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physics user1
With training can you shut down your emotions and empathy?
Isn't that more to do though with managing anger and etc in an appropriate manner, as compared with eliminating the emotion altogether?Kuzon said:Of course you can - just like you can train to remove anger, sadness or anxiety such as in cognitive behavioural therapy. Emotions arise from thoughts and you have a lot of (but not total) control over your thoughts.
Fervent Freyja said:What emotion are you referring to?
rootone said:Isn't that more to do though with managing anger and etc in an appropriate manner, as compared with eliminating the emotion altogether?
I am aware that there are medications for anxiety and so on, but they can be effective (partially anyway), for one person while not for another.
Cozma Alex said:Mostly empathy, fear, embarrassment, remorse and love
Cozma Alex said:With training can you shut down your emotions and empathy?
Fervent Freyja said:There is this group of women at my daughters ballet school that are starting to get on my nerves, badly. They think that although I pay for the schools services, not their company, that I should follow their little unwritten rules and be more like them. I'm debating what strategy I should use to get them to leave me alone. I've thought about flirting with their husbands, but not all of them make an appearance.
Fervent Freyja said:Animals usually lose the will to live when they find 'peace'.
Drakkith said:Might I suggest simply ignoring them? I seriously doubt this will improve your situation in the slightest.
I'd like a reference for this. And a definition of "peace" in this context. My first thought goes to the millions of pets around the world who have little-to-no worries and yet still live to be fat and happy for many years.
Fervent Freyja said:Have you never been clawed ruthlessly by a hungry cat when going to feed it an hour late?
Fervent Freyja said:My point was that we should never expect all emotions in life to feel good. For example, hunger hurts, eating feels good. Without experiencing hunger, eating could never really feel good- how could you define it was even good without being able to compare it to something else, like hunger?
CollinsArg said:Try studying philosophy, Albert Kamus got to eliminate his empathy to his mother.
Cozma Alex said:Guys i was just curious, i found something on psychopaths and i found that they can choose to feel empathy if they want and i was wondering if the opposite was possible
SW VandeCarr said:Do you mean to selectively turn empathy off? Well I think we have an example with war. In combat you have to dehumanize the "enemy". A total stranger who could possibly be a friend under different circumstances becomes someone who is to be immediately hated and feared at first contact, and therefore killed if possible. There many stories of soldiers who completely broke down after finding pictures of apparent family members on the body of a man they just killed. Maybe that's not exactly what you're asking about. With criminals, there are examples where they can feel genuine affection for some people and kill others without a thought. So yes, it's possible.
Cozma Alex said:What if you actualy have bounds with someone, like a close friend, can you kill him without remorse or without feeling anything just because you choose to not feel anything?
But can a person choose to be a psycho? I mean, it is know that with practise our brain change, can a normal guy become a psycho then? I have read that psychopats are born, they have different brains, can a person train and so change his brain in order to be a psycho?SW VandeCarr said:That would be psychopath and they certainly exist.
Cozma Alex said:But can a person choose to be a psycho?
Laroxe said:. The idea that psychopaths lack empathy because they can engage in extreme harm to others without guilt is nonsense, a psychopath knows exactly what effect they are having on a victim, they use this empathy to refine the torment they cause, the difference is is that they enjoy it, if they didn't, why would they bother.
I'm not sure there is a standard definition of empathy, Carl Rogers originally talked about it in terms of being able to enter into another persons world of experience, however another pillar of his work was phenomenology, the idea that peoples experience was their own, it was a personal and idiosyncratic view of events, so it was impossible to enter into another's world of experience. You can never really understand how another feels, the best you can come up with is how you would feel in a similar situation. Later in his writing he talked about empathy in terms of accurate listening, it became less about what connects with your own experience and more about trying to clarify what the person experiences by getting more information. Some workers have attempted to clarify the idea by sub dividing it into cognitive empathy and emotional empathy, a football player may watch another player take the ball, then based on what he would do if he was in that position he plans an interception, going to where he thinks the other will go. That's cognitive, a strategic skill, emotional empathy is the ability to recognise emotional states in another again it may be based on our own experience of events or the ability to pick up non verbal cues. No one talks about empathy as an emotion.SW VandeCarr said:Is this your opinion or can you provide some evidence to back it up? That's not the the standard interperation of empathy or measures of empathy. Coercive and sadomasochistic behaviors correlate with measures of low empathy.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-015-0595-0
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/blame-the-amygdala/201304/what-would-we-find-wrong-in-the-brain-serial-killer
http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/9/4/435.short
http://www.livescience.com/39904-why-psychopaths-lack-empathy.html
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-neurological-basis-lack-empathy-psychopaths.html
Laroxe said:I'm not sure there is a standard definition of empathy
I wouldn't consider that statement to be completely true...Laroxe said:No one talks about empathy as an emotion.
SW VandeCarr said:I've been away for a while but I think there's still a standard as to what you can say in this forum. I asked that you provide an acceptable source for your claims. You've quoted my links, but you obviously haven't read them or provided any of your own. Below is a quote from the fifth link:
"When the highly psychopathic individuals imagined the accidents happening to themselves, their brains lit up in the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, the somatosensory cortex and the right amygdala — all areas involved in empathy. The response was quite pronounced, suggesting psychopathic individuals were sensitive to thoughts of pain.
But when the highly psychopathic inmates imagined the accident happening to others, their brains failed to light up in the regions associated with empathy. In fact, an area involved in pleasure, the ventral striatum, lit up instead. Furthermore, these individuals showed abnormal connectivity between the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for empathetic decision-making.
By contrast, the less psychopathic individuals showed more normal brain activation and connectivity in these areas."
These are directly observable neurophysiologic correlates of empathetic and non-empathetic responses to different suggestions.
SW VandeCarr said:I've been away for a while but I think there's still a standard as to what you can say in this forum. I asked that you provide an acceptable source for your claims. You've quoted my links, but you obviously haven't read them or provided any of your own. Below is a quote from the fifth link:
"When the highly psychopathic individuals imagined the accidents happening to themselves, their brains lit up in the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, the somatosensory cortex and the right amygdala — all areas involved in empathy. The response was quite pronounced, suggesting psychopathic individuals were sensitive to thoughts of pain.
But when the highly psychopathic inmates imagined the accident happening to others, their brains failed to light up in the regions associated with empathy. In fact, an area involved in pleasure, the ventral striatum, lit up instead. Furthermore, these individuals showed abnormal connectivity between the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for empathetic decision-making.
By contrast, the less psychopathic individuals showed more normal brain activation and connectivity in these areas."
These are directly observable neurophysiologic correlates of empathetic and non-empathetic responses to different suggestions.
Laroxe said:Indeed, there are real advantages to being able to reference the key issues but your question effectively asks for about half of all psychology to be explained,
BillTre said:Fear is an emotion that is often treated with anti-phobia type treatments, which involve increasingly close/big experiences with what ever is the cause of the fear.
SW VandeCarr said:The OP was asking something different.
Fervent Freyja said:What emotion are you referring to?
Cozma Alex said:Mostly empathy, fear, embarrassment, remorse and love
SW VandeCarr said:What you say makes sense, but may not be always be the correct approach. Some people with deep phobias may be severely traumatized by exposure. I have a healthy fear of spiders. I didn't always. As a young child I picked one up and it bit me. My entire hand swelled and it took some time (I can't remember exactly) to recover. However, for many phobias, I agree this technique can work.
SW VandeCarr said:No. I was specifically objecting to this:
"The idea that psychopaths lack empathy because they can engage in extreme harm to others without guilt is nonsense, a psychopath knows exactly what effect they are having on a victim, they use this empathy to refine the torment they cause, the difference is is that they enjoy it, if they didn't, why.would they bother." (boldface mine)
While the term term "empathy" may have some variations of interpretation, I asked you to find a reputable source saying that psychopaths that commit heinous crimes against innocent victims for some kind of gratification do not lack empathy and that claiming they do lack empathy is "nonsense". I doubt any expert would say that. Could there be exceptional cases? Sure, but that does not falsify the scientific evidence that true psychopaths have low empathy.
The fact that the relevant brain regions light up when the subject imagines pain in himself simply means the subject fears pain. When the suggestion is pain in another, the empathic response is that the same regions light up. The non empathic response is that these regions remain dark, and in a true psychopath another region associated with pleasure lights up.
Laroxe said:This leave us with the problem of explaining what motivates behaviours that can be elaborate and long term, involving the torture of others and that put the perpetrator at high risk, its credible that there may be impaired fear responses, but why act like this for nothing, it doesn't make sense, if they feel pleasure this can only be because they are aware of the effect on their victims.