People will choose to avoid feeling empathy for others six times out of 10, a new study suggests. Empathy - imagining and understanding another person's situation and emotions - is important to our social functioning and decision-making. While some say that too much empathy can override rationality and lead us to act against our own interests, it's also an important component to bonding and to motivating us to help one another. But according to a new study from Pennsylvania State University, for most people, most of the time, acting empathetically just demands too much mental energy, even if the feelings we're absorbing are positive ones. Most of us will avoid empathizing with others 65 percent of the time, simply because we find it more mentally draining, according to a new Pennsylvania State University study Empathy is thought to be partially genetic, but it is certainly also a chosen response to others around us. In the 1990s, scientists discovered mirror neurons - brain cells that fire when we see and hear the behaviors of others. These neurons are thought to help our brains mimic one another's synaptic activity and therefore feel what one another are feeling (or at least make a closer approximation of the same feelings). Mirror neurons were discovered in monkey and some scientists have expressed doubt that mirror neurons exist in humans, but we do know that there are certain areas in our brains that are active and involved in empathy. And our level of empathy is to some extent encoded into our DNA. University of Cambridge research suggested that about a tenth of the variation in our levels of empathy is explained by genetics - and women, on average, are more biologically empathetic than men are. But there are plenty of cognitive choices and active motivations involved in our states of empathy too. For the rare few that are empathetic to a fault, empathy can fuel undo sadness and lead to decisions that will cause them emotional pain or even financial loss. For most, however, it just seems like more trouble than it's worth, according to the new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. To see how motivated to empathize people might be, researchers recruited over 1,200 people and presented them with a series of experiments involving two decks of cards. In all iterations of the experiment, participants were told that they could choose at-will from either deck at any time during the course of the trial. In one version, both decks contained images of downtrodden refugee children. In another, some images were of happy people and others of sad people. But in all instances, each deck came with different instructions. One deck was labelled 'feel' and the other, 'describe.' If they chose the 'describe' deck, participants had to simply write an objective statement about the person pictured on each card, detailing things like the person's age, gender and appearance. If they chose the 'feel' deck, participants were instructed to imagine what the person was feeling and 'empathically focus on the internal experiences and feelings of this person.' No matter if the faces were happy or sad, people steered clear of empathy that vast majority of the time. In fact, participants only chose the empathetic deck about 35 percent of the time. The other 65 percent of the time, participants would rather give a cold an unfeeling description of another person than try to feel what they appeared to be feeling, even if that feeling was joy. When tested on why they would be so empathy avoidant, respondents were quite clear that it just took too much brain power, and seemed like an easier task to fail. So, the researchers wondered if people might be more motivated to empathize if they weren't wary of their own performance when it came to feeling for others. They told half of the study participants that they were 'better' at empathy than the vast majority of other participants, and told the other half they'd performed in the bottom five percent on empathy. A dose of confidence persuaded participants that they weren't so bad at empathy after all, and they were more likely to choose cards from the empathy deck thereafter. Empathy is the heart and soul - or at least the psychology - of philanthropy, so the researchers saw in their findings an opportunity perhaps influence people to want to do more for one another. 'If we can shift people's motivations toward engaging in empathy, then that could be good news for society as a whole,' said lead study author and Penn State psychologist Dr C Daryl Cameron. And boosting their confidence and making empathy seem a little easier is certainly less complicated than convincing them they won't feel sad if they try to feel other peoples' sadness. Instead, 'it could encourage people to reach out to groups who need help, such as immigrants, refugees and the victims of natural disasters,' Dr Cameron said. All rights reserved for this news site dailymail and under his responsibility