What Is Instinctive Empathy?

The history of mankind saw the existence of instinctive empathy which is crucial to reinforce the survival of our ancestors, allowing them to be receptive and responsive towards the needs of their progeny. Since then, this survival instinct has gradually evolved as a socially expected behaviour, attitude and personality trait, as someone devoid of it will pass off as being rude or even mentally ill (Waal, 2013). Advancement in neuroscience research has attributed the physiological basis of empathy to the mirror-neuron mechanism in our brain, in which a specific type of brain cell, called mirror neurons are activated when we observe another person’s emotions, helping us to feel the same way, thus fostering a form of connection which can be comforting

Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself, believe” ("60 Powerful Winston Churchill Quotes", 2017). I realised this quote to be most apt to the art of performing, as it is important for performers to empathise with their character role before they can believably vivify the persona and convince the audience as well. In an interview, Academy Award winning actress Natalie Portman said, “An actor’s job is empathy” as acting only involve 30% of the work, the remaining relies on the actor breathing in life into the character he assumes and forgetting his “real person” and thinking only about the character’s emotions, beliefs, motivations and desire (Torre, 2012). Thus, this amplifies how crucial empathy has in projecting the actor into his assumed role, allowing him to portray the full extent of the feelings of the character he plays, instead of just blindly follow the words and cues of the script as they only contribute to the external portrayal of the character but not the internal life that makes the character truly alive (Torre, 2012; Ligthelm, n.d.). For example, Natalie Portman has managed to strip herself off her “sweet girl” persona to fully embrace the state of emotions and mind of a ballerina with Schizophrenia (James, 2010). Even though performance relies highly on the empathy of the performer, yet it also evokes and utilises the empathy of the audience which allows the engagement of the performers in creating a near-hypnotic state among the spectators which is described by George Gunkel (1963), an early researcher on empathy, as being a “theatrical illusion”. This elucidated how empathic identification in performance originates from not only the performers but the audience as well, even though the performers indubitably must lull themselves into believing these emotions are