Women who practice submissive BDSM displayed reduced empathy and an atypical neural response to other people ’s pain

This study is limited to one subgroup of people who practice BDSM, and doesn’t implicate the wider field. The fact that the effects were initially discovered for women, not men, may reflect the fact that men tend to be less empathic to begin with. And the online study’s identification of submissive practitioners, rather than dominant ones, as having lower than normal empathy and an atypical response to pain, could reflect that this is the subset of people who willingly expose themselves to pain experience, which could be densensitising, or because this group is made up of individuals started out less sensitised. This last issue is a point to emphasise – because we don’t know whether the kind of person drawn to submissive practices is different from the norm, the study doesn’t show that practicing BDSM causes any changes in empathy. But that the differences could be produced by the practice is certainly conceptually possible, both from the general principles of brain plasticity and from more specific insights from pain science. Working in a pain management service over this summer has left me in no doubt that our relationship with pain is shaped by psychological factors, and can change over time. More research will be needed to tell if this is the case here. If submissive practices were causing empathic changes, would this matter? On the one hand, our neural empathic responses don’t dictate our moral capacities – we don’t assume that emergency ward doctors ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Sex Source Type: blogs