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Wired for compassion

Fight. Flight. Freeze. We’re so familiar with these responses to fear, threat and uncertainty you might think humans are wired solely for stress.

 

Less well known, are the biological systems involved with compassion, care and kindness.

 

Meet the vagus nerve, the longest and most complex of the cranial nerves. The vagus nerve originates in the brainstem and descends through the neck, chest and abdomen connecting the brain, throat, heart, lungs and digestive organs (vagus: Latin ‘wandering’).

 

The vagus nerve innervates a ‘stay and tend’ response and moves us towards others with the intention of caregiving.

 

It enables the facial muscles to express concern and understanding. It allows the vocal apparatus to produce the exhalation ‘sigh’ that co-regulates soother and soothed. It slows the heart rate, reduces blood pressure, and modulates the stress response. It facilitates touch and heightens bonding through its connection to dense oxytocin receptor networks.

 

Our ‘fight or flight’ stress response gets all the attention in dominant cultural models, but it’s our ‘stay and tend’ care response that has the power to create and sustain positive change through compassionate connection.

 

Mind the gap

Perception gaps describe the difference between belief and reality.

And when it comes to compassionate social values, this gap is a chasm.

 

Most people think ‘other people’ are primarily motivated by Power: a cluster of self-enhancement values around social status, recognition, public image, wealth and authority.

 

But when asked, most people actually say they prioritise Benevolence: a cluster of self-transcendent values around love, kindness, friendship, helpfulness and responsibility.

 

Underestimating peoples’ capacity and willingness to care undermines the ambition and confidence of our messaging. Words that fail to inspire, fail to land, and fail to spread. The subsequent lack of traction fuels our misperceptions and so the cycle continues.

 

Touching words

Compassion emerges from the Latin com- ‘with’ or ‘together’, and pati ‘to suffer’.

 

Compassion has affective, cognitive and behavioural elements:

  • We feel an embodied sense of another’s suffering through our mirror neuron networks.

  • We recognise and understand what and why the person is suffering through considered thought and perspective taking.

  • We are motivated to act in ways that help alleviate that suffering.

 

We allude to these affective, cognitive and behavioural elements through metaphor and figurative language.

 

“It touched a nerve”, we might say in visceral reaction to another’s suffering. That nerve, you guessed correctly, is the vagus nerve, the nerve of compassion.

 

We speak of the “warmth of compassion” and describe compassionate people as “warm hearted”. The spreading warmth in your chest that accompanies the affective experience of compassion is again, the vagus nerve at work.

 

“I’m reaching out”, we say in unconscious awareness that compassion is an approach emotion. Movement towards is a key signalling behaviour of intent to stay and tend.

 

“You don’t deserve that”, is a common sooth. Deservedness is a key appraisal of compassion. We are keenly attuned to respond with compassion to undeserved suffering. It is not an unconditional emotion.

 

No words

The affective experience of compassion elicits an evolved physiological response. We signal our intent to ‘suffer with’ through a distinct facial musculature. The eyebrows pull in and up on an oblique angle. The head tilts forward in engagement and the lips press together in readiness to remain silent and listen.

 

Compassionate listening requires us to take different perspectives. It cultivates curiosity and humility because it requires the listener to experience another’s emotions empathically, then do the deep cognitive work of understanding, before moving ahead with action.

 

More than words

Words neurally activate thought. The more you think, hear, read and speak the words of a given values orientation or worldview, the more normalised these become. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Repeated activation of neural circuits through repetition of words and phrases, creates enduring frames of reference through which we perceive, reason, and make judgments about received information.

 

Further, we are moved to act physically in accordance with what we feel and think neurochemically. Words change hearts, minds, and actions.

 

Dehumanising, inhumane language disconnects the neural circuits involved with empathy and compassion. Conversely, compassionate inclusive language heightens empathic capacities and creates an amplified sense of connection to our shared humanity. 

 

A word of caution

Humans have an evolved capacity for benevolence, however, we are most likely to extend compassion towards those with whom we are in close contact or affiliated: our ‘in-group’.

 

Cognitive awareness of this bias is a critical first step in intentionally expanding the inclusiveness of compassion beyond the ‘in-group’ to others you do not know, and most challenging of all, others you do not agree with: the ‘out-group’.

 

Activating compassion through language - tips for Changemakers

Listen for values perception gaps. If you hear yourself or others saying “no-one cares about this” or “everyone thinks that” you’ve got a perception gap on your hands. Stare it down. Start your project planning and communications in the knowledge that most people are socially minded and prioritise compassionate values. This creates an entirely different starting position and posture.

 

Begin messages with widely shared values and aspirations that emphasise our commonalities instead of our differences. The goal is to create a bigger we rather than a more divided us and them.

 

Activate more inclusive, compassionate mindsets through your messaging by scaling up the Benevolence values of love, care, kindness and responsibility to the Universalism values of social justice, peace, broadmindedness, equality and harmony. Such values form the basis of ethical systems thinking because they activate understanding, tolerance, acceptance and appreciation for all people – including those beyond the ‘in-group’.

 

Repeat the activation of compassionate neural networks through repetition of compassionate words, frames, values and imagery in your communications. Remember, the more you think, hear, read and speak the words of compassion, the stronger and more automatic this way of reasoning becomes.

 

Last words

Cultural narratives become self-fulfilling scripts. Dominant cultural narratives tell us we are wired for stress, competition and the pursuit of power so that is what we believe and that is what we become. Changemakers can change this narrative by telling the real story: we are wired for compassion, most people are socially minded and prioritise compassionate values, and it is our innate instinct for caregiving, compassion and community that continues to shape our evolution.

 

Wise Words

"Each of us carries an inner spark of compassion. By nurturing it, we can transform ourselves, our communities, and the world."

Dr Jane Goodall

 

Go Deeper

Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351–374.

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Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17(10), 847-853.

 

Keltner, D. (2009). Compassion. In Born to be good: The science of a meaningful life (pp. 225-250). Norton.

 

Porges, S. W. (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 116-143.

 

Schwartz, S. H. (2007). Universalism values and the inclusiveness of our moral universe. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38(6), 711-728.

 

Strauss, C., Taylor, B. L., Gu, J., Kuyken, W., Baer, R., Jones, F., & Cavanagh, K. (2016). What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures. Clinical Psychology Review, 47, 15-27.

 

The Common Cause Foundation. (2016). Perceptions matter: The Common Cause UK values survey. London: Common Cause Foundation.

 

Vaughn, D. A., Savjani, R. R. S., Cohen, M. S., & Eagleman, D. M. (2018). Empathic neural responses predict group allegiance. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 302.

 

Yudkin, D., Hawkins, S., & Dixon, T. (2019). The perception gap: How false impressions are pulling Americans apart. More in Common, US.

 

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado (Unsplash)

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© Trudi Ryan, Words for Change

wordsforchange.com.au/compassion

© Words for Change 2024

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