Psychology Professor Examines Relation of Fear, Empathy Through Subject With Rare Brain Disorder
Psychology professor says fear is one of the greatest determining factors of our behavior and how we relate to those around us. She and a team of researchers published a study today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B to explore the concept of fear through a woman born with a rare brain disorder that prevents her from experiencing fear.
Understanding Fear in Others
The woman, referred to as SM, has been featured in NPR鈥檚 Invisibilia, The Wall Street Journal and Time due to her Urbach-Wiethe syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that resulted in the loss of her amygdala. As a result, SM cannot experience fear and is unable to recognize signs of fear in others.
The amygdala is a part of the brain implicated in both the expression of conditioned or learned fear and social fear recognition.
鈥淪M鈥檚 willingness to participate in research studies over the years has made invaluable contributions to science,鈥� says Marsh. 鈥淭his is one of many studies for which she has volunteered that has allowed us to better understand fundamental phenomena like emotion, empathy and morality.鈥�
Marsh co-authored the study with Dr. Peter Turkletaub, associate professor of neurology and rehabilitation medicine at Georgetown, Elise Cardinale (C鈥�10, G鈥�17), a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health and Katie O鈥機onnell, a Ph.D. student in Georgetown鈥檚 Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience. The team sought to answer whether losing the ability to feel fear causes someone to not understand fear in others.
鈥淚f so, this would tell us something really interesting about empathy,鈥� says Marsh. 鈥淚t would strongly support the idea that when we empathize with people, we do it by trying to imagine or simulate their experience. If you can’t feel a state, you can’t simulate it in others, either. Therefore you cannot stand in their shoes and understand where they are coming from.鈥�
Predicting the Emotion
The researchers conducted a study in which SM read a series of short, hypothetical statements that one person could make to another. Each statement was designed to elicit one of five emotions from her 鈥� anger, disgust, fear, happiness or sadness.
Cardinale, who worked in Marsh’s lab as an undergraduate research assistant and who went on to earn her Ph.D. in psychology from Georgetown, developed the statements that have been used in several subsequent studies.
The fear statements are very direct and include phrases such as 鈥淚 want to punch you,鈥� or 鈥淚 could kill you if I wanted to.鈥� After reading each statement, SM and control participants were asked to predict what emotion someone would probably feel in response to each statement.
Control participants in the study 鈥� all of whom were adult women and demographically similar to SM 鈥� had little difficulty predicting the statement “I could kill you if I wanted to” would most likely invoke a feeling of fear that Marsh says suggests they were successfully simulating the likely state of the target of these statements.
The results for SM were somewhat different.
鈥淲hereas SM was generally successful predicting when others would feel anger, happiness or disgust, she could not predict when others would feel fear,鈥� Marsh explains. 鈥淭his suggests her amygdala lesions have not only robbed her of the experience of fear, but of the ability to understand others’ fear.鈥�
Similarities and Crucial Differences
This inability to understand others鈥� fear indicates that SM is similar in one way to another group that Marsh鈥檚 lab studies 鈥� psychopaths. Both have impaired experiences of fear and have difficulty empathizing with the fears of others.
However, there are crucial differences between them.
While neither psychopaths nor SM can predict the fear of others, psychopaths also lack the ability to appreciate that making others feel fear is morally wrong. SM has normal judgments about causing others to feel fear.
Marsh explains, 鈥淭his distinction is important because it suggests that difficulty empathizing with others’ fear doesn’t automatically make a person psychopathic.鈥�
Marsh explains that the difference between the two is likely due to developmental factors.
鈥淧eople with psychopathy have problems in their amygdala from very, very early in childhood, which affect the development of their brain during childhood,鈥� Marsh says. 鈥淏ut SM鈥檚 amygdala is believed to have been intact when she was a child, and only later did her Urbach-Wiethe syndrome cause it to be destroyed.鈥�
Marsh says this gives an important indication that links empathy and morality.
鈥淭hey are often related, but can be dissociated,鈥� she says, 鈥渁nd it is likely that very early childhood is important for learning to connect your empathic responses to your moral judgments.鈥�