No surprise...

Looking for empathy and support? You're more likely to get it from a poor person than you are from a rich one, according to new research published in Psychological Science.

In a series of experiments, the new study found that lower-class people were better at reading emotions on others' faces — one measure of what researchers call empathic accuracy — than people in the upper class. "A lot of what we see is a baseline orientation for the lower class to be more empathetic and the upper class to be less [so]," says Michael Kraus, a co-author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco. 

Why might that be? "Lower-class environments are much different from upper-class environments," explains Kraus. "Lower-class individuals have to respond chronically to a number of vulnerabilities and social threats. You really need to depend on others so they will tell you if a social threat or opportunity is coming and that makes you more perceptive of emotions."

Study co-author Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that people in lower socioeconomic classes "live lives defined by threat. They are threatened by the environment, by institutions and by other people. One of most adaptive strategies in response to threat is to be very vigilant and carefully attend to others and try to promote cooperation to build strong alliances." 

An earlier study by the same researchers found that those of lower socioeconomic status were also more helpful and generous, suggesting that it's not just empathic accuracy but empathy itself that may be enhanced by circumstance. "Coming from an environment where you're more vulnerable, you solve problems by turning to others," says Kraus. That increases empathy and strengthens social bonds.

For the new study, Kraus and his colleagues conducted three different experiments. The first involved 200 university employees, some with college degrees and some without; the university setting is one in which educational attainment is particularly linked to job status and can be used as a proxy for social class. When asked to look at photographs of faces and identify the emotions portrayed, those with only a high school degree did better than their college-educated counterparts. 

This measure of empathic accuracy — "a person's ability to accurately read emotions that other people are feeling," says Kraus — is important because it is a key part of empathy itself: if you can't recognize what someone else is going through, it's hard to respond with kindness to their needs.

The second experiment involved college students who were asked to rate their own class status by placing themselves on a ladder representing various class ranks. In previous studies, subjective measures of class similar to this one have been found to accurately predict psychological and physical problems among lower status people.

In the experiment, two participants alternately watched and then took part in a hypothetical job interview with an experimenter. Once again, people who judged themselves to be lower class outperformed the those who identified as upper class in reading the emotions of their fellow participant.

In the third experiment, students were asked to compare their own class status with either someone at the top of the socioeconomic ladder — or someone at the bottom. People who compared themselves with a lower-class person, which made them think of themselves as having a higher status, were less accurate at reading emotional expressions. Conversely, those who were made to feel that they were in a lower class were better at reading emotions.

"I think [the study] is really well done and extremely compelling,” says Jamil Zaki, a postdoc at Harvard who studies empathy but was not associated with the research.

In addition to navigating lives that involve more social threats and vulnerabilities, the impact of power relations could also help explain why people lower on the class ladder might be better able to read emotional signals. When your job depends on knowing when the boss is angry, for instance, you're more likely to try to get better at reading him than he is to bother worrying about reading you. 

"People induced to feel more power do all sorts of things that show that they are not paying as much attention to people and to the emotions of others," says Zaki.

The influence of power could also be the reason that some studies find a gender difference in empathetic accuracy favoring women: they frequently have less power than men. "There are likely to be many determinants" of the gender difference, says Keltner. "One is that having lower power status makes women more attuned. Another may be that they more systematically take on caregiving roles. A third may be basic biology. If women do indeed have higher levels of the [bonding chemical] oxytocin and we know that oxytocin promotes empathy, that may be involved."

In an economy that puts more and more people at risk of falling out of the middle or upper classes, the reduction in empathy seen in the upper classes is troubling. ?)

"We are living in a period of historically high inequality. Health problems and psychological problems are correlated with inequality and we have rising inequality," says Keltner. "People in positions of power are not going to see [the inequality]. They're going to be blind to it and that has enormous implications for how we educate leaders, why they may not see [what's] obvious [to everyone else] and why they may not even understand the suffering of the people below them."

The good news for those stuck on the bottom, however, is that the people around them may be nicer.

Maia Szalavitz @'Time'

doctorow TSA motto: you can't see London, you can't see France, until we see your underpants #reddit

Oh dear god...

Sarah Palin: “We Gotta Stand With Our North Korean Allies”

Chalmers Johnson @ Commonwealth Club SF

Chalmers Johnson Dies at 79; Criticized U.S. Role in World

Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, his wife, Sheila, said.

Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.

In “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (Metropolitan Books, 2000), Dr. Johnson wondered why America’s military spending continued to rise after the cold war had ended. He concluded that through a network of more than 700 strategic bases around the world, the United States was committed to creating global hegemony. And he worried about the consequences for American democracy.

It was a theme he expanded upon in three subsequent books, “The Sorrows of Empire” (2004), “Nemesis” (2006) and “Dismantling the Empire” (2010).

Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote.

“This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”

To maintain its empire, he said, the United States “will inevitably undercut domestic democracy.”

In a review of “The Sorrows of Empire” in The New York Times, Ronald Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, wrote that the book was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger.” He added that it “conveys a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the United States has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms.”

E. B. Keehn, past president of the Japan Society of Southern California and a former lecturer at Cambridge University, said in an interview on Monday that Dr. Johnson “did not go into his work with an agenda.”

“If the data pointed to a conclusion that made people uncomfortable, including himself,” Dr. Keehn said, “he would never shy away from it.”

That was true not only of the “blowback” series, Dr. Keehn said, but of Dr. Johnson’s studies of Chinese Communism and of the role Japan’s government played in its economy.

His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market.

The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”

Born in Phoenix on Aug. 6, 1931, Chalmers Ashby Johnson was one of two children of Katherine and David Johnson Jr. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, with a degree in economics, he served in the Navy in the Korean War; it was the start of his fascination with Asia. “His assault boat landing craft was constantly being repaired in Yokohama,” his wife said, “so he started to study Japanese.”

After receiving his master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1961, both from Berkeley, he joined the university’s political science faculty. He headed the China Center at Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and was chairman of the political science department from 1976 to 1980. In 1988 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach at its new School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He retired in 1992.

Besides his wife, the former Sheila Knipscheer, he is survived by his sister, Barbara Johnson. 

Dennis Hevesi @'NY Times'

I thoroughly recommend 'Blowback' 

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Burn Baby Burn

Tens of thousands of students and school pupils walked out of class, marched, and occupied buildings around the country in the second day of mass action within a fortnight to protest at education cuts and higher tuition fees.

Amid more than a dozen protests, estimated by some to involve up to 130,000 students, the only significant violence came in central London. Late in the evening a crowd rampaged near Trafalgar Square, smashing windows on buses, shops and offices, including the Treasury.

Earlier a small group of young protesters, many of school age, tried to break through police lines. Others seized on an unattended police van, smashing windows and scrawling graffiti along its side.

The coalition government condemned the protests, saying they were being hijacked by extremist groups. The education secretary, Michael Gove, gave a notably combative response, urging the media not to give the violent minority "the oxygen of publicity", a resonant phrase associated closely with Margaret Thatcher's efforts in the 1980s to deny the IRA television coverage.

Gove said the government would not waver, adding: "I respond to arguments, I do not respond to violence."

In contrast Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, whose pre-election pledge to oppose increased tuition fees has made him the focus of student anger, spoke of his "massive regret" in having to rescind the promise.

"I regret of course that I can't keep the promise that I made because – just as in life – sometimes you are not fully in control of all the things you need to deliver those pledges," he told one of several angry callers to BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show. "Of course I massively regret finding myself in this situation."

But said that the fact the Liberal Democrats had been forced into a coalition, and that the country's finances were worse than they had anticipated, meant they had to accept "compromise".

Asked about his reaction to footage, earlier in the week of students, hanging him in effigy, Clegg said: "I'm developing a thick skin."

In a further sign of the developing pressure on the government's cuts programme, Len McCluskey, the new leader of Unite, Britain's biggest trade union, put himself and his union at the forefront of "an alliance of resistance". In an interview in the Guardian, McCluskey says: "There is an anger building up the likes of which we have not seen in our country since the poll tax."

The biggest single protest was in London, where an estimated 5,000 people – many of them noticeably younger than those who took part in the previous mass protest on 10 November – spent hours "kettled" in Whitehall as officers sought to prevent a repeat of the chaotic scenes when protesters burst through police lines to storm the Conservative party headquarters. Thousands more marched elsewhere around the country while others staged sit-ins at university buildings.

About 3,000 higher education students and school pupils gathered to protest in central Manchester, where there were four arrests, and a similar number gathered in Liverpool. A crowd, estimated at 2,000 people, protested in Sheffield, with about 1,000 doing so in Leeds and 3,000 in Brighton. There were scuffles in Cambridge as crowds climbed over railings in an apparent attempt to storm the university's Senate House.

But the scenes endlessly replayed on TV news channels came from central London. Two officers were injured, one suffering a broken arm, with 11 other people hurt. Police said 32 people had been arrested. As with the violence a fortnight ago, it was carried out by a minority of the crowd as many others shouted their disapproval.

One 19-year-old art student was pictured trying to stop masked marchers attacking the van. "We're going to be portrayed badly in the media," she shouted at them. "We're just wrecking a police van."

After being forced to apologise for the mayhem two weeks ago when fewer than 250 police were unable to marshal a crowd of more than 50,000, Scotland Yard sent almost four times as many officers onto the streets and quickly penned marchers into a section of streets.

Late last night some parents arrived at the police cordon pleading for their children to be released. The worst violence erupted after 6pm as officers let the marchers leave.

@'The Guardian'

Steve Jobs and Apple Cut Deal with Murdoch, Showing Contempt for Core Users' Liberal Orientation

It's enough to launch an Apple boycott by progressives: Steve Jobs, master innovator of those hipster devices of choice, just delivered a kick in the teeth to Apple's most ardent fans with news of his deal with Rupert Murdoch for an iPad-only newspaper to be known as The Daily, to be made available through Apple's App Store. Subscriptions will go for 99 cents per week.

The New York Times’ David Carr reports that other, unspecified publishers have sought the kind of deal that Murdoch struck with Jobs -- a subscription-based newspaper app -- only to be rebuffed. He hints at a possible quid pro quo in Murdoch's decision, as CEO of News Corporation (the parent company of the FOX Broadcasting Company), to allow Apple to sell certain Fox shows on iTunes for 99 cents an episode -- against the wishes of other Fox executives.

Go to any coffeehouse frequented by progressives, and you'll enter a world that looks like a grubby version of an Apple Store: MacBooks, iPhones and iPads abound amid the tables splashed with java and banana loaf crumbs.

If Apple were a political party, progressives would be its base. Before Apple was a multi-gajilliion-earning company, progressives embraced its products as an antidote to the cumbersome operating systems and meglomaniacal reach of Microsoft. Without the stalwart, almost cult-like support of progressives, Apple wouldn't have survived its catastrophic decision in its early years to offer its operating system only to consumers who purchased its hardware, while Microsoft earned great profits by offering its operating system as a stand-alone product. The early Apples were quirky, often clunky machines with tiny monitors, but progressives loved the vision that created them. For their loyalty, progressives are about to see Murdoch get the first crack at developing a "news" product specifically for the spectacularly successful Apple iPad tablet.

I have to put "news" in quotes, of course, because Murdoch's primary aim has little to do with the delivery of news: it's all about propaganda. Even legitimate news products, such as the newsroom content of the Wall Street Journal, also owned by Murdoch's News Corp., simply exists as a legitimizing delivery device for the paper's editorial-page content, some of it created by two of Murdoch's own community organizers: columnist John Fund and editorial board member Stephen Moore, both of whom shill, as AlterNet reported, for the programs of David Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation. But I digress. Kind of...

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Adele M. Stan @'AlterNet'

Homeland

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