Intergroup Conflicts: How They Affect A Teenager's Capacity To Feel Empathy

Hardened by the effects of armed strife to their families and community, teenagers develop a stereotypical perspective of their lifelong adversaries. For one, not everyone is evil, and what if, just like them, adolescents have also been influenced by the experiences and stories being told against rival nations?

According to ars TECHNICA, the constant exposure to high-stress conflict situations may have an outsized influence on developing adolescent brains. A recent study published in PNAS found that adolescents who grew up in protracted civil conflicts end up more empathetic and cognitively attuned to the people within their own group and less sensitive to the pain felt by others.

In a study of 85 people either identifying themselves has Jewish or Arabs, the subjects showed significant brain activation for the in-group youth shown in the photographs experiencing pain. Whereas, no brain activity was recorded for out-group adolescents on agonizing circumstances. The experiment conducted via MEG (magnetoencephalography) also showed almost identical outcomes to illustrations to other in-group members. During social interactions to non-group youth, moderate hostility with little compromise was depicted.

Robert Ricigliano, a mediation expert at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee tells Nature that one of the key lessons of the systems mindset is to stop approaching conflicts as problems that need to be fixed and instead think of them as systems with underlying dynamics that need to shift. The important thing is that violence declines through time. As it has taken numerous years for the feud to escalate, so it will take a long span of time for the fuel of rage to dissipate.

The key to such hostility is intervention. Researchers from the University of Zurich found that surprisingly positive experiences with people from another group trigger a learning effect in the brain, which increases empathy, relates PyschCentral. The more meaningful the experience, the better the effect it produces among the youngsters, whether it may be direct perception through positive communication or towards the other members of the out-group.

As people say, the youth are tomorrow's hope but how can these teenagers foster compassion, peace and unity if they are being taught otherwise, or sadly, not taught at all? With enough perseverance, the emphatic gap will narrow and bridges of love for one another will slowly but surely be built.