Now comes word from the University of California, Berkeley, a new study has confirmed that the richer you are the less compassionate you are In a study just published in the journal Emotion, psychologist Jennifer Stellar sought to determine the empathic  capacities of a group of 300 college students, who had been hand-selected for maximum economic diversity. As a rule, college students have just one income level: poor. Stellar thus chose her subjects based on the income of the people who respond to the requests and write the checks: the parents. In the first of three experiments, she had 148 of her subjects fill out reports how often they experience emotions such as joy, love, compassion and horror. She also had them agree or disagree with statements like "I often notice people who need help." When the numbers on these lists were processed, Stellar found no meaningful personality differences among the students that could be attributable to income except one: across the board, the lower the subjects' family income, the higher their score on compassion. The second study involved 64 subjects who watched two videos -- an emotionally neutral instructional video on construction techniques, and a far more charged one that involved real families coping with a cancer-stricken child. Again, the subjects filled out emotional lists and again they scored similarly. But the lower-income volunteers continued to come out higher on the compassion-and-empathy scale. During this study, Stellar also used heartbeat monitors to determine their physical reactions to the two videos. There was, not surprisingly, no difference in heart rate when the instructional video was playing, but when the cancer stories began, the heartbeats of the lower-income volunteers slowed noticeably -- a counterintuitive  sign of caring. An immediate threat to ourselves or another causes heart rate to jump, the better to snap into action to respond to the danger. An emotional crisis can have the opposite physical effect on observers -- helping them settle down to provide the quieter attention that simply listening and comforting requires. In the final part of the study, 106 of the participants were paired off and told to interview each other as if they were applying for a position as lab manager. So that the subjects would have real skin in the game, the ones who performed best in the interviews -- as judged by Stellar-- would win a cash prize. All of the subjects reported feeling the same levels of stress or anxiety when they were being interviewed, but only the lower-income subjects were reliably able to detect the same feelings in their partner when the roles were reversed. So does this mean the rich really can't feel the poor? A low score on the compassion scale doesn't mean a lack of capacity for the feeling, Stellar argues. It may just mean a lack of experience observing -- and tending to -- the hardship others. Perhaps that helps explain why so many wealthy college kids find their way into the Peace Corps and other volunteer groups. What can be the best title of the text?
Without money? That's not a big deal Hate money? Then try to be low-income Got money? Then you might lack sympathy Too much money? Come to experience hardships