UC Berkley: Lower Classes Quicker to Show Compassion in the Face of Suffering

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations |December 19, 2011

BERKELEY —

Emotional differences between the rich and poor, as depicted in such Charles Dickens classics as “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” may have a scientific basis. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that people in the lower socio-economic classes are more physiologically attuned to suffering, and quicker to express compassion than their more affluent counterparts.

By comparison, the UC Berkeley study found that individuals in the upper middle and upper classes were less able to detect and respond to the distress signals of others. Overall, the results indicate that socio-economic status correlates with the level of empathy and compassion that people show in the face of emotionally charged situations.

“It’s not that the upper classes are coldhearted,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Jennifer Stellar, lead author of the study published online on Dec. 12 in the journal, Emotion. “They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives.”

Stellar and her colleagues’ findings challenge previous studies that have characterized lower-class people as being more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of adversity.

“These latest results indicate that there’s a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing,” Stellar said.

It has not escaped the researchers’ attention that the findings come at a time of rising class tension, expressed in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Rather than widen the class divide, Stellar said she would like to see the findings promote understanding of different class cultures. For example, the findings suggest that people from lower socio-economic backgrounds may thrive better in cooperative settings than their upper-class counterparts.

“Upper-class individuals appear to be more self-focused, they’ve grown up with more freedom and autonomy,” she said. “They may do better in an individualist, competitive environment.”

More than 300 ethnically diverse young adults were recruited for the UC Berkeley study, which was divided into three experiments that used three separate groups of participants. Because all the volunteers were college undergraduates, their class identification – lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class or upper class – was based on parental income and education.

In the first experiment, 148 young adults were rated on how frequently and intensely they experience such emotions as joy, contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement and awe. In addition, they reported how much they agreed with such statements as “When I see someone hurt or in need, I feel a powerful urge to take care of them,” and “I often notice people who need help.” Compassion was the only positive emotion reported at greater levels by lower-class participants, the study found.

In the second experiment, a new group of 64 participants viewed two videos: an instructional video on construction and an emotionally charged video about families who are coping with the challenges of having a child with cancer. Participants showed no differences while watching the “neutral” instructional video, and all reported feeling sad in response to the video about families of cancer patients. However, members of the lower class reported higher levels of compassion and empathy as distinct from sorrow.

The researchers also monitored the heart rates of participants as they watched the neutral and emotionally charged videos. Lower-class participants showed greater decreases in heart rate as they watched the cancer family video than upper-class participants.

“One might assume that watching someone suffering would cause stress and raise the heart rate,” Stellar said. “But we have found that, during compassion, the heart rate lowers as if the body is calming itself to take care of another person.”

Finally, a new set of 106 participants was randomly divided into pairs and pitted against one another in mock interviews for a lab manager position. To further raise the stress level in interviews, those who performed best were to win a cash prize. Post-interview reports from the participants showed that the lower-class interviewees perceived their rivals to be feeling greater amounts of stress, anxiety and embarrassment and as a result reported more compassion and sympathy for their competitors. Conversely, upper-class participants were less able to detect emotional distress signals in their rivals.

“Recognizing suffering is the first step to responding compassionately. The results suggest that it’s not that upper classes don’t care, it’s that they just aren’t as good at perceiving stress or anxiety,” Stellar said.

Other coauthors of the study are UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner; Michael Kraus, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry at UCSF; and Vida Manzo, a researcher in social psychology at  Northwestern University. The study was funded by grants from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and the McNair Scholars Program.

America's Vanishing Middle Class: A Tale of Two Economies

by Jeff Stibel

The US economy today borders on schizophrenic. To be sure, we are seeing signs of positive momentum. The last three months have delivered almost 250,000 new jobs per month on average. Great news, but at the same time, unemployment is growing and now exceeds nine percent. Both consumer confidence and small business confidence is higher than where they were last year. But confidence has been falling rapidly for the past few months.

Were Charles Dickens to show up as a commentator on the evening news, he would have a ready vocabulary to describe our current economic situation: This recovery is very much A Tale of Two Cities. After years of record low interest rates, multiple stimulus packages, and the expansion of tax cuts and credits, we are in the midst of a very real recovery, but it is a recovery characterized by asymmetry. Banks and major corporations are flush with capital — large businesses are recording record profits — but job growth is tepid, unemployment remains high and small businesses are struggling.

At first glance, the combination of record corporate profits alongside anemic job growth seems contrary, but the two are directly connected. The primary reason corporate profits are at record highs is that large companies learned to be lean and highly productive during the worst years of the recession. The profits generated through a reduced but more productive headcount has induced many large companies to continue this lean approach even as we emerge from recession. The result: record profits despite weak revenue growth, which leads to a lack of hiring.

The job growth problem is even more nuanced than that. It turns out that the hiring we are seeing is at the extreme ends of the spectrum. To ensure strong profits, corporations are cutting out the middle layers of management — the middle-class. In their place, they are hiring at the very low end and promoting at the high end. Senior management compensation is up nearly 25% this year ($9M for the average S&P 500 CEO), to levels higher than in pre-recession days, according to executive compensation research firm Equilar.

On the other side, we have job growth coming in at the bottom of the pyramid, mostly minimum wage and temporary positions. Take last month’s job creation, for example. Out of the 260,000 jobs created in April, a whopping 60,000 jobs came from one company: McDonald’s. There is nothing wrong with flipping burgers for a living, but it will not pull us out of a recession.

Meanwhile, middle-class jobs are declining at an alarming rate. Middle income jobs have been falling rapidly for some time and now represent well less than half of all jobs in the US. New numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that these middle income jobs have been replaced by low-income jobs. This has left 17 million college-educated Americans with jobs well below their educational levels. If the middle-class are filling the jobs available for the less educated, then the poorest Americans will largely be left jobless. The question we need to start asking is not “how do we add jobs to the economy?”; rather, it is “how do we create middle-class jobs to rebuild our economy?”

Without middle-class jobs, our society will enter into a “Stagnant Age” of two classes: rich and poor. And with two-thirds of our GDP coming from consumer spending — and most of that coming from the middle-class — we will be left with a shrinking economy.

Contractor Behind Bungled Embassy Construction Sends State Dept. List of Claims Totaling $375 Million

govtoversight:

It’s like a bad movie that never seems to end. First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Company, the contractor responsible for bungling the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, has sent the State Department a list of claims totaling hundreds of millions of dollars related to its work on that Embassy, according to people familiar with the situation.

Totaling over $375 million, the claims include $22 million for extra security, nearly $13 million for danger pay, and a hair over $4 million for food shortages. The claims come more than three years after the completion of the Embassy.

At the same time, government officials are calling for the State Department to seek a $132 million rebate from First Kuwaiti.

Read the entire outrageous story over on the POGO blog.

Three Cheers for Decline

BY CHARLES KENNY

As the U.S. bond rating falls and the stock market plunges, the American Century looks to be well and truly over. While this has provoked no small amount of hand-wringing, Americans may soon come to enjoy no longer bearing the responsibility for running the world’s indispensable nation.

The signs of decline are everywhere. Illegal immigrants are heading back home in search of a better life. China already leads the world in green technology and is about to become the world’s biggest economy in terms of purchasing power. Two U.S.-led wars are dragging toward an end charitably described as: mission not completely failed. The United States was able to avoid default only by stopping pretty much all other government business for several weeks. And it’s not only U.S. political and economic preeminence that is deteriorating, but its cultural hegemony: India’s Bollywood and Nigeria’s Nollywood are each producing more films a year than Hollywood (to say nothing of their superior artistic quality).

Of course, the United States still possesses greater military strength than any other country in the world. But what good has being the world’s policeman done for Americans? Wielding that might meant the United States saw more combat deaths overseas last year than any other country, according to data from Uppsala University. Beyond the blood is the treasure: U.S. military spending increased 81 percent between 2001 and 2010 and now accounts for 43 percent of the global total — six times its nearest rival, China. The U.S. military burden is equivalent to 4.8 percent of GDP, the largest economic burden of any OECD country.

It is no coincidence that the man who coined the term “imperial overstretch,” Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, is British. Britain was the last country to get knocked off the top spot, after all — and the United States could learn a lot from its experience.

Britain spent much of the 1950s pretending it was still a global power, which resulted in one of the country’s grimmest decades — food was still rationed until 1954. This exercise in delusion culminated in Britain’s attempt to occupy the Suez Canal in 1957, an effort that was scuttled by the world’s new ascendant power, the United States.

But it was only a year after the Suez crisis signaled the end of Britain’s global reach that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared his compatriots “never had it so good.” He was right: Average incomes, health indicators, and levels of education were all far better than in the glory days when Britannia ruled the seas. Then, after Britain gave up on empire — decolonizing across Africa and Asia in the early 1960s — they got the Beatles, the Mini, and free love.

Britain may still go on about “punching above its weight” in international affairs, and it has kept some of the trappings of great-power status, such as a seat on the U.N. Security Council and a small flotilla of nuclear submarines, but its burdens are significantly less momentous. Freed from the distractions of colonial oversight and global leadership, it could retire its planet-spanning chain of military bases, shrink the Royal Navy, and devalue the pound without fears that the world would come to an end. And the country learned to collaborate without feeling equal status was a slight to its dignity — joining the European Union, for example, and signing the Kyoto Protocol.

Could the United States go down the same track toward contented (well, most of the time), pretty-good-power status? The British experience suggests that the first step is to accept you have a problem. The simple fact that Britain couldn’t afford to keep its empire together after World War II helped forge that acceptance — and it might resonate in the United States at the moment.

Perhaps Washington could take a baby step or two toward scaling back its global commitments by returning the defense budget to its Reagan-era average, a move that would save about $250 billion a year. Surely what was good enough for a world riven by the Cold War, when the Warsaw Pact had 249 combat divisions and we lived in constant threat of global thermonuclear Armageddon, is also good enough for the United States today — at a time when al Qaeda apparently has fewer than 100 fighters left in Afghanistan. And it really would be a baby step: Even with a $250 billion cut, the United States would still outspend China about four times over.

Defense cuts would allow the United States to tend to a few other priorities, which just might take Americans’ minds off the fact that their country is no longer No. 1. Perhaps the United States could focus on constructing a high-speed rail line or two, or maybe even finish the job on extending health care. After all, of the large economies that enjoyed a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s last week, the United States ranked at the bottom of the list in terms of life expectancy, and it was the only country without universal health care. Perhaps America could also spend a little more on basic education; the United States was at the tail end of the AAA club when it came to believing basic scientific truths like evolution, and it scored lowest out of all those countries on international tests of students’ math skills.

The end of Britain’s imperial ambitions allowed the country to abandon national service and just relax a little. Similarly, with less need to flag the martial spirit through adrenaline-pumping threat alerts and wars on terror, the United States could find a moment to reform its criminal justice system; another international indicator where the United States remains in the lead, after all, is in percentage of its population behind bars. And once America accepts it doesn’t need to work every waking hour to keep up with the Soviets, Japanese, or Chinese, perhaps it could take time for a vacation. At the moment, there is no statutory minimum for paid leave in the United States. Even Singapore provides seven days, and the rest of the AAA club gives employees minimums ranging from 18 to 30 days.

As to foreign relations, the United States couldn’t — and wouldn’t — follow Britain’s example and join the European Union, but here too, there could be scope for baby steps. What about signing up for the International Criminal Court or taking a less obstructive line during climate negotiations? In fact, a decline from hyperpower status will doubtless help prolong the upward trend in international opinion of the United States. It’s even possible that the U.S. government could get more done in the world by playing nice than barging around on its own.

Whatever happens to the United States in the global economic rankings, it will remain a great country. Accepting — even embracing — decline will serve as a reminder that American exceptionalism is built on a set of values, not stock indices. If the S&P downgrade helps the United States foster a shift toward prioritizing the good life over great-power status, perhaps it will be seen as a blessing in disguise. What’s more, the United States starts out its decline with many advantages over 1950s Britain. Not least, in large parts of the country, it is already possible to find a good restaurant — something that took the Brits 30-plus years of not-so-bad power status to achieve.

caraobrien: Worst. Congress. Ever.  Americans have complained for years that their government is broken. This time they’re right. All I have to say is that it was not like this before the past midterms. The election of a GOP majority to the House was the worse electoral result this country could have reached in a economic crisis like this. They saw, they came, and the made everything worse.
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caraobrien:

Worst. Congress. Ever. 

Americans have complained for years that their government is broken. This time they’re right.

All I have to say is that it was not like this before the past midterms. The election of a GOP majority to the House was the worse electoral result this country could have reached in a economic crisis like this. They saw, they came, and the made everything worse.

(via pantslessprogressive)

Source: caraobrien

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.
Jose Antiono Vargas, a Pulizter Prize winning journalist, reveals himself to be an undocumented immigrant and shows one of the sad, human stories behind the United States’ immigration policies. (via murmurtheblues)

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

Source: thousandmilesfromnowhere

Who is Glenn Beck? The Profile of An Idiot.

Alright, so over tonight’s dinner debate I mentioned Mr. Glenn Beck, to my surprise, my friend Elva did not who he was. So I told her I’d post something tonight that would explain and describe the man that has led the spawning of the Tea Party and the conservative attack on Progressivism.

The following are some quotes and links to pages, sites, videos, ect. that I think do an excellent job at representing who he is. I hope you have the time to read it, it’s inherently important to be informed about the political atmosphere of out democratic nation, the political pundits included. Enjoy.

Stats:

Born February 10, 1964 in Everett, Washington. Age 46.

Salary, $32 million.

Married twice. Divorced once. 4 children, 2 per marriage.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, currently Mormon.

Self-described Conservative Libertarian

Bio (wikipedia):

Beck was born in Everett, Washington and raised as a Roman Catholic. He obtained his first broadcast job as a disc-jockey for his hometown radio station at the age of 13 after winning a contest. When his mother died, Beck moved to Bellingham, where he attended high school. After graduation, he worked at radio stations in Provo, Utah, Washington D.C. and New Haven, Connecticut. Along the way, Beck married and divorced his first wife. He also struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, and went through recovery in the mid 1990s. After marrying his second wife Tania in 1999, the couple converted to Mormonism.

He is an American conservative  radio and television host, political commentator, author, and entrepreneur. He is currently the host of The Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks; He is also the host of a self-titled cable-news show on Fox News Channel. As an author, Beck has had six New York Times-bestselling books, with five debuting at #1  . Beck is also the founder and CEO of Mercury Radio Arts, a multi-media production company through which he produces content for radio, television, publishing, the stage, and the Internet.

Moving on, here are some of his views on issues:

  • personal responsibility
  • private charity
  • right to life
  • freedom of religion
  • very limited government
  • low national debt
  • very against gun control
  • believes humans have NOT caused Global Warming
  • not supportive of universal health-care
  • supportive of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
  • NOT supportive of equal marriage rights

Basically, he’s a very conservative and libertarian individual.

Here are some videos that are of intrest:

Please try and watch most of each of them.

Of course, if you look him up on youtube, you can find much more material on him.

Here are some pages of interest:

Here are a few quotes:

  • “This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture….I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.” –on President Obama, sparking an advertiser exodus from his FOX News show, July 28, 2009 
  • “When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh shut up’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining.” –”The Glenn Beck Program,” Sept. 9, 2005
  • “You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one – I can’t speak for you, but I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.” –”The Glenn Beck Program,” Nov. 6, 2006

So basically Mr. Beck is extremely conservative. He believes that government has no business in peoples individual lives, and that corporations and capitalism should take precedent in all national issues. He supported John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. He called Obama a racist, communist, Nazi, baby killer, death master, terrorist, closet Muslim, ect. on countless occasions. He works for the “fair and balanced” Fox “News” Network, which we all know is a Republican media stronghold of fear mongering. He is the “fearmonger-in-chief” as the Anti-Defamation League described him. His views on gay marriage and health-care are enough evidence to call him a self-interested bigot. He takes advantage of the ignorance and prejudice of people to inflate hatred and bigotry against the common worker and the Progressive movement. Also keep in mind the fact that he himself has referred to his show and work as “entertainment” and the he “is not a journalist” thus I find it very disturbing that some people actually take him seriously! 

You don’t have to be a liberal or independent to see how ridiculous his assertions are. If you ever get a chance to watch his show on Fox, you’ll probably either laugh or be sick to your stomach due to his blatant craziness. He also has had several rallies recently that for many have been insulting and inflammatory. Example: his rally on the anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech that exerted the goal of “taking back the Civil Rights Movement.” Obviously this is extremely ludicrous and demeaning to the Civil Rights Era’s legacy, just goes to prove I guess.

Ultimately this man is a lunatic, anything he says is either substantiated by his own prejudices or twisted and plainly false evidence. I would never take his views on anything for more than the cheap and absurd laugh they cause me.

This has been probably my longest and most intense post yet, I could always go further example, I didn’t even mention his “books:” ‘Arguing With Idiots’ and ‘Common Sense’. Regardless, I thank you for reading it if you’ve made it this far. I guarantee that if you look further into this topic and his movement and see the truth you won’t be fooled into believing the lies. Don’t hesitate to ask questions on The Situation Report, I’d love to go into specific detail about his crazy antics.

Take good care. Peace and blessings.

-The Situation Report.

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