There’s a bright side to stress

Stress can make us better human beings. But it also it can also hamper our judgement. That’s the conclusion of an experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Vienna.

The study, published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, looked at what happens in the brain when people who are highly stressed try to empathize with others.

It found that they showed increased empathy towards others and wanted to help them more, but that stress skewed their judgement.

The study

A group of 80 male participants were asked to undertake some difficult problem-solving against the clock while receiving negative feedback (to enhance the feelings of stress).

They were then asked to empathize with others by looking at photographs of a painful medical procedure and vividly imagining the pain of that patient. For some of the photos, they were told that the patients had undergone anaesthesia before the operation. This allowed the researchers to identify whether the group could separate their own reaction to the pictures from the actual feelings of the patient – in other words, whether they could show empathy.

The researchers then tested the relationship between empathy and pro-social behaviour (helping others). The group played a game where they had to share a sum of money, as much or as little as they wanted, with a stranger.

The results

As they were doing this task, brain scans revealed their brain activity and stress levels. The researchers focused especially on the changes in the so-called "empathy network" – the part of the brain that controls empathy.

The brain scans showed that as the participants became more stressed, they also showed more empathy.

And the more strongly their brains reacted to another person’s pain, the more money they chose to give to a stranger.

However, the participants showed the same level of brain activity even when they knew the patients undergoing the operations hadn’t felt any pain because of anaesthesia.

This led the researchers to conclude that when we are in stressful situations, we can’t always analyse another person’s feelings accurately. Put another way, if someone is crying for joy, we might still think they are upset, due to a lack of judgement and our own overridingly stressed perspective.

“Hence, depending on the context and situation, stress can be either beneficial or detrimental in social situations," concludes Claus Lamm, lead of the study.