From the attacks in the centre of Paris until the blasts of Brusselss airport, a

lot of people showed their emotions and feelings on the net. Facebook,
tweeter,Also the news.and I felt anger, sadness and a big feeling of
injustice, either.
23th of March, that day, I was reading a Newspaper, first page, had big
headlines about terrorist attacks, what happened, who died, who was
injured, the stories of these persons. I was so interested about the lives of
all of them. What they had in common with me?
More or less, a week later, there was other headline in the newspaper, about
the killing of 147 Universitys students in Kenya. I could see a dreadful
picture, but I was not impacted, why not? At the end, all these attacks and
killings were signed by the same killer.
I felt inequity, but my emotions were different from Europes terrorist
attacks. I didnt pay so much attention at that fact. I was not worried about
who were the people injured or death, or about their lives.
Few days later, trying to found some information about that success, I came
across to another article titled I feel your pain, unless youre from a
different race.
As a psychologist, I questioned why empathy was not working at the same
level for all these catastrophic events, so I tried to explore a little bit more
about these phenomena.
When you see or imagine someone else in pain, you brain experiences a
twinge (spams) of pain as well. But this not happens when race and bias do
they role.
A psychological study shows this fact. We are less emphatic with people
from other races. Our brain responds to racial differences with less neuronal
activity in a brain region called medial prefrontal cortex. Theres a possible
explanation about that, it could be evolutionary sense. In case of war or
even a competition it could be adaptive to feel less proximity and empathy
for people we consider our opponents.
One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic. This can be called statistic
insensibility. When we talk about a number, without any name, no stories,
its an abstract number. But, personification of the tragedy helps to feel
more close to the pain of others.
And the last, we focus our thinks and emotions because if we feel pain for
everything and everyone of the persons, animals and things, we could not
afford all this feelings of anger, sadness, injustice, so, our brain, just
connect with those that are closer to us or we feel similarity.
Probably, there are more points to explain this kind of empathy, but I hope
that these can help you to understand why we feel how we feel.

To sum up, the researchers conclude that how much were able to feel the
pain of others and how much were willing to help them depends on how
similar we are to them and how much we identify with them.