Building Compassion, Creating WellBeing

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Building Compassion, Creating Well-Being

• Dacher Keltner
• University of California, Berkeley
• www.greatergood.berkeley.edu

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Greater Good Science Center Stimulus Package

• Science. The neuroscience of compassion.
  Cross-racial friendship catalyzes academics
• Dissemination. Greater Good, Half Full
• Conversation. This speaker series

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A Roadmap

• A War on Compassion
• The Evolution and Neuroscience of Compassion
• BREAK 1030 to 1045
• Compassion, empathy, gratitude and other
  pro-social sentiments
• LUNCH 1200 TO 100
• Paul Ekman 100 to 145
• Break 145 to 200
• Compassion breakdowns in our culture
• Compassion deficits in disorders
• BREAK 300 TO 315
• Practical Steps toward cultivating
• compassion
• NIRVANA 430

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Goals

• New Ideas and Lenses
• New Tools, Practices, and Resources
• Evidence and notions for the Meaningful Life

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Some Definitions

• Compassion Concern to enhance the welfare of
  another who suffers or is in need
• Empathy mirroring or understanding of others
  emotion.
• Mimicry Imitation of others emotion, behavior
• Love of Humanity A belief in the goodness,
  connectedness of others
• Pity Feeling of concern for someone felt to be
  inferior to self

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The War on Compassion

• FREUDIAN MIND The very emphasis of the
  commandment Thou shalt not kill, makes it
  certain that we are descended from an endlessly
  long chain of generations of murderers, whose
  love of murder was in their blood as it is
  perhaps also in ours. Sigmund Freud
• LIBERTARIANISM If any civilization is to
  survive, it is the morality of altruism that men
  have to reject. Ayn Rand
• POLITICAL THEORY Of mankind we may say in
  general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy
  of gain.
• Machiavelli
• EVOLUTIONARY SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST The natural
  world is grossly immoral. Natural selection
  can honestly be described as a process for
  maximizing short sighted selfishness George
  Williams
• MORAL THEORY Sympathy as a good natured emotion
  is always blind and weak. Immanuel Kant

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Compassion as Opponent (In Western Thought)

• Compassion belittles recipients
• Compassion entails a loss of freedom
• Compassion is inherently subjective, unreliable
  as an ethical principle
• Compassion as enemy to achievement

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The Bad is Stronger than the Good? The Design of
Homo Economicus

• Negative Contamination
• Self-Interest as Default?
• Altruism selfish genes or Freudian Fantasy
• Attachment and Anxiety

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Compassion deficits in US Children
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Compassion Deficits in US Adults

• Cynicism and the Decline of Trust

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The Evolution of Compassion Survival of The
Kindest

• Evolution of our Ultrasociality
• Hunter gatherers
• Archeology
• Primate predecessors

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Dimensions to our Ultrasociality

• Care-taking
• Flattened Hierarchies
• Conflict and Reconciliation
• Fragile Monogamy

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Darwin Survival of the Kindest
sympathy, he argued, will have been increased
through natural selection for those
communities, which included the greatest number
of the most sympathetic members, would flourish
best, and rear the greatest number of offspring
(Darwin, 1871/2004, p.130).
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Take care or die
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The Compassionate Brain

• Pain, others pain Anterior Cingulate
• Empathy Prefrontal cortex, Temporal Parietal
  Junction
• Maternal Love Lateral Orbitofrontal cortex
• Romantic Love Reduced Amygdala, Ventral Striatum
• Compassion Amygdala, Prefrontal cortex

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Vagal Superstars

• Increased positive emotion
• More resilient response to bereavement
• More sympathetic prosocial children
• Trusted more in interactions with strangers

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Oxytocin and Pro-Sociality

• Faithful and frisky voles
• Oxytocin levels predict attachment behaviors
• Oxytocin predicts care-taking in mammals
• Kissing leads to rises in oxytocin for men, not
  women

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• Affiliation Cues Sexual Cues Contr. for
  Sexual Cues Contr. for Affiliation Cues
• __________________________________________________
  
• Oxytocin Reactivity .50 .11
• Oxytocin Recovery .15 .12
• __________________________________________________

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Oxytocin and Trust
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The Compassionate Nervous System

• Brain Amygdala, Anterior cingulate, Pre-frontal
  cortex, Lateral Orbitofrontal cortex
• Vagus Nerve
• Immune system
• Oxytocin, Dopamine
• Genes
• Dopamine DR4 predicts self-reported altruism
• AVPR1A (vasopressin) predicts generosity in
  ultimatum game

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Emergence of Pro-social Emotion

• Reliable Identification
• Contagious Compassion
• Shift Costs and Benefits of Giving
• It Pays to Be Good

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Its not in the face
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Touch and the spread of goodness

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Contagious Compassion

• Neonate distress reactions
• Emotional, Physiological Convergence in Friends
• Compassion inspires elevation
• Gratitude spreads through networks
• Positive Emotion spreads through communities
• Collective Joys

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Reversing Cost-Benefit Analyses Compassion
promotes Common Humanity with those in need

• Increase the Gains of Giving
• Cooperation activates reward regions of the brain
  (Rilling et al)
• Giving produces more enduring pleasure than
  receiving
• Increase sense of common humanity
• Expanded circle Peter Singer
• Compassion correlates with policy attitudes that
  enhance young, sick, elderly

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Vagal Superstars in a Trust Tournament

• 50 participants played in internet trust game
• Give between 1 and 20 raffle tickets to 12
  different individuals
• Viewed individuals for 20 seconds on video
• Gift tripled in value, value to be returned later

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It Pays to Be Good
Trust
T 4.69, p lt .01
T 17.01, p lt .001
Resources Received
Vagal Tone
T 4.19, p lt .01 (T 1,59, ns)
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Compassion as an Adaptation Shaped by Natural
Selection

• Health of offspring
• Sexual Selection
• Social Selection

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From Genes and Brains to a Culture of Compassion

• Compassion selected for in Evolution
• It is built into our brains and bodies
• Predicts health
• Predicts longevity
• It becomes codified into rituals and practices
• It forms the heart of ethical systems

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Compassion as A Master Emotion?

• Karen Armstrong Unites religions
• Martha Nussbaum A Moral Emotion
• Kindness a Universal Virtue
• From Experience to Sentiment to Way of Life
• Enabler and outcome of many pro-social
  experiences, from art to altruism

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Buddhism

• Nirvana and the eightfold path
• Tibetan
• If you want others to be happy, practice
  compassion, if you want to be happy practice
  compassion. His Holiness the Dalai Lama

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Confucianism and Jen

• A person of jen, Confucius observes, wishing to
  establish his own character, also establishes the
  character of others.
• A person of jen brings the good things of others
  to completion and does not bring the bad things
  of others to completion.

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IMAGINE
The great secret of morals is love, or a going
out of our own nature, and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful which exists in
thought, action or person, not our own. A man,
to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and
comprehensively he must put himself in the place
of another and of many others the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own.
The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination (Shelley).
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Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

• Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and
  joy and knowledge that pass all the art and
  argument of
• the earth
• And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand
  of my own,
• And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest
  brother
• of my own,
• And that all the men ever born are also my
  brothers
• and the women my sisters and lovers,
• And that a kelson of creation is love.

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Singer Evolving Circle of Care

• Bequeath(ed) humans with a sense of empathy an
  ability to treat other peoples interests as
  comparable to ones own. Unfortunately, by
  default we apply it only to a very serious narrow
  circle of friends and family. People outside
  that circle were treated as subhuman and can be
  exploited with impunity. But over history the
  circle has expanded from village to the clan to
  the tribe to the nation to other races to other
  sexes and to other species.

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Altruism

• Compassion is a motive of altruism
  distress/anxiety predicts more egoistic action
• Predicts altruism in children
• Greater helping, altruism in rural areas

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Compassionate Love

• Compassionate care-giving produces secure
  attachments in children
• Compassion for partners weaknesses, needs
  predicts long-term satisfaction
• Compassionate sacrifice (to enhance partners
  welfare) predicts stable marriages anxious
  sacrifices (to avoid problems) predicts
  dissatisfaction

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Caregiving

• Volunteerism Uncompensated assistance given to
  those in need
• 31 of US in any year
• Guided by compassion, empathic concern
• Care-givers who care 14 hours/week 36 reduced
  chance of dying in 7 year period (Stephanie
  Brown)

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Empathy and Mirroring as Roots of Connection

• Emotional mimicry produces rapport, closeness
  between colleagues at work, teachers/students
• Friends laughs synchronize
• Friends blushes trigger more blushing
• Strangers fidgeting bouts mimic
• Friends emotions converge over time

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Forgiveness

• Fred Luskins Forgiveness project
• Forgiveness and Health
• Compassion promotes less punitive attitudes,
  greater forgiveness in criminal judgments
• Everyday reconciliation

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Gratitude/Appreciation/Reverence

• Count your blessings (Lyubomirsky) 5 blessings
  1/week leads to increased happiness and health
• Appreciation for loved ones uniquely relates to
  social well-being in relationships
• Thank you 11 increase in tips

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Cooperation

• A Human Universal (Henrich)
• 15 cultures play ultimatum game 39 average
  offer, cooperation increases with interdependence
  (zero sum world)
• Cooperators fare better than competitors

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Cooperate
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Pro-Social Emotions as the Path To Well-being

• Happiness found in connection, not materialism
• 3 to 1 and 5 to 1 ratios in life and marriage

Pro-social emotion
Social Well-being
Strong Bonds
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Cultural breakdowns in compassion

• Our busy culture
• Videogames
• Narcissism, self-esteem
• The Economic mindset
• Power asymmetries

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Compassion/Empathy Deficits as a Transdiagnostic
Deficit

• From symptoms to basic processes across diagnoses
• Anhedonia in depression, schizophrenia
• Irritability in depression, mania, antisocial
  disorder

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Empathy deficits Autism Spectrum

• Parallel Play and Tim Page
• Deficits in pretense, teasing, voice modulation,
  irony, social relationships
• Egocentrism Difficulty understanding other
  independent of self
• Mind in Eyes (Baron-Cohen)

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Emotional disorders as deficits in Self-compassion

• Self-compassion
• See failures kindly
• See self as part of larger humanity
• Hold pains in mindful attentiveness
• Self-compassion predicts
• Reduced anxiety
• Reduced depression
• Reduced rumination
• Reduced neurotic perfectionism

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Depression and compassion deficits

• Depression associated with reduced activation in
  the left frontal lobes
• Depression associated with anhedonia, lack of
  engagement with others
• Images of the good self trigger shame, anxiety in
  depressives

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Antisocial behavior and compassion

• Sociopaths
• Raised in violent families
• Reduced physiological reaction to others
  suffering
• Reduced interconnectivity in frontal lobes

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Frontal Lobe Patients

• Orbitofrontal patients
• Fail to read others embarrassment
• Empathy difficulties
• Antisocial behavior

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Frontal Temporal Dementia

• Organic degradation of frontal lobes
• Onset in mid 50s
• Accompanied by apathy, failure to connect,
  difficulties empathizing
• Produces antisocial behavior

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Compassion Excesses

• Mania
• Williams Syndrome
• Physiological Linkage in marriage

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Cultivation Possible? A good idea?

• Stability of basic personality structure
• Ironic effects of trying to be happy

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The meaning of cultivation

• Skill cultivation (Lyubomirsky)
• Train the eye
• Change your language
• Change your frame, metaphor
• Modest acts gratitude, appreciation
• Change your physical environment
• Change your culture
• Change your nervous system

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Cultivating Compassion and Social Well-being GIVE

• Dunn, 2008
• A random sample of people endorsed belief that
  spending money on self enhances well-being more
  than giving it away
• Giving 20 improves happiness more than spending
  20 on self

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Meditation (Kabat-Zinn Wallace)

• Core Principles
• Breathing reduced cariovascular arousal
• Awareness of sensations Frontal control of
  limbic
• Awareness of mind
• Loving Kindness shift in asymmetry
• Empirical Evidence
• Monks
• Kabat-Zinn, Davidson (2004) software engineers
• Fredrickson, 2008 boosts in happiness over 2
  months
• mindful people happier, more optimistic

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Awe and the Sacred

• Transcendent experiences of beauty give people a
  sense of common humanity
• Experiences of awe trigger activation in the
  vagus nerve
• Experiences of awe trigger sacrifice, altruism

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Making Compassion a meme, a sticky idea

• Oliners and rescuers
• Reading compassionate words hug makes people
  more altruistic, less prejudiced toward outgroups

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Inspiring elevation

• Elevation Others compassion inspires compassion
• It activates vagus nerve response
• It produces altruistic behavior

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Play
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Touch

• Reward
• Reinforce Reciprocity
• Signal Safety
• Soothe
• Power

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Touch Interventions

• Increases weight of premature babies
• Reduces depression in patients with alzheimers
• Increases likelihood children will speak in class
• Preventative medicine

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Art

• Rasas in the Natyashastra
• Aesthetically pleasing Compassion in viewing
  the suffering of Others
• The Evolution of the chills
• Triggers activation in the
• left Orbitofrontal cortex

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A Compassionate, Cooperative Future

• Pinker and the rise of cooperation, compassion
• Wright and the rise of nonzero relations
• Cooperation fares better than competition
• The wisdom of the tit-for-tat (Axelrod, 1984)
• Cooperates, forgives, not envious, readable,
  strong

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Thank You
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