead that says you care more, maybe it’s in your genes, a new study suggests.
We all have about three billion letters in our genetic code, but people who have a two copies of the "G" gene in their DNA seem to be more empathetic and are more trustworthy, compassionate and cooperative – and it can be detected in about 20 seconds, says Aleksandr Kogan, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. People who don't have the double G variation are less likely to be empathetic.
A variation in the oxytocin receptor gene can be identified by non-verbal behaviors in people who smile more, offer head nods and eye contact. The findings were published in today’s early online edition published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences in the United States of America (PNAS). Oxytocin is sometimes called the “love hormone” and is associated with bonding, sexual arousal and, of course, empathy.
“People who are more empathetic seem to be better at affirming you,” Kogan says. “They are more understanding and they smile. They are going to have more open body posture; their arms are going to be out more, signaling ‘I’m here for you.’ Some, you are going to judge as more empathetic.”
Kogan and his team made this determination when they asked 116 University of Toronto students to watch a short, silent video clip of people with varying oxytocin receptors genes listening to their romantic partners tell them about a time of suffering. The ethnically diverse students -- average age 19 -- were asked to identify which people were more trustworthy, compassionate and cooperative.
After only 20 seconds, the people who watched the video could easily point out which listening partners had the double G genotype and were more empathetic because of their caring body language compared to people who did have this particular empathy gene.
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I believe this and think it is a pretty accurate description based upon those I know to be empathetic. Unfortunately, there are those in society that can imitate these same signs but end up being all about themselves. I'll bet Herman Cain and Sandusky believe themselves to be empathetic.
*Mississauga
Another inane article on msnbc.com
Another inane comment on an article on msnbc.com.
I think it's interesting in reading the history of MDMA (ecstasy) that Shulgin originally called it 'empathy' but didn't think people knew what that meant.
the description of emotion in this article sound similary to those experiencing an ecstasy high though.
IngVer hit the nail on the head! There's a balance between what we can choose and what we can't. I personally believe many aspects of our personality are inborn or formed very early in life. Go to any day care or preschool and you can see it in very young children already. Morphine Carnival sounds very full of himself. He must have really bought into the whole "positive thinking, I can will myself to do anything" self-help bit. I'm not saying a person can't learn to control unfriendly, mean or violent urges and behavior. Many do. I'm not saying you can't learn to "be nice". I'm just saying you can't make a teddy bear out of a grizzly bear.
Anger suppresses brain cell formation. Love and compassion raises brain cell formation. We are still evolving to be kinder smarter beings according to the latest reasearch. 100,000 years ago homo sapiens bred empathic wolves to create dogs. Today geneticist have discovered that the gene for empathy or kindness is connected to the gene for kind appearances in dogs which is linked to intelligence. What is really exciting is that nastiness is being evolved out of all mamallian creatures.
Still, one of our of every 100 humans is born with sociopathology. In a totally empathic society, sociopaths do not become psychopaths. The measure of how good we all are is a also measure of the number of serial killers there are amongst us.
Interesting, Jack. Insofar as anger is secondary to stress, your 'brain cell' point seems good. But, sociopaths and psychopaths may have even less such stress than 'norms'. Also, over the last million years or so (~50K generations), the main 'selector' amongst all of the Hominid lines has almost certainly been intraspecific group competition: War and its child Genocide. I like the 1:99 ratio for its equivalence to the 1% but leaves out all of their equally pathological sycophants which must add at least another 10% to what we see in nature (us). An estimation of heterogeneous (1G) versus homogeneous (2G0 carriers in our population would have been interesting. The double Oxytocin dose, if truly both copies are active, may simply make a person more relaxed/less threatened and thereby better able to sort of 'take on' the troubled thoughts of another without as much 'aversive' reaction as a less ... 'buffered' person might experience. But whether 'empathy' and sociopathy are directly related in the sense that a less empathetic person is automatically a more sociopathic person would seem a stretch based on the above information. As far as measuring the number of serial killers in a population, do generals, CEOs, politicians, and such other serial mass murdering trash count?