Regulating emotions reduces compassion

As a person of pragmatism and logic, it is rare that I accept a conspiracy theory. But then Japan loses as many as 10,000 people in a deathly 8.9 magnitude earthquake, not to mention the nuclear power plant disaster, just more than a year after the devastation in Haiti. It is no wonder that the conspiracy theorists are touting claims of the world ending in 2012.

When it comes to tragedy, I'm definitely a crier. Some people bottle up their feelings inside, stone-faced on the outside. But I've grieved hysterically and quite audibly at every funeral I've attended in my adult memory. What can I say — I'm Italian. Yet, even as I am thinking about this horrible catastrophe in Japan and how devastated the citizens there must be, I don't cry or even choke up a little. What do I do instead?  I change my Facebook status to something shallow about my horoscope. And upon realization, I begin to feel like a horrible person.

Where is my compassion? The New Madrid Fault Line runs through the Midwest, particularly Missouri. If that fault line had shifted instead, it could just as easily be my family and friends left homeless, searching for their missing friends. It wasn't until a foreign exchange student friend of mine sighed with relief that her family was okay that it began to sink in. Until then, I was able to close my computer, text a friend and go out to a bar for drinks, being completely ignorant as I consumed myself in my bubble world. Don't these people deserve a moment of my good intentions? As a decent human being, shouldn't I give them an ounce of my goodwill?  

I don't think of myself as a person of weak character, but it is intriguing how I was able to flip off a switch on my emotions and my thoughts when it came to the Japanese. In considering this, I didn't even examine any latent out-group bias, the tendency to treat people who are different from me in a negative manner, because my cold reaction was not limited to the Japanese. I responded similarly to the quake in Haiti and to Hurricane Katrina. Though I've never admitted it before, I think the middle-school version of me cried more out of fear than out of compassion at the tragedy of 9/11. It's not that these events didn't bother me, because they did.  It was more that my life moved on and I didn't hesitate to allow it to.

It's ironic that we should feel less compassionate towards the death of many people than we do toward the death of one — logic would hold that the compassion we felt would multiply by the number of people affected.  This irony is called the collapse of compassion, and I feel a lot better knowing I'm not the only one who experiences it.  Conventional psychology states that when faced with surmounting numbers of affected people, we begin to consider them as statistics rather than as individuals, and we meet great difficulty trying to feel.  Our emotional systems are simply not tuned in to mass suffering as well as they are to the specifics of individual suffering, regardless of how well we know the individual.

But new research published in January in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that our approach to dealing with mass suffering is not out of our control or due to the fact that large amounts of trauma translate to statistics.  Researchers C. Daryl Cameron and B. Keith Payne at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill argue that we feel less compassion for large amounts of people as a way of protecting ourselves.  Think about it — if I were to wail as loudly as I do at an individual funeral for every life lost in Japan today, I would completely exhaust myself.  It is taxing to feel compassion, especially in a situation where there are currently limited opportunities to help.  Being able to adeptly control the emotions we experience is called emotion regulation.  

In Cameron and Payne's study, they tried to find a more tangible, objective and universal cost associated with feeling compassion and therefore decided upon a monetary cost.  In their experiments, they primed subjects with a story about the civil war in Darfur and presented them with pictures of either one Sudanese child or eight.  They then asked subjects to rate their emotions, either freely or given the constraint that they would be asked to give a donation at the end of the experiment.  As predicted, the researchers found when people were asked to give money, they felt less compassion for eight suffering children than for one. However, they also found that those people who were better at regulating their emotions had even lower levels of compassion. When specifically asked to regulate their emotions, subjects demonstrated the collapse of compassion much more clearly than when told to experience their emotions freely.  

It sounds inhumane that as outside observers we would not be willing to deal with the taxing costs associated with experiencing great emotion when the people suffering are dealing with much more.  However, it's often not a decision we make freely, but one our mind makes for us.  Knowing this reminds me it is okay to grieve for the Japanese and for any mass disaster, and encourages me to find ways to trick my brain into doing so.  It's no wonder those commercials zoom in on the faces of sad puppies all by their lonesome instead of showing a large cage full of dogs that need your help — marketers realize that in order to entice your compassion, they cannot flood your emotions.  

Think about the Japanese quake and nuclear disaster this way: that's someone's family, too.  When campus clubs helped victims of Hurricane Katrina, they didn't try to rebuild New Orleans overnight.  They tackled it one house at a time.

But don't be upset if your initial response is detached — you're not a bad person. It's simply your mind trying to protect you.  Knowing how and why you regulate your emotions will allow you to experience compassion.