Since I recorded this I’ve been thinking a lot about mood contagion, embodied cognition, and body mapping as these apply to our interactions with companion animals. Particularly, I’ve been wondering about the effect all-positive training has on an animal’s development of empathy. Does such a view of reality make it difficult for them to understand what it means to do wrong, to hurt someone else? Given the role modeling plays in learning, do they see others suffering and then mimic their mood and the physiological changes that go with it? But if that’s the case, then their lives wouldn’t be all-positive. Rather than subject their pets to that, would their all-positive owners shield their animals from such “negative” experiences?
Many years ago there was a similar trend in children’s education that involved giving effusive praise for everything the child did right and creating an all-positive environment. This was based on the premise that this would develop the children’s self-confidence and self-esteem. At the time, the short-term results of this approach looked good. And as is so often the case, many assumed these results proved that this was the way to go. But then one researcher decided to study how these kids behaved when they reached adolescence and this time the results were quite different. Because the kids had been taught that everything about them and what they did was so special, they couldn’t cope when reality didn’t support that view. And when it didn’t, some of them became violent. In other words, they couldn’t empathize with others.
In addition to the excerpt from Franz de Waal’s The Age of Empathy published in the October edition of Discover magazine that I discussed in the podcast, you can read another excerpt of his book here. This one gives some insights to what happens to those reward-focused humans who think they’re special when they become adults, and compares this to how animals avoid such complications left to their own “lower animal” devices.
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