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Does stress affect how empathetic we are toward strangers?

Generally speaking, we feel more empathy for people we know than we do with strangers. […]

Generally speaking, we feel more empathy for people we know than we do with strangers. But it turns out that stress hormones can make that disconnect even greater – and it’s not just in humans.

A Canadian and American research team,  who published their findings in Current Biology, have found that drugs that reduce stress can lead to more empathy in humans as well as mice. (Additionally, playing a fun video game with a stranger has a similar affect – in the humans, of course.)

Stress level rise in both people and mice when in the presence of strangers. For the mice, the researchers gave them the stress-reducing drug and found that they reacted to other unfamiliar mice that were in pain in the same way they would if it were a mouse they knew. And the same was true for undergraduate students (who in this case were more like Guinea pigs than mice).

“They were asked to rate the pain of a friend or stranger whose hand was plunged into ice cold water for 30 seconds,” BBC News explains. “Students who took the drug reported feeling the pain of a stranger more deeply than those who did not take it. They also showed more pained facial expressions and touched their own hands more when watching someone else in pain.”

Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, study author and neuroscientist from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said the study findings seem to show that our brain can basically veto the sense of empathy when experiencing stress. The drugs make a difference, but also breaking the ice by playing a game with another person has the same affect.

One of the most interesting aspects of the study is that humans and mice reacted the same way.

“This suggests either that mice are more complicated than we think or that the principle underlying human social interactions is simpler than we think,” Mogil said. “When it comes to social behavior, mice are people too.”

[Photo from Flickr user _chrisUK]

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