I Feel for You
By Dr. Steve Olivas
May 1st, 2009
Whenever an awful crime bubbles into our awareness, like the Craigslist Killer (Philip Markoff), folks feel a need to understand the mind of a murderer. I don’t think I could paint a complete picture in a short column, but I’ll address one facet of the equation: empathy. In other words, why do some of us feel for others while others feel absolutely nothing for those around them.
To begin, empathy has a nature and a nurture component. First, the biology.
Each of us has a certain capacity for empathy when we are born. It’s like intelligence… we all are born with an empty “cup.” Some of us have a bigger cup, some a smaller cup. The cup represents how much potential we have.
However, how much we fill the cup depends on our environment as we grow up. Some people with tremendous potential only have a few droplets sprinkled into their cup; their volume is wasted. Other people may not have as big of a cup to start off with, but they have a waterfall cascading into it – they fill it to its max, and they hit the peak of their capability.
Empathy is similar. The parts of the brain that allow us to feel pain – both pain in ourselves AND reading it in other people - are called the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (YIKES!). Anyway, the potential (or, capacity) of these regions is genetically determined. You always hear that women have more empathy than men? Well, some of that is biologically determined.
By the way, your brain can tell the difference between pain in yourself and pain in others. But the same general region in the brain lights up when we hit our own thumb with a hammer, or watch somebody else hit their thumb. In other words, pain is pain is pain… but we have to be able to differentiate our pain from that of others.
As an aside, folks without this ability can have all kinds of kooky energy whenever they see somebody else hurt, or wronged, or victimized. For those people, they are consumed by the pain of others because they have a harder time differentiating themselves from the world around them. Again, part nature, part nurture.
Regardless of relative capacity, each of us HAS these regions in our brain, and therefore we all have potential for empathy. Then comes the nurture piece to the puzzle…
If you come from a place where you never bond with a caregiver, your ability to form relationships grows more and more dim. Too, your ability to empathize seems to have a critical period. In other words, if you don’t get empathy by a certain age (which seems to be very young), it is extraordinarily difficult to establish one later in life.
Now… a lack of empathy doesn’t predispose a person toward being a murderer. It is a necessary component, but not a sufficient one. A killer will also have rage. They typically come from some pretty awful place – some sort of abuse or neglect or an actively addicted parent or something BAD in their upbringing.
When you combine the rage stirred by a painful upbringing, a genetic predisposition toward limited empathy, and a lack of bonding with a caregiver, the recipe for trouble is complete.
Incidentally, the worst combination is psychopathology plus high intelligence – these are the people who learn to hide it. Dangerous folks…
The complete recipe is a bit more complicated, but this is a good primer to begin understanding how some people can go haywire. Stay careful, and don’t screw up our kids!
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