In other words, rather than being defined by a feeling like warmth, sympathy or sadness for
another, compassion can be viewed as a motivational drive that does not appear to rely on, require
or communicate any unique and singular affective state. Indeed, while prototypical behavioral
expressions of compassion have been proposed (e.g., oblique eyebrows, fixed gaze and forward
lean
, as one study recently found, very few people (a range of 0% to 8% across two studies)
are able to freely identify “compassion” facial expressions as such, more frequently interpreting the
expression simply as sadness
. The lack of a signature and uniform compassionate facial
expression is consistent with the premise that compassion is a drive that can arise flexibly under
different emotional conditions, or perhaps even in the absence of emotion.
Moreover, whereas emotions tend to focus on the evaluative and signaling aspects of the
relationship between organism and object, motivational drives more directly emphasize the
organism’s desire to act with respect to the object or environment
. Thus, when compassion is
conceptualized as a motivation rather than an emotion, the “other” or target of compassion may
exist unqualified. That is, compassion can be conceptualized as a widely encompassing, non-
evaluative aspiration that can be delivered even in the absence of emotional attachment to or
evaluation of the target. As alluded to above, this allows for the possibility that Gandhi may have
experienced genuine compassion towards his oppressors in the absence of feeling much warmth
or sympathy towards them.
Another key implication of viewing compassion as separate from emotion rests in how we
understand their relationship to one another (see
for our model of this relationship). From
a theoretical standpoint, emotion and motivation are closely linked in that emotions are often
precursors to motivational drives, signaling us to pay attention and act in particular ways towards
objects in our environment
. In line with this, compassion can be viewed as a dynamic
motivational drive that may be inhibited or facilitated by different emotional processes.In particular,
we argue that emotions that activate the fight or flight system and direct attention towards the self,
as in the case of anger, fear, shame and embarrassment, serve as inhibitors to the compassion
drive. Moreover, unlike other motivational drives such as aggression or pleasure seeking, a
growing body of research suggests that compassion operates best under conditions of emotional
balance, or low arousal emotional states. In other words, subjective emotional intensity,
particularly in the case of negatively valenced emotions but with any excess emotion in general,
appears to thwart compassion. At the same time, a numbness or insensitivity to emotion can also
hinder compassion. From this view, training in emotional balance (i.e., learning how to strike the
balance between feeling too little or too much, and learning in particular how to manage potentially
destructive emotions) is seen as a key aspect of cultivating compassion. Importantly, the goal of
managing destructive emotions is not simply to avoid or eradicate them, but to acknowledge and
be mindful of them without becoming overwhelmed or dictated by them.
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