Master Class [156]: When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled
By Daniel Goleman
GETTING A GRIP on our impulse to empathize with other people’s feelings can help us make better decisions when someone’s emotional flood threatens to overwhelm us.
Ordinarily, when we see someone pricked with a pin, our brains emit a signal indicating that our own pain centers are echoing that distress. But physicians learn in medical school to block even such automatic responses. Their attentional anesthetic seems to be deployed by the temporal-parietal junction and regions of the prefrontal cortex, a circuit that boosts concentration by tuning out emotions.
That’s what happens in your brain when you distance yourself from others in order to stay calm and help them. The same neural network kicks in when we see a problem in an emotionally overheated environment and need to focus on looking for a solution. If you’re talking with someone who is upset, this system helps you understand the person’s perspective intellectually by shifting from the heart-to-heart of emotional empathy to the head-to-heart of cognitive empathy.
What’s more, some lab research suggests that the appropriate application of empathic concern is critical to making moral judgments. Brain scans have revealed that