Sympathetic joy: What Is It, and How Can You Feel More of It?
The answer is:
How we can be happy with other people and why that's good for us is what science is trying to find out about us.
Our cats are in love with my partner. This is how it works: Most of the time, when cats are given two laps, they'll choose hers. During the day, Leif nurses on her shoulder with his little paws making little snacks.
The answer is no. Nope. A woman I love is being loved by cats I love.
Researchers have a name for this feeling, and it comes from the Buddhist ethic of Mudit. Scientists call this feeling sympathetic joy, which is also called appreciative joy or empathic joy. It can also be called vicarious reward or positive empathy. People call it a lot of things, but no matter what, it's the pure happiness we feel when someone else does well.
That's great, but there are times when it can be hard to feel happy for someone else. Especially if we're afraid or unhappy with our own lives. Fear, jealousy, envy, stress, and resentment are just a few of the unpleasant emotions that can make it hard to share in other people's happiness.
There will still be times when we want that warm, fluffy cat to be on our laps instead of someone else's. We might also be depressed about why the cat (or our boss, or the world) doesn't like us as much.
In the future, research will be able to explain why sympathetic joy happens and when it doesn't. Because sympathetic joy is good for us and good for the people we care about. We also learn how to cultivate more of it in our lives. Here's a list of what the research so far says.
As a result of being happy for someone else, you will get a lot
In the beginning, it may seem noble to be happy for someone else. But what's in it for you?
The person who can connect with another person's happiness has a lot to gain. Many studies have shown that when we see someone else having a good time, the brain's reward system gets excited. More than just feeling good, being able to feel other people's happiness has been linked to a better life and more happiness in the long run.
More sympathetic joy could also make us a more compassionate group of people. Study after study has found a connection between sympathetic joy and our desire to help other people, as well as the likelihood that we'll do it.
Sympathy also seems to lead to better relationships with other people. If you want your relationship to be better, you should look for a partner who can understand both your negative and positive emotions. This is what a paper published in 2018 found.
It's called compersion by people who have multiple romantic relationships with the permission of everyone involved. It's when your partner has fun or falls in love with someone else that makes you happy, and you feel good about it, too. In 2013, a study of just over 300 polyamorous people found that the more they felt this kind of "sympathetic joy," the more satisfied they were with their relationships. The same thing happened in two other studies last year, one of which looked at 5,000 people.
People who are happy make you happy, too.
It may also be better for your job if you are happy for someone else. One 2016 study looked at the level of sympathetic joy in more than 1,200 mostly white teachers who mostly taught students of color. Teachers who were more likely to enjoy their students' good times felt more connected to them, and their students did better in school. One more study looked at teachers and people who work on the front lines of health care. People who felt more sympathetic joy on the job had less burnout and were happier at work.
This is a good time to say that there are a lot of questions about sympathetic joy that haven't been solved. It was mostly done with young people in China or the United States. So, what does sympathetic joy look like in other parts of the world, as well? Is it shaped by what people do? Is there a rise and fall in the amount of sympathetic joy we feel as we grow up?
The answers to these questions may not be clear yet. Neuroscience, on the other hand, is beginning to figure out how sympathetic joy moves through our bodies.
In your brain, what kind of joy looks like.
During the last few years, scientists have tried to figure out if sympathetic joy looks different from other kinds of connections in the brain, like when we become sad when other people are hurt. It's clear now why sympathetic joy is so powerful.
In the beginning, we'll look at how the two pieces fit together. Researchers have found that when we empathize with other people's good and bad feelings, we activate parts of our brains that help us figure out how important our own and other people's feelings are. The nucleus accumbens (which signals pleasure) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which tells us we're happy) both work when we have good feelings and when we see good feelings in other people (which supports learning to like whatever or whoever brings that pleasure).
So, what makes sympathetic joy different in the brain? During the last few years, a number of studies have shed more light on how it is different from other types of resonance. It seems to come down to a question of emphasis, though.
They put people in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines while they watched an episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." They were trying to figure out how their brains worked when they saw happy and sad things on the TV show, so they put them in the machines.
However, there were differences in how the brain responded to positive and negative events on the screen. Empathy joy was linked to frontostriatal circuitry more than anger. This neural pathway is thought to start in the prefrontal cortex, and it is thought to help with things like controlling emotions, planning, and making decisions. Seeing bad things made the insula, a part of the brain that tells us about things like pain or how we feel right now, respond more.
That's what a 2021 study found, too. It found that while all kinds of empathy activate frontostriatal circuitry, sympathetic joy caused more activation, which "engaged a much broader network of prefrontal subregions than empathy for negative emotion," the researchers write.
What stops us from having a good time?
These findings are important to you and me, so why do they matter? It suggests that when someone is in trouble, we tend to act more quickly and think about their pain and even feel it ourselves. Decisions about what is important and how to interpret that information and how to act in the situation can be part of the process of sympathetic joy. In other words, sympathetic joy may have a lot more moving parts than you think.
Another thing can also stop it from moving forward, like anger or sadness. It's sometimes our fears that get in the way of our natural desire to be sympathetically happy. If a friend loses their job and you see them in pain, it's very likely that you'll feel genuine concern, which would start this brain circuitry. But if you don't like your job and your friend gets a better one than you, it's possible that those same parts of your brain won't be happy for them.
There is nothing wrong with feeling jealous on their behalf instead of happy for them. It's a common thing to do. Indeed, a study published this year by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that social comparisons with people who we thought were doing better than us were more likely to make us jealous and sad than make us feel happy. There have been a lot of studies that show that anxiety makes people less empathetic, and it makes sense to think that feeling anxious might make you less able to feel sympathetic joy.
People who are different from you can also make it hard to feel empathy for them, especially if the difference is about status and power. Empathy for people who are lower down the ladder tends to drop as people get more money, for example. In many, many studies, it has been found that we have a hard time feeling empathy for people from outside groups, whether they are racial, national, or something else. When it comes to sympathetic joy for people in other groups, there doesn't seem to be much research on it. However, the studies that have been done so far show that human differences would make it more difficult to feel that way.
Simultaneous joy: How to grow it
These and more are some of the reasons why it can be hard to feel happy for someone else. When my partner has a cat purring on his or her lap, I'm not always happy to see them. Sometimes I wonder: Why do they like her so much when I'm the one who feeds them? It's not fair now that I think about it.
Make sure that you don't let self-pity, jealousy, or envy take away your sympathetic joy. You can get it back with a little thought and effort. There is good news: Sympathetic joy is like a muscle that you can build up with some mental work, just like any other feeling or behavior that you want to improve. You can start by taking our new quiz that measures your sympathetic joy. The results won't be scientific, but they are based on a scale that has been used mostly in China.
The quiz might help you think about how good you are at feeling good with other people when they have a good experience, and it will give you a place to start when you want to improve that ability. This will include learning how to better deal with your own stress, reducing the urge to compare yourself to other people, and strengthening your sense of common humanity with other people.
Here are some exercises that researchers suggest to open the door to positive empathy. Most of them come from other articles in the Greater Good or from our website of science-tested practices, Greater Good in Action, but some are new.
Watch a game without taking sides. Kelly McGonigal wrote about this idea for Greater Good in 2017. It's important to "celebrate the happiness and success of the winner," she says. Make sure you're happy for them, and watch how they celebrate with other people. If you can, try to think about how the person you care about is sharing the moment with their friends, family, coaches, or teammates.
Capitalize on good things that happen. Depending on how we respond when people close to us tell us about good things that have happened to them, these moments can make us feel a lot closer to each other. This activity gives advice on how to respond in a way that has been shown to make both people in the relationship feel better and make them feel closer and happier with each other.
Try to make people less angry. Life is full of things that remind us of what we don't have. Juliana Breines, a psychologist, wrote an article for Greater Good in 2013 that talked about how to lessen your desire for what other people have. She suggested five steps, including naming your envy and cultivating gratitude.
Write a letter that is kind to yourself. A self-compassionate way to write can help you change your self-critical voice for one that is more compassionate. One that comforts and reassures you rather than criticizing you for your flaws will help you. In the first place, think of something about yourself that makes you feel ashamed. Write down how you feel. It might help if you show compassion, understanding, and acceptance for the part of yourself that you don't like at first, Compassion for yourself can help you start to enjoy the good things that happen in the lives of other people.
Try meditating with loving-kindness. Part of what makes this meditation good for you is that it makes you feel more connected to other people, whether they are your friends, family, or even strangers. The more people meditate on loving-kindness, the more positive they become about others, and the more satisfying their social interactions and close relationships become. Practicing loving-kindness meditation can also help you put less of your attention on yourself. This, in turn, can help you share in the happiness of other people.
Try meditating on the fact that we are all the same. It means acknowledging that we are all humans, and that we have some of the same problems. We all go through things that make us sad, stressed, and hurt. We all want to be loved and be happy. Listen to this guided meditation by Sean Fargo, a former Buddhist monk who is now a teacher. It will help you improve your relationship with yourself as well as build compassion for other people.
Try to look someone in the eye. If you deliberately look at another person when they share good news, it can make you feel more happy for them. This was found in a study by the journal NeuroImage in 2021. This method isn't a sure thing. Cultural differences and neurodiversity can change the meaning and appropriateness of eye contact. That's why it takes thought, effort, and good judgment to do well. In other words, even though eye contact can be a little risky at times, the reward could be a greater sense of connection and happiness.
Let someone else do something nice for you, then. A new one from Kelly McGonigal is on the way. "This might not seem like a practice of empathic joy, but when you start to pay attention to how happy it makes the other person, it becomes one," she says. In some cases, people are afraid of being a burden to others, or they don't want to be kind.
