Empathy

In the past I’ve published posts on scientific studies when they had positive things to say about BDSM. For example, this one on flow and this one on psychological health. It seems only fair therefore to feature one that has a more troubling message.

The study in question looked at empathy in female submissives, and came to the conclusion that they have reduced empathy to other peoples suffering. As described in this article, the experiment was done by showing them photographs of people with neutral and ‘in pain’ expressions and watching what parts of the brain lit up. Apparently female submissives had unusually low responses to the ‘in pain’ photos in the parts of the brain normally associated with empathy.

I understand the methodology behind this approach. It reminds me of an anecdote from a doctor studying psychopaths who’d been jailed for violent crimes. He described showing an expression of a frighted man to one of his subjects and asked what he thought the man in the photograph was feeling. The prisoner laughed and said he didn’t know, but it reminded him of the looks on peoples faces just before he stabbed them. Clearly being able to relate expressions to internal emotions is a key part of empathizing with someone.

However, that said, while I understand the general approach here, it does seem flawed in this case. They’re starting from the premise that pain is a bad thing, and therefore seeing someone in pain should trigger empathy and concern. That’s true for most people but not for masochists. We have a much more complex relationship to pain. It’s an ambiguous sensation and therefore context is important. If I see someone stub their toe then I wince and feel bad for them. If I see someone tied up and caned in a BDSM movie I get excited and wish it was me. If I just see a pained expression alone, it’ll probably depend on my mood and what’s on my mind. Lacking context for the pain I’ll add my own, and that could generate all sorts of different emotional responses.

I think if you’re going to study empathy in kinky people, you really need to take into account their sexual wiring. For example, study their responses to happy or surprised faces rather than people in pain. Or put the pain into a suitable context. I’m sure non-kinky people would be disturbed by and empathize with the apparent pain of the man in the image below. As a masochist my reaction to the image is quite different, because I understand in this context the pain for him might be a sort of pleasure.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea who created this image. If you can help attribute it then please leave me a comment.

Author: paltego

See the 'about' page if you really want to know about me.

6 thoughts on “Empathy”

  1. Great pussy and very much agree with your analysis. I wonder what other measures could be used? Donations to charity vs other people of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Finding out if there are things masochists react to more (eg pain to animals)?

    1. Can I just say I really did try to Swype “Great post”, but whether it’s your site or my predictions, autocorrect didn’t come up with that.

    2. Social activity (like charity donations) is probably tricky to look at for an experiment like this where they’re analyzing brain activity. In a more general survey context I imagine it’d also be difficult to control for other social factors and/or get a sufficiently large sample size. Although I’m obviously only guessing. I wondered if short (few second) clips would work to provide suitable context? But I suspect they want very ‘pure’ input and the more complex the thing the person looks at the trickier to interpret the brain activity is. They probably have a lot of standard data already measured against different groups with their current input sets. Interesting stuff anyway.

      -paltego

  2. Thanks for sharing, but you picked the wrong article by Siyang Luo:)

    Embodiment and Humiliation Moderation of Neural Responses to Others’ Suffering in Female Submissive BDSM Practitioners.
    https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00463/full

    Much more interesting, it mixes scientific research with real ball gags. And it’s so good, it’s open access. Sorry, got carried away.

    Like you I have my doubts. The Psypost article itself is clickbait. No other way to explain how the first bullet point from the Science Direct abstract:

    “Involving in BDSM relationships and practices did not necessarily result in weaken empathy abilities.”

    turns into this headline:

    “Female submissives have reduced empathy to others’ suffering, study on BDSM finds”

    As for the study itself, lots of questions. Did it include men? If so, and Psypost seems to suggest that, what explains the differences between both sexes? What explains the results anyway?

    Given this particular outcome, I wonder just how sound the methodology is.
    Control group: how do you account for people that are submissive but don’t tell. Is there perhaps some sort of local effect, cultural influences, correlation vs causation etc.

    The whole thing feels like a clone of the “violence on TV leads to more violence in daily life” discussion, which is as much part of the culture wars as it is part of science. The jury is still very much out on that one.

    Perhaps you can ask Damiana Chi, I believe she has earned her Ph.D. in psychology, to write a guest post. You seem to know everyone. Would be interesting.

    1. Interesting follow-up study. Hard to imagine getting the funding for that study in the US. Putting ballgags on submissives and measuring their responses to pictures of pain is beginning to sound like a kink in itself!

      Although I’d think the use of ball gags would create even more of the kind of problems I mentioned in the post. i.e. Suggesting a BDSM context for the pain, in which excitement and arousal are more natural responses than sympathy or concern. It seems like a very tricky study to set-up properly.

      And of course, as you say, what starts as careful couched observations, typically gets turned into a silly clickbait headline.

      I am planning to head to LA in November, so maybe I’ll mention it to Damiana Chi. I’m sure her thoughts would be illuminating!

      -paltego

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