Giving a helping hand: effects of joint attention on mental rotation of body parts

Research on joint attention has addressed both the effects of gaze following and the ability to share representations. It is largely unknown, however, whether sharing attention also affects the perceptual processing of jointly attended objects. This study tested whether attending to stimuli with another person from opposite perspectives induces a tendency to adopt an allocentric rather than an egocentric reference frame. Pairs of participants performed a handedness task while individually or jointly attending to rotated hand stimuli from opposite sides. Results revealed a significant flattening of the performance rotation curve when participants attended jointly (experiment 1). The effect of joint attention was robust to manipulations of social interaction (cooperation versus competition, experiment 2), but was modulated by the extent to which an allocentric reference frame was primed (experiment 3). Thus, attending to objects together from opposite perspectives makes people adopt an allocentric rather than the default egocentric reference frame.

Children's intergroup empathic processing: the roles of novel ingroup identification, situational distress, and social anxiety

Individuals often feel more empathy toward members of their own social groups than toward members of other social groups. However, individual factors contributing to this empathy bias remain largely unexplored among children. This study examined intergroup empathic processing among 94 children (mean age=8.74years, SD=1.76) assigned to novel color groups. After 1week in their group, children were interviewed to assess their ingroup identification and trait levels of social anxiety. Subsequently, a social threat was simulated, and children's feelings of situational distress and empathy bias for others who experienced the same threat were assessed. Findings indicated that, among children who reported more social anxiety and situational distress, those with a stronger ingroup identity displayed more empathy bias favoring their ingroup. Given that empathy is an important contributor to prosocial behavior, implications for children's intergroup relations are discussed.