As a psychologist, empathy is obviously important.
When people feel like they’re getting compassion and understanding, they are much more likely to make the changes that up until now have felt all too scary.
But can empathy change our experience of pain? Does it have any impact upon how the brain responds to pain?
Researchers at Michigan State University wanted to find out whether certain types of doctor-patient interaction could influence how patients react to pain.
Issidoros Sarinopoulos, PhD and his colleagues randomly assigned participants to one of two groups.
One group received patient-centered interviews (PCI), a style that involves asking open-ended questions and encouraging a free-flowing conversation to address patient concerns about a procedure.
The other group, who served as the control, received standard clinician-centered interviews (CCI) that focused solely on gathering medical history and other clinical information.
Participants in both groups filled out post interview questionnaires to rate the interviews, and, to no one’s surprise, the PCI group reported higher satisfaction with their doctor and the experience.
Next, the patients all had a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
During the scan, researchers applied mildly painful stimulation to their left hand as they viewed photographs of either their interviewing doctor or an unfamiliar doctor.
The results revealed something fascinating about the power of empathy.
The PCI group showed a significant decrease in activity (in the left anterior insula) in response to pain while they looked at a picture of their interviewing doctor versus the unknown doctor.
What’s more, the PCI group reported feeling less pain as they viewed photos of the familiar doctor.
By comparison, the CCI group (the control) demonstrated no significant difference between seeing their interviewing doctor versus the face of an unknown doctor.
While these results show how empathy can change the brain to help alleviate pain, we do need to note that more research is critical – this particular study was limited somewhat by its small sample size.
I’d also be interested to see further research to determine the strength and duration of the effect of empathic listening over a longer time period. Maybe someday we’ll be talking about its half-life.
If you’d like to know more, the full study was published online in November 2012 in the journal Patient Education and Counseling.
This study reveals how even the most casual relationships and interactions can impact our brain, including even our experience of pain.
Click here to learn some other key ways to heal the mind and cultivate a healthy brain using mindfulness.
What kind of surprising effects have you found with empathy? Please share your comments below.
Thank You Ruth, I emailed this info to my son who is a residency director with 30 residents to help shape into being more effective ER docs. It reinforced what the 2 of us have discussed and was nice to have some science to back up our knowings.
So do you think this may also have an impact for children on LEARNING new things (increased anxiety), if you think you have an empathetic teacher? Thanks for info. i will pass it on.
In doing my own work, when I felt I was trully being listened to, experiencing a sense of genuine empathy, I then heard better, new suggestions, and was able to make positive change in my life.
Empathy is the primary quality of the midwife and the doula. When a woman is accompanied through her labor by an empathetic companion her need for drugs diminishes and the baby and she enjoy all the benefits of a natural birth. Both systems are flooded with oxytocin. The baby is imprinted to seek and give empathy in times of stress and transition and the mother can, if needed, rewire her brain to do likewise so that she will be more likely to seek empathetic support during the often challenging times of motherhood.
I know that even hearing a recording of my therapist’s voice can relieve my physical pain and make the unbearable, bearable.
How true ! Both in medical education and in patient care, the nature of Otherness is key. Messages must be based not on what we think but what the person we speak to perceives of what we say. Moreover, non verbal messages are immensely more powerful than words often empty and descriptory in a meaningless senseless fashion.Additionnaly, life history is often totally absent in the medical case histories thought of as essential in medicine. Narrative medicine tries to deal with that. Science is made of measurements. A purely scientific approach of the sick patient reduces a suffering human subject to a sick organ to be measured, with a zero degree of communication. And forgets illness experiences while focusing on disease activity.I have tried to expand on this in my first three books, “Ce que les maux de ventre disent de notre passé”, “Ces enfants malades de leurs parents”, on transgenerational somatisation and so far the only one translated in english ( “Suffering in silence”, New Orleans Gestalt Press) and “Chacun peut guérir”, so far sold all together 85,000, an indication of needs of patients to be not only listened to but heard.
The hardest thing for me is how to place boundaries on my natural empathetic responces.
Unless I’m totally open , the other’s pain can hurt me too until I’ve taken time to clear my mind. Slways practice mindfulness so you aren’t in the way of the healing.
Patricia is so right but placing boundaries is creating an obstacle to communication. I teach medical students that when we are two, in fact we are six. The metaphore I use is a sad TV movie : if it makes people cry, it is not the TV that is hurting, but the story the viewer associates with his/her past personal history. This is true also and even more with lovers, friends, colleagues.
But this can also be viewed as a gift of life and an alley of recovery from the past for the healer. As way to deal with these issues, I advise the students to run with the hurt feeling to anybody else, capable of unconditionnal acceptance, rather than the patient who, unwittingly, woke them up.
Basically, this is what is working in transference and countertransference mechanisms, unconscious factors included. A clear case of what I have baptised “Psychoanalysis in town” rather than on the couch. The problem, well known to Sandor Ferenczy, is that there are two healers, not just one taking care of the other one, askingt for help.
Thank you for being such a phenomenal resource for cutting age information! I am founder of LinkedIn’s top ranked Parenting 2.0 group, gathering human development professionals from more than sixty countries, and we have an ongoing discussion dedicated solely to sharing your brilliance. Happy New Years hugs from your shameless hussy!! Mama Marlaine
One has to be approach empathy with a degree of mindfulness because caregivers often end up suffering from empathy fatigue (typically referred to as compassion fatigue) when they share the pain of the many people often in their care. But some individuals have made a good case for the difference between empathy and compassion, and suggested that by cultivating compassion (“not” the same animal as empathy, although the general view is that these are just two words for the same thing), caregivers can protect themselves from burnout yet benefit their patients enormously. The distinction between the two has emerged from meditation practitioners’ experience.
Thank you. Wednesday is now available for me to watch the webinars once again.
It is fascinating that we are starting to see that one brain can affect anothers with
how we direct our attention/intention, even remotely.
There have been many studies on compassion in this area. The implications for this are exciting. Maybe Buddha has been right all along.
Research that is important reading for physicians in training — and for medical school curriculum. We need to convey more how the healer’s presence in itself, is part of the treatment — and then follow up with supporting them in helping them learn ways to cultivate empathy and mindful presence. Not assume it comes “naturally” — for many, it doesn’t.
Hi Ruth, Your post has got me wondering about the degree to which the sharing of another’s pain can actually help lighten the load for them. In Iacobini’s book, Mirroring People, he describes an experiment where people watching a movie of someone getting a needle in their hand produced a full simulation of the pain experience in their own brains, exactly as if the pain were their own. Clearly from the study you cite it is true that knowing someone has empathy for you can reduce your perception of pain. In psychotherapy, empathy with our clients’ emotional pain is so important. I wonder if a similar study could be done to show that to the degree clients feel empathy about their painful situations, their own pain around it is reduced. As though, as I said at he start, we can take a piece of someone’s pain and feel it for them so they don’t have to. It sounds magical, I know, except it seems as though something like that is really happening. Iacobini said pain is not a private experience — our brain actually treats it as a shared one (p. 124). Thanks again for the food for thought.
Absolutely love this research study. I’m an empath and I know how important empathy is. This just proves it even more. Thank you so much for sharing.
When I read the subject line in your email it says how empathy changes the brain. I am interested in how empathy for other animals changes the brain. When we empathize with animals used for food and we choose not to consume “meat,” dairy and eggs, how does that change the brain?
Interesting suggestion by Beth L. No matter where you stand on vegetarianism/veganism, it would seem that the more chances to practice empathy, the greater the results.
As an endocrinologist in practice for 30+ years, I noted patients were much more likely to take their medication, follow appropriate diets, keep appointments etc. when they had an empathetic relationship with their physicians. Objective data showing empathy changes the brain is deeply appreciated.
I fully agree.
have been a professor of surgery for fourty years. I am 75 and still working full time, doing surgery yesterday and to-day. I try to-day to avoid surgery, while, as a yougster, was eager beaver to do more and more, in a strictly obsessional scientific way.
I have obsevred zero postoperative mortality in elective surgery. While well trained at the Mayo Clinic, I also have always adhered to the the necessity of establishing a therapeutic alliance with the patient to be operated, before surgrery, and hopefully running ahead of complications rather than behind…
Thanks, Ruth, for this really informative article. I’m going to send it to a company that has chosen to strip out empathy in favour of ‘just-get-the-job-done’ behaviours. I’ll keep you posted on the result!:-) Catherine