Empathy training: stimulating the brain's neural connections with a video game

Human emotions, like any other phenomenon, are governed by certain mechanisms and laws, in this case, the human body, or rather the brain. When you see a crying person, you understand that he is saddened (grieving, sad, etc.). Understanding this, you can either pass by or empathize with this person. The ability to empathize is often referred to as empathy, and it is not the default setting of our brain from birth. It needs to be developed. For some, it proceeds faster and more naturally, for someone, on the contrary, empathy is dulled. Someone may burst into tears while watching the film “Hachiko”, and someone will not lead an eyebrow when watching a documentary about Auschwitz. Any human skill depends on the state of his body systems, on the influence of parents, society as a whole and others.

Scientists decided to investigate empathy and chose for this the most suitable subjects - adolescents, because they have not yet fully developed such skills. Is it possible to accelerate the development of empathy, is it possible to “inculcate” it, and what processes take place in the brain at the time of empathy? The video game developed by scientists specifically for this study served as a tool for finding answers. What results have shown tests we learn from the report of scientists. Go.
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What is empathy?

Empathy - a conscious empathy for the emotions of another person. In other words, if your interlocutor is sad or fun, and you understand this and experience similar emotions, regardless of whether you show them or not.

Let's dig a little deeper into the description of the term empathy. First, the word "conscious" is important. A person who empathizes with the interlocutor fully understands that the emotions that he experiences are a projection of the emotions of the interlocutor himself, and not his personal state. If a person does not understand this, then such a phenomenon is called identification, when a person puts himself in the place of the interlocutor, as if trying on his emotions and condition on himself, considering the “borrowed” emotions to be his own.

Empathy, as you might guess, plays an important role in professions based on social interaction: doctors, teachers, religious figures, politicians, etc.

It is worth noting that a person is able to identify the emotional state of the interlocutor without direct confirmation of it (crying, laughing, shouting, etc.). Sometimes a person can hide his condition for one reason or another, but factors such as speech, facial expression, body position, gaze focus, word selection are tips for solving his emotions. The ability to recognize all these, sometimes unobtrusive, details are important in the above professions, especially in medicine. It is not surprising that psychiatrists with higher empathic abilities are more likely to make a correct diagnosis for patients who often do not intend to lay all their complaints on the table and describe the details of the symptoms.

Everyone has empathy, but its level is different. In 2004, one of the most common tests was developed, which determines the degree of empathy of the respondent - Empathy Quotient (test version in English and Russian ).


Dr. Peter Sifneos (1920-2008)

Sometimes deviations occur, leading to a decrease or complete absence of empathy in a person. Back in 1968, Peter Sifneos published a work in which he described his observations of patients in a psychiatric hospital. He noted that some of them cannot verbally express their own or other people's emotions, reason only from the standpoint of logic and do not have the ability to fantasize. A similar deviation was called alexithymia, which in Greek means "no words for the senses." Further studies have confirmed that the vast majority of people with autism are in a state of secondary alexithymia. Fully understand the mechanism of occurrence of this disorder has not yet succeeded, as well as finding a way to treat it.

Similar disorders, like empathy itself, originate in the brain, whose work defines a person as a person. In the 90s of the last century, so-called “mirror” neurons were described, which are activated when a person (or animal) repeats actions performed by another person (or animals). This led scientists to the idea that these neurons play the most important role in emotional empathy.

Describe empathy, like any other aspect of the human brain, can be very, very long. However, we already understood the main essence of this phenomenon. The researchers did not focus on describing the etymology of the process of empathy, but on studying possible learning and stimulating the development of this, so to speak, social skill.

The basis of the study

When it comes to emotions, naturally the most important element of the experiment will be the person. Adolescents were chosen as subjects for empathy, and for a reason. First of all, many studies conducted earlier confirmed that the emotional state of adolescents is extremely unstable due to the low level of self-control and the ability to express emotions correctly. In order to form the right emotional response to any situation, including the emotions of the interlocutor, a person turns to two main sources of knowledge: intuition and experience. The first implies not banal guessing, but the result of the work of our brain. The second, as the name implies, is based on the experience of similar situations in the past, in which people have been. If a person has not had social activity, he cannot fully grasp empathy, despite the fact that this skill lies in each of us. This is akin to speech - if a child does not hear speech, then he will not learn to speak, although he has both vocal cords and a developed brain for this. Despite the importance of the experience, the researchers nevertheless used as the subjects precisely the category of people whose experience is minimal. This was done deliberately, in order to check whether their method is able to help develop or develop empathy, and later on correctly apply the acquired skills in real communication in society.

One of the most popular methods of entertainment for many adolescents (which must be concealed, and in adults too), video games, was chosen as the basis of its methodology. According to research, children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 73 minutes a day on video games. In addition to the popularity of this entertainment, the fact of its unobtrusiveness is also important. No one likes being forced to do something, be it study or some strange tests. The game also allows you to obtain the necessary data for the study, while minimizing the pressure on the subject, which will allow to obtain significantly more realistic indicators.

The subjects were divided into 2 groups: Crystals of Kaydor and Bastion . These are two games, the first of which was developed by a research team. The player acts as a robot, which was shipwrecked on an unknown planet. He needs resources for repair and survival. The planet is inhabited by unusual creatures with which the player will have to interact. It is this communication that is the basis of the experiment, since in different situations aliens will express one of 6 basic emotions: joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise. The player must either correctly identify this emotion, or respond to it correctly. It is also possible to train with the recognition of the degree of expression of a particular emotion (moving the slider, the intensity of the emotion varies from subtle to pronounced).

Bastion is a commercial game and was not specifically designed for the experiment. However, the story in the game is strongly intertwined with emotional events, the characters are also sad, angry and scared. Difference from Crystals of Kaydor - lack of mimic display of emotions. Therefore, Bastion is a control group. Among other things, I personally would like to mention the musical accompaniment in the game Bastion, which also plays a significant role in the formation of one or another emotional background, which can affect the emotional response of the player.


Image # 1: Crystals of Kaydor game elements:
a - the main menu of the game;
b - the player must choose one of the 6 emotions that the character on the left demonstrates;
c - calibration screen for expressing emotions from mild to pronounced;
d - the player must choose which emotion to answer to the character on the left;
e - character's reaction to the player's response;
f is a mini-game where the player must help aliens find some object.

Using the game as a research tool was also inspired by the fact that pro-social behavior * among adolescents was previously tested using Lemmings. The results were more than satisfactory.

Prosocial behavior * - human actions that benefit other people or society as a whole.

Another example from the past was the study of the effectiveness of using the emotional component in terms of increasing productivity. Two groups of students received the same task, but the implementation was different. The first, control, group had to perform the task based on visual and textual materials. And the second group interacted with each other, using the role-playing game. And it was this group that showed a significantly higher result in the speed and accuracy of the task.


Promotional video game Crystals of Kaydor

The main goal of the study was to understand whether it is possible to train a person of empathy or to improve the level of this skill. Thus, the researchers decided to use modern computer technologies in conjunction with neurobiological tests to form a socially significant skill. It sounds very unusual, but we have long understood that to be a researcher means to think outside the box.

Research results

In order for test results to be as reliable and accurate as possible, all outliers * were removed from them. A comparison was also made of the results of analyzing the data of the subjects of both groups before the experiment ( T1 ) and after ( T2 ) in order to see whether their empathic abilities changed. The threshold of indicators was set as 4 / (NP) , where N is the sample size, and P is the number of parameters in the model.

Emission * is a measurement result that does not fall under the general distribution.

In addition, intragroup tests were conducted aimed at identifying significant changes in the degree of empathy of one or several subjects within each of the two groups. This check also confirmed that there were no significant differences between the two groups in any of the dependent variables.

Significant results of the ROI analysis (area of ​​interest) were subject to correction of group error probability by the Hill-Bonferroni method.

Through fMRI * , MRI * and DTI * , visual data were obtained on the state of the brain of each of the subjects. FSL software was used to analyze these data.

fMRI * - functional magnetic resonance imaging is performed to observe changes in blood flow caused by neural activity.

MRI * - magnetic resonance imaging is performed to obtain topographic images of organs.

DTI * - diffusion spectral tomography allows to reconstruct the neural pathways in the brain.

Table 1: statistical data of various variables.

Changes in rsfMRI

In order to see the effect of the game on the degree of empathy, it is necessary to examine the subject's brain, or rather to analyze the relationship between the areas of the prefrontal cortex and the right temporal-parietal node, since this area is responsible, among other things, for the social actions of a person.


vmPFC - ventromedial prefrontal cortex (motivation for social reward and understanding of its value);
dmPFC - dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (perception of other people / dissimilar to themselves);
mPFC - medial prefrontal zone (perception of oneself / people similar to oneself).


rTPJ is the right temporal-parietal node responsible for processing information in terms of the ability to maintain attentiveness.


Image number 2

Figure 2a shows the important distinguishing features of the subject, who played in the Crystals of Kaydor and the subject, who played in the Bastion. At the first, the plots in the PPC (dark back bark) were activated, and the active zone dmPFC is significantly larger (yellow) than the player in Bastion (its activity is marked in red).

Analyzing the photographs of participants from the first group (Crystals of Kaydor) a persistent connection between the sites shown in blue in Figure 2b was revealed. As we can see, this connection in subjects of the second group (Bastion) is not distinguished by stamina and severity.

Empathic accuracy

In addition to analyzing the changes in the strength of the connection between the areas of the prefrontal cortex and the temporal-parietal node, an amygdala was also observed, which plays a very important role in the storage of emotional information, a kind of emotional memory. When you remember an event, it is this area that allows you to “remember” its emotional background.

The relationship between the vmPFC / dmPFC and the right amygdala was specifically analyzed. Why exactly right? The fact is that in the task list of this area of ​​the brain there is a very important test item - face recognition. In addition, the right amygdala is also responsible for certain human emotions (fear and sadness), compares the place and time with the emotional background, and also participates in the formation of long-term memory.

Considering that one of the most important elements of a game created by researchers is the task of “reading” people to determine emotions, the analysis of this area is not just justified, but extremely important.

It was revealed that the subjects of the first group (Crystals of Kaydor) at the end of the test more accurately determined the emotions of both other people and themselves. This also confirmed the hypothesis that enhancing empathic skills helps to increase control over one's own emotions, inasmuch as the subjects recognize them better. Strange as it may sound, adolescents sometimes express emotions not to the extent they should. We all know these stereotypes about imbalance, lack of control, denial of elders and so on. This behavior is regulated by the brain. If the skills of this body are improved, then the above-described problems of social integration are leveled, as if by themselves. The graphs below show that the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala is better for group 1 than for group 2, which confirms the words above.


Image No. 3: changes in the indicators of connectivity of the brain areas of the test groups of some groups before and after the study; a - connection of the amygdala and vmPFC; b - connection of the amygdala and dmPFC.

For more detailed acquaintance with the research (data analysis, additional materials, measurement techniques) I strongly recommend reading the report of scientists.

The official site of the game Crystals of Kaydor .

Epilogue

Researchers honestly say that their work is only the first stage in understanding the mechanism of human empathy. At the moment, the study of the brain and its functions becomes easier thanks to the use of modern technology in research. Starting from MRI and ending with video games. You must use any available tools to achieve a complete understanding of the work of the most important human organ. After all, the brain is responsible for what we are, how we interact with the environment, how we form social bonds and even moral norms. Scientists are confident that their research will push many others who can help not only adolescents to integrate more quickly and efficiently, but also to people whose asociality is associated not with age, but with a certain disorder. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, most people with autism are not able to properly recognize their emotions and those around them, which greatly complicates social integration.

My personal opinion is that helping adolescents more “smoothly” to go through the stage of emotional formation and, most importantly, in the right direction is good. However, adolescents are not central to this study, they were chosen because they are excellent subjects because of unformed emotional experience and increased emotional intuition. Adolescents will grow up, and if their environment, including parents, will direct them to the right path, then they most likely will not have problems with empathic skills and, as a result, social interconnections. I do not take into account the unique and non-standard cases.

But people suffering from different disorders, do not outgrow them, no matter how many years have passed, no matter what environment they have. Drug maintenance of an acceptable condition is not an option, it is only a disguise of the problem, so that society would look at such a person without disgust and not twist his finger to his temple. Who cares about those who cannot normally (like everyone else) socialize.Did they have a choice? And they could control their brain? Can a person not make a sore throat during a cold or force of will reduce pain in a finger that a hammer hits? No, he can not. Yogis, superheroes and other non-standard situations do not count. I'm talking about an ordinary person. An ordinary person with an unusual problem. Therefore, no matter how naive and insignificant this study seems, I am glad that it is. For a person and his brain sometimes need help from outside, not only scientists, but also you and me.

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