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A woman and a man watch a sad movie. The woman is crying, tissue in hand, leaning on the man's shoulder. And unlike many stereotypes, the man too has a sad look on his face, and his eyes are glistening. They are both feeling compassion for the characters on screen.
As discussed in her post from June 20, Dr. Emma Seppala proposes that men and women don't differ in the amount of compassion that they show others, but that the pathways to that compassion may differ. Recent neuroscience research shows different brain responses and activations between the genders in their compassionate responses to others.
I may have a possible explanation. In my own work, I too have found gender differences in the pathways to compassion--although I was specifically looking at compassionate responses to fictional characters in live theatrical performances.
In our study, children and adults watched one of two emotional plays—either West Side Story, or The Vagina Monologues. These audience members had paid to see the shows and come of their own volition. After they saw the show, we asked participants to complete a short questionnaire about the show they had just watched. We specifically asked about a few very emotional moments: For example in West Side Story (spoiler!) when Maria watches Tony die, or in The Vagina Monologues, when a woman describes the horrors of rape during the Bosnian war. For each moment, we asked five simple questions:
1) What emotion was [name of character] feeling in this scene?
2) How strongly did [name of character] feel this emotion?
3) What emotion were you feeling during this scene?
4) How strongly did you feel this emotion?
5) How sorry do you feel for [name of character] in this scene?
We then looked to several different possible predictors of compassion, or how sorry the audience member was feeling for the character:
1) Whether people rated themselves as matching the emotion that they thought the character was feeling (which we defined as empathy, feeling the emotion of another).
2) How strongly audience members thought the character was feeling an emotion.
3) How strongly audience members were feeling personal emotions and distress.
Happily, all of the audience members were correct in their judgments of what characters were feeling. So, actors, for the most part, my research is showing that audience members are understanding and reading what you’re putting out there.
We then looked at what predicted feeling sorry for the character. One surprise? That age didn’t make a difference. Although the audience for The Vagina Monologues was obviously all adults, the audience for West Side Story ranged in age from 13 (who got parents’ permission before participating) to 70 years old. When we looked at the data, age didn’t predict any of our findings—empathy, sympathy, or understanding what a character was feeling. What did predict the relationship among our variables was gender.
Men and women felt compassion for the characters—they felt bad that bad things were happening to Maria and the Bosnian War Refugee. But what predicted their level of compassion varied. For men, level of compassion was predicted by their own distress, their judgment of the distress of the character and the match between their own emotional state and the emotion of the character. For women, level of compassion was predicted only by their analysis of how much distress the character was in. Their own emotional distress and the connection between their emotion and the emotion of the character didn’t predict compassion.
Importantly, though, the difference wasn’t that men weren’t feeling compassion and women were. Or, even that men weren’t feeling empathy and women were. Just as Dr. Seppala found in her neurological studies, the important difference is that the pathways to what predicted levels of compassion were different—through the self for men, and through the target for women.
