Feeling better by abusing someone innocent, or thinking more about your own needs, is not compatible with feeling empathy. Does stress decrease empathy? Seemingly yes, in both mice and humans. A remarkable 2006 paper in Science by Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University showed the rudiments of mouse empathy—a mouse’s pain threshold is lowered when it is near another mouse in pain, but only if the other mouse is its cagemate.82
