“When Tania Singer asked me to go into a state of pure empathy without engaging in compassion
or altruistic love, I decided to empathically resonate with the suffering of children in a Romanian
orphanage. I had seen a BBC documentary on these totally neglected orphans the night before and
was very touched by their fates. Despite being fed and washed every day, these children were
completely emaciated and emotionally abandoned. The lack of affection had caused severe
symptoms of apathy and vulnerability. Many children were rocking back and forth for hours and
their health was actually in such a bad state that deaths were regular in this orphanage. Even when
being washed, many of these children winced with pain and the slightest collision could lead to a
broken leg or arm. So when I was immersing myself in empathic resonance, I visualized the
suffering of these orphan children as vividly as possible. The empathic sharing of their pain very
quickly became intolerable to me and I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burned out.
After nearly an hour of empathic resonance, I was given the choice to engage in compassion or to
finish scanning. Without the slightest hesitation, I agreed to continue scanning with compassion
meditation, because I felt so drained after the empathic resonance. Subsequently engaging in
compassion meditation completely altered my mental landscape. Although the images of the
suffering children were still as vivid as before, they no longer induced distress. Instead, I felt
natural and boundless love for these children and the courage to approach and console them. In
addition, the distance between the children and myself had completely disappeared. This was
when we realized the immense potential of compassion as an antidote to empathic distress and
burnout.”
Empathy and Compassion Training in Non-Experts
Matthieu Ricard’s first-person perspective conveyed that empathic resonance with the suffering of
others was a highly aversive experience. Given these properties, empathy can actually be a
precursor for burnout: when empathic resonance with suffering repeatedly induces strong negative
emotions, this can be overwhelming
People who work in helping professions (see
and
, like caregivers and doctors, are faced with the suffering of others on a
daily basis and are at a particularly high risk of burnout. Moreover, distressing experiences are not
confined to hospitals and nursing homes – everyone can certainly think of a relative or close friend
who at this very moment is suffering from a serious disease or from strong aversive emotions. In
fact, everyone can be overwhelmed by resonating too strongly with the suffering of others at their
workplaces or in their private lives. Although the strong negative affect that accompanied empathy
was alarming, Matthieu Ricard’s first-person perspective also revealed that compassion could help
to overcome this pain. From the scientific perspective, compassion seemed to offer a new strategy
that enables people to meet suffering with warm-hearted emotions. It actually seemed that
compassion would not only benefit the person who felt it by protecting them against burnout, but
may also benefit others by increasing helping behavior
.
And indeed, back in Zurich, the first steps to investigate whether non-experts could be trained in
similar loving-kindness enhancing techniques were undertaken. Using a newly developed task,
called the Zurich Prosocial Game, the research team measured different types of prosocial
behavior in a computer game before and after short-term training in loving-kindness (
metta
in Pali;
see
. The team found that training
metta
for a few days increased
helping behavior towards strangers and that altruistic behavior increased more strongly in
participants who practiced more loving-kindness
In order to study the plasticity of compassion and to investigate the difference between
compassion and empathy in participants who had never meditated before, Tania Singer’s Ph.D.
student Olga Klimecki and colleagues embarked on a large-scale project. In the course of the
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