MIRRORING SUFFERING
The Upside Of Poverty: Compassion
THERE’S AN UPSIDE TO POVERTY: BEING POOR INCREASES YOUR COMPASSION, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
In three experiments carried out with college students, researchers found that students whose families reported the lowest incomes consistently tested for higher levels of compassion.
The research, “Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering,” was published in the December issue of the journal Emotion.
In addition to self-reporting feeling higher levels of compassion, lower-income students’ were able to detect stress and anxiety in others better in one experiment. And, in a second, their heart rates slowed more than their well-off peers while viewing videos about a cancer-stricken child.
“We have found that, during compassion, the heart rate lowers as if the body is calming itself to take care of another person,” reports Jennifer Stellar, a Ph.D. psychology candidate at Stanford and co-author of the paper.
The studies’ findings were reported earlier this year widely in the media. “I wouldn’t say that upper-class people are being jerky,” Michael Kraus, a University of California-San Francisco, said at the time. “But they’re less aware of other people’s emotions. If a person is upset, they don’t see it. Similarly, if a person is happy and excited, they may not react to that either.
The study’s authors say their findings suggest “that attention to and recognition of suffering is a prerequisite step before compassion can take place.” They also hypothesize that this attentiveness among the poorer may be “an important strategy for those who chronically face challenges in their environments is to build and
maintain support systems with others….This strategy, consisting of elevated compassion and caretaking, would promote more reciprocity, which may be particularly important for
overcoming harsh environments.”
So now you know what your poor friends are nicer.
