Emotion serves many functions, but one of the most conspicuous is its social function. Without emotion, no sense of solidarity could ever arise between one person and another — and even when parents bring a child into the world, they would have little reason to devote themselves to raising that child.
It is the surge of tenderness and compassion we feel the moment we look at a child that binds parent and child together. This piece explores how emotion — empathy in particular — connects human beings, and how it becomes the driving force behind moral action.
1. The Social Nature of Emotion
The Emotion That Connects Us
Human beings are, by nature, separate individuals. Yet emotion ties these separate beings together with an invisible thread. If I feel sad when someone else grieves, I am already connected to that person. If I feel joy when someone else rejoices, the same connection is at work. It is through this process of sharing emotion — what we call empathy — that a sense of solidarity is created between people. The apostle Paul captures this in his letter to the Romans:
"Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep." (Romans 12:15)
Rejoicing Together: Why Joy Is Harder to Share Than Sorrow
Most people assume that grief is the hardest emotion to share with others. In fact, the opposite is true: joy is often harder to share. This is captured neatly by the German term Schadenfreude — a compound of Schaden ("harm" or "damage") and Freude ("joy") — describing the pleasure one feels at another person's misfortune.
Neuroscience research lends support to this observation. In a widely cited 2009 fMRI study published in Science, Hidehiko Takahashi and colleagues found that participants showed activation in the anterior cingulate cortex — a region associated with the processing of pain — when they learned that a person with superior standing was doing well, and activation in the ventral striatum — a region associated with reward — when that same person suffered a setback.
In other words, another person's success can register in the brain much like pain, while their downfall can register much like reward. (Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., & Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323(5916), 937–939.)
Scripture, too, records this very psychology. The Ammonites, kin to Israel and Judah, did not mourn when their neighbors fell — they gloated.
"Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou saidst, Aha, against my sanctuary, when it was profaned; and against the land of Israel, when it was desolate; and against the house of Judah, when they went into captivity..." (Ezekiel 25:3)
Even among close friends, joy can be difficult to share. If a close friend's child is admitted to a top university while one's own child is rejected, it is far from easy to visit that friend and say, sincerely, that their child's success is a comfort even amid one's own disappointment.
For this reason, the circle of people with whom we can genuinely share joy tends to shrink down to family. Put differently, anyone with whom we can truly share joy has, in effect, become part of our extended family. How many people can we say this of? A life in which joy can only be shared with blood relatives would be a narrow and lonely one.
The more people we can genuinely rejoice with, the more our "community of joy" expands. Scripture tells us that when even one sinner repents, the angels in heaven rejoice as well (Luke 15:10) — suggesting that shared joy over the same event is itself what binds heaven and humanity into a single family.
Sharing Anger
A second emotion that is notoriously difficult to share is anger. There is a saying that captures this well: two people can agree on everything and still find it hard to live together if their points of anger differ — while two people who agree on almost nothing can still get along reasonably well if their points of anger align.
Scripture offers a striking example of someone who became angry at exactly what angered God: the priest Phinehas. When the Israelites fell into idolatry and immorality, Phinehas responded with the same indignation that burned in God, and God rewarded him with an everlasting covenant of peace.
"Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake among them, that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy. Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace: And he shall have it, and his seed after him, even the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel." (Numbers 25:11–13)
Why should shared anger matter so much to a relationship? Because what angers us is a direct expression of our moral values. People differ in the standards they use to judge what counts as wrong, and each person becomes angry when those standards are violated.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory shows that people differ in which moral foundations — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty, and so on — they weigh most heavily. These differences surface most sharply in politics: people tend to be far more tolerant of religious differences than of political ones.
Because of this, the points at which we get angry are a critical variable in whether a relationship can endure — and living well alongside someone whose anger points differ from our own often requires simply acknowledging that difference rather than arguing over it.
2. The Moral Nature of Emotion
The second dimension of emotions worth sharing is their moral character. Shared emotion — empathy — is a central cause and driving force of moral behavior.
The Engine of Altruism
Altruistic behavior in humans and animals has long puzzled researchers who study it. From an evolutionary-psychology standpoint, altruism looks almost irrational: it costs the actor something and offers no obvious survival advantage. Scholars have proposed various explanations, but none has proven as compelling as the theory of empathy.
We do not help others solely because we expect some reward in return. Imagine walking down the street and seeing someone who has been injured. Our capacity for empathy activates: their pain is transmitted to us as our own. The emotion is shared. And because we now carry that pain ourselves, the only way to resolve it is to help resolve theirs.
The Gospels repeatedly describe Jesus as being "moved with compassion" when he encountered the sick and the suffering. The underlying Greek word, splanchnizomai, derives from a term for the internal organs — the bowels — and suggests a gut-level, visceral ache felt at the sight of another's suffering.
In English, the word that best captures this kind of feeling is empathy — distinct from mere pity or sympathy in that it involves actually feeling the other person's pain as one's own. Empathy, in turn, expands into compassion, which moves from feeling into action. It is precisely this sharing of emotion — empathy — that makes moral action possible.
"And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick." (Matthew 14:14)
Empathy Scales with Similarity
If empathy is such a crucial engine of moral behavior, how is this capacity developed? First, empathy scales with similarity: we find it easier to empathize with people who share something in common with us. The Korean proverb "A widow understands a widower's grief best" captures this — shared circumstance breeds understanding.
This principle helps explain why the Son of God had to become human. Could a purely divine being fully grasp the pain of human experience from a position outside it? The author of Hebrews argues that because Christ endured the very trials common to humanity, he is uniquely positioned to sympathize with human weakness.
"For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." (Hebrews 4:15–16)
Empathy Scales with Familiarity
Second, empathy scales with familiarity: people tend to empathize more readily with those they know well. Watching a child suffer on the other side of the world evokes a very different intensity of empathy than watching one's own child suffer. Studies of animal behavior have similarly found that individuals show stronger empathic responses toward familiar cage-mates than toward unfamiliar members of the same species.
This is why Ellen G. White, in her book Education, argues that familiarity is the wellspring of sympathy and that sympathy, in turn, is the source of effective service to others. She urges that children and young people be allowed to become genuinely acquainted with people and places beyond their own borders, since it is precisely that kind of lived familiarity that awakens real empathy for those who suffer far away. (Ellen G. White, Education, p. 269)
Conclusion
Emotion is never a purely private, individual matter. Emotion — and empathy above all — is the invisible thread that connects us as separate individuals, and at the same time the real engine behind human moral action. The more joy we share, the wider our community grows; the more our points of anger align with others', the deeper our relationships become. And the closer we draw to those who are unfamiliar to us — the more we come to know them — the further the reach of our empathy and the good it produces extends as well.
References
- Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., & Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323(5916), 937–939.
- Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books. (on Moral Foundations Theory)
- White, E. G. Education. Pacific Press Publishing Association, p. 269.
- Scripture quotations from the King James Version: Romans 12:15; Ezekiel 25:3; Numbers 25:11–13; Matthew 14:14; Hebrews 4:15–16; Luke 15:10