The Affiliative Role of Empathy in Everyday Interpersonal Interactions

What empathizers do: Empathy and the selection of everyday interpersonal emotion regulation strategies

BACKGROUND

Empathic behavior is crucial in promoting positive social outcomes and strengthening interpersonal bonds. Research on how empathy modulates responses to others' emotions remains scarce yet is fundamental for elucidating mechanisms of impaired social functioning in psychopathology and its treatment.

METHODS

Two ecological momentary assessment studies (Ns = 125 and 204) investigated participants' empathy and usage of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in 5537 social interactions. We measured empathy, a multi-faceted construct, as dissected into its components of mentalizing and experience sharing in Study 1, while Study 2 additionally investigated empathic concern and personal distress.

RESULTS

Findings revealed that empathizers engage in significantly increased other-focused regulation, especially when feeling empathic concern. We also found differences in the strengths of the links between empathy and responses to others' emotions: When we mentalize, share others' emotions, or feel concerned, we choose more relationship-oriented strategies, including validation and soothing, and less cognitive reappraisal and avoidance to regulate others' emotions. In contrast, when personally distressed by others' emotions, we select more cognitive reappraisal and avoidance and less relationship-oriented strategies.

LIMITATIONS

Both studies relied on regulator reports.

CONCLUSIONS

Empathy facets distinctly shape our responses to others' emotions and can make us increasingly emotionally responsive and relationship-oriented. Understanding these dynamics can enhance the treatment of affective disorders characterized by deficits in social functioning.

Speech-based personality prediction using deep learning with acoustic and linguistic embeddings

This study introduces a novel method for predicting the Big Five personality traits through the analysis of speech samples, advancing the field of computational personality assessment. We collected data from 2045 participants who completed a self-reported Big Five personality questionnaire and provided free-form speech samples by introducing themselves without constraints on content. Using pre-trained convolutional neural networks and transformer-based models, we extracted embeddings representing both acoustic features (e.g., tone, pitch, rhythm) and linguistic content from the speech samples. These embeddings were combined and input into gradient boosted tree models to predict personality traits. Our results indicate that personality traits can be effectively predicted from speech, with correlation coefficients between predicted scores and self-reported scores ranging from 0.26 (extraversion) to 0.39 (neuroticism), and from 0.39 to 0.60 for disattenuated correlations. Intraclass correlations show moderate to high consistency in our model's predictions. This approach captures the subtle ways in which personality traits are expressed through both how people speak and what they say. Our findings underscore the potential of voice-based assessments as a complementary tool in psychological research, providing new insights into the connection between speech and personality.

Eating pigs, not Peppa Pig: The effect of identifiability on children's propensity to humanize, befriend, and consume edible animals

This research aimed to provide experimental evidence on whether identifying an edible animal by a name and specific preferences encourages children to perceive the animal as more similar to humans, increases their willingness to befriend the animal, and makes them less willing to consume it. In two pre-registered studies involving 208 preschool children, participants were presented with pictures of pigs (Study 1) and chickens (Study 2). In the identifiability condition, one animal was depicted with individual qualities such as a name and personal preferences, while in the non-identifiability condition, animals were portrayed with characteristics representative of the entire species. The children then rated their desire to befriend and consume the animal, while in Study 2, they also rated the animal's similarity to humans. The results revealed that animal identifiability led to higher perceived similarity to humans, increased the desire to befriend it, and reduced inclination to consume the animal. These findings highlight animal identifiability's powerful and robust effect on children's attitudes toward edible animals.

Using Immersive Environments in E-Mental Health Rehabilitation Programs Directed to Future Health Professionals to Promote Empathy and Health Literacy about Schizophrenia

Rehabilitation involves all types of patients, including people with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is considered a complex syndrome characterized in general by fundamental and characteristic distortions of thinking and perception. The quality of life of a person with schizophrenia can be compromised by difficulty in carrying out their daily tasks and by the social stigma of their condition. The importance of training and sensitizing students in rehabilitation areas to this type of problem to improve the rehabilitation processes in which they will participate as future professionals involves empathy and the ability to communicate with these populations. It is possible through virtual reality to create immersive environments to simulate some psychotic symptoms characteristic of people with schizophrenia, such as visual hallucinations and hearing voices. The aim of this study was to test the effect of exposure to experiences characteristic of schizophrenia through two different types of immersive environments, graphical computational virtual reality and 360° video, on students from areas of social rehabilitation regarding empathy, social distance, and attitudes towards people with schizophrenia. Although the results were positive for the three parameters under study, no significant differences were found for each of them between the environments to which the participants were exposed. This study concluded that the choice between the two types of immersive environments should be based on the project's objectives, the target audience's needs, and available resources, rather than the type of environment itself, as their impact was similar.

Visualizing Compassion: Episodic Simulation as Contemplative Practice

Contemplative interventions designed to cultivate compassion are receiving increasing empirical attention. Accumulating evidence suggests that these interventions bolster prosocial motivation and warmth towards others. Less is known about how these practices impact compassion in everyday life. Here we consider one mechanistic pathway through which compassion practices may impact perception and action in the world: simulation. Evidence suggests that vividly imagining a situation simulates that experience in the brain as if it were, to a degree, actually happening. Thus, we hypothesize that simulation during imagery-based contemplative practices can construct sensorimotor patterns in the brain that prime an individual to act compassionately in the world. We first present evidence across multiple literatures in Psychology that motivates this hypothesis, including the neuroscience of mental imagery and the emerging literature on prosocial episodic simulation. Then, we examine the specific contemplative practices in compassion-based interventions that may construct such simulations. We conclude with future directions for investigating how compassion-based interventions may shape prosocial perception and action in everyday life.

Associations of state and trait empathy with daily alcohol use

BACKGROUND

A growing literature documents associations between lower trait empathy and heavier alcohol use and more alcohol problems in adolescent and young adult samples. Prior work linking empathy and alcohol use/problems in these populations has thus far focused on trait rather than state empathy, and researchers often do not differentiate between cognitive and affective empathy. Further, no prior studies have examined associations between daily fluctuations in state empathy and alcohol use. The goal of the current study is to advance knowledge about the associations between state (vs. trait) and cognitive (vs. affective) empathy and alcohol use.

METHODS

Adult alcohol drinkers (n = 492; Mage = 22.89, SD = 5.53; 53.70% female) participated in ecological momentary assessment studies for 7 to 10 days (day n = 4683). Multilevel hurdle models were used to investigate associations between day-level state empathy and daily alcohol use at the within-person level, and associations between individual differences in trait empathy and alcohol use across days at the between-person level.

RESULTS

Higher day-level state affective empathy was not associated with the likelihood of drinking on a particular day, but it was significantly associated with a greater number of drinks consumed on alcohol-consuming days, with the latter associations remaining after controlling for day-level positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). No associations were found for day-level state cognitive empathy, or trait affective or cognitive empathy.

CONCLUSIONS

On drinking days, when individuals reported more affective empathy than is typical for them, they were more likely to consume a greater number of alcoholic drinks, results that remained when controlling for levels of PA and NA. Daily shifts in affective empathy may be important to consider in efforts to understand alcohol use.

Just world beliefs and altruistic behaviors of college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: The mediating role of empathy

Altruistic behavior is of great significance for individual happiness and social development. The study has focused on the influence of two factors at the individual level on college students' altruistic behavior. The self-report questionnaires of 2,272 college students on belief in a just world, empathy and altruistic behavior were investigated. The results of the study found that: 1) Just-world belief and empathy both positively predicted altruistic behavior; 2) Empathy influenced altruistic behavior through just-world belief. And from the perspective of motivation theory, it explains that individuals affirm that altruistic behavior will bring spiritual pleasure, so individuals will maintain the consistency of their own internal factors to promote altruistic behavior.This study enriches the research value of altruistic behavior at the individual level and provides an empirical basis for the cultivation of altruistic behavior at the individual level.

Can Translational Social Neuroscience Research Offer Insights to Mitigate Structural Racism in the United States?

Social isolation and conflict due to structural racism may result in human suffering and loneliness across the life span. Given the rising prevalence of these problems in the United States, combined with disruptions experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the neurobiology of affiliative behaviors may offer practical solutions to the pressing challenges associated with structural racism. Controlled experiments across species demonstrate that social connections are critical to survival, although strengthening individual resilience is insufficient to address the magnitude and impact of structural racism. In contrast, the multilevel construct of social resilience, defined by the power of groups to cultivate, engage in, and sustain positive relationships that endure and recuperate from social adversities, offers unique insights that may have greater impact, reach, and durability than individual-level interventions. Here, we review putative social resilience-enhancing interventions and, when available, their biological mediators, with the hope to stimulate discovery of novel approaches to mitigate structural racism. We first explore the social neuroscience principles underlying psychotherapy and other psychiatric interventions. Then, we explore translational efforts across species to tailor treatments that increase social resilience, with context and cultural sensitivity in mind. Finally, we conclude with some practical future directions for understudied areas that may be essential for progress in biological psychiatry, including ethical ways to increase representation in research and developing social paradigms that inform dynamics toward or away from socially resilient outcomes.

Psychometric Evaluation of a Big Five Personality State Scale for Intensive Longitudinal Studies

Despite enthusiasm for using intensive longitudinal designs to measure day-to-day manifestations of personality underlying differences between people, the validity of personality state scales has yet to be established. In this study, we evaluated the psychometrics of 20-item and 10-item daily, Big Five personality state scales in three independent samples (N = 1,041). We used multilevel models to separately examine the validity of the scales for assessing personality variation at the between- and within-person levels. Results showed that a five-factor structure at both levels fits the data well, the scales had good convergent and discriminative associations with external variables, and personality states captured similar nomological nets as established global, self-report personality inventories. Limitations of the scales were identified (e.g., low reliability, low correlations with external criterion) that point to a need for more, systematic psychometric work. Our findings provide initial support for the use of personality state scales in intensive longitudinal designs to study between-person traits, within-person processes, and their interrelationship.

Antagonism in Daily Life: An Exploratory Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

Interpersonal Antagonism is one of the major domains of maladaptive personality. Structural-based investigations of Antagonism have generally been consistent in highlighting the more specific antagonistic traits (e.g., manipulativeness, callousness) that underlie the broader domain. However, less work has attempted to merge structural and functional accounts of Antagonism to assess how specific antagonistic traits manifest in daily life. This exploratory study examined how Antagonism and its specific features relate to outcomes assessed using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods. Across four independent EMA samples (N range=297-396; total N = 1,365; observations per outcome=5,419-17,735), we investigated how antagonistic traits related to theoretically relevant, EMA-based outcomes (e.g., affect, empathy, coldness-warmth in interpersonal interactions). Results showed robust findings across samples and operationalizations of Antagonism (e.g., Antagonism's relation with negative affect), along with more mixed results (e.g., Antagonism's relation with different measures of empathy). We discuss future research directions for structural and functional accounts of Antagonism.