Social Class and Social Pain: Target SES Biases Judgments of Pain and Support for White Target Individuals

Social pain, defined as distress caused by negative interpersonal experiences (e.g., ostracism, mistreatment), is detrimental to health. Yet, it is unclear how social class might shape judgments of the social pains of low-socioeconomic status (SES) and high-SES individuals. Five studies tested competing toughness and empathy predictions for SES's effect on social pain judgments. Consistent with an empathy account, in all studies (Ncumulative = 1,046), low-SES White targets were judged more sensitive to social pain than high-SES White targets. Further, empathy mediated these effects, such that participants felt greater empathy and expected more social pain for low-SES targets relative to high-SES targets. Social pain judgments also informed judgments of social support needs, as low-SES targets were presumed to need more coping resources to manage hurtful events than high-SES targets. The current findings provide initial evidence that empathic concern for low-SES White individuals sensitizes social pain judgments and increases expected support needs for lower class White individuals.

Contextual modulation of the red-attractiveness effect: Differences in affiliation and competitive settings

Color is not just about aesthetics but also communicates specific information and has important implications for psychological functioning. It has been shown that the color red enhances perceived attractiveness when evaluating the opposite sex, which we call the red-attractiveness effect. However, few studies have attached importance to the social context in which attractiveness ratings are made, which means that the red-attractiveness effect is rarely explained by analyzing the role of social context. We conducted two experiments to test the red-attractiveness effect in Chinese culture and the influence of context (affiliation or competitive) on the red-attractiveness effect. Experiment 1 (160 Chinese college students, 80 males) showed that the opposite-sex target in red, compared to white, was rated more attractive, and the red-attractiveness effect was applicable to Chinese culture. Experiment 2 (480 Chinese college students, 240 males) found that perceived attractiveness was strengthened in the affiliation context and weakened in the competitive context, that is, the main effect of context was significant. We did not find any significant effect of the color red in either context, that is, the color main effect was not significant. However, the results indicate that red can enhance perceived attractiveness when evaluating the opposite sex. This study demonstrates that the red attractiveness effect may exist in different cultural backgrounds and contexts.

Exploring Actual and Presumed Links between Accurately Inferring Contents of Other People's Minds and Prosocial Outcomes

The term "empathic accuracy" has been applied to people's ability to infer the contents of other people's minds-that is, other people's varying feelings and/or thoughts over the course of a social interaction. However, despite the ease of intuitively linking this skill to competence in helping professions such as counseling, the "empathic" prefix in its name may have contributed to overestimating its association with prosocial traits and behaviors. Accuracy in reading others' thoughts and feelings, like many other skills, can be used toward prosocial-but also malevolent or morally neutral-ends. Prosocial intentions can direct attention towards other people's thoughts and feelings, which may, in turn, increase accuracy in inferring those thoughts and feelings, but attention to others' thoughts and feelings does not necessarily heighten prosocial intentions, let alone outcomes.

The Association Between Emotional Expressions and Empathic Accuracy

Empathic accuracy, the ability to accurately represent and understand another's emotional state, is integral to socio-emotional functioning. It is also inherently an interpersonal process that requires active engagement of the emotional systems of both interaction partners. The emotional expressivity of the partner sharing their emotions restricts empathic accuracy and the perceiver's emotional expressivity might also affect empathic accuracy as they behaviorally simulate and thus share the emotions they see in the other's face. We explored a potential role of emotional expressivity in people's ability to understand another's emotions in a face-to-face dyadic interaction. Participants took turns sharing emotional experiences while their facial expressions were recorded. They then watched the recordings while continuously rating their own and their partner's affect at any given point during the recording. Empathic accuracy was indexed as the epoch by-epoch emotion change detection. We found that emotional expressivity of the listener, but not of the partner, was associated with increased empathic accuracy, even when controlling for partner's expressivity. Our findings highlight the active role the person empathizing takes in face-to-face emotional sharing.

Constructive conflict resolution requires tailored responsiveness to specific needs

Conflict affords an opportunity for relationship partners to demonstrate that they can be responsive to each other's needs. Understanding what constitutes responsiveness during conflict requires taking a dyadic perspective to identify how partners can tailor responses to address actors' specific needs. The present article reviews recent evidence showing that perceived responsiveness emerges from dyadic patterns involving how both partners and actors behave, and that partners' responsiveness during conflict involves different kinds of behaviors depending on actors' behavior and needs. These dyadic patterns emphasize that building tailored responsiveness to promote conflict resolution requires couples being able and willing to identify, communicate, and respond to each other's specific needs.

Self-esteem's impacts on intimacy-building: Pathways through self-disclosure and responsiveness

Building intimate relationships is rewarding but entails risking rejection. Trait self-esteem-a person's overall self-evaluation-has important implications for how people behave in socially risky situations. Integrating established models of responsiveness and intimacy with theory and research on self-esteem, we present a model that highlights the ways in which self-esteem impacts intimacy-building. A review of relevant research reveals that compared to people with high self-esteem, people with low self-esteem exhibit interpersonal perceptions and behaviors that can hinder intimacy development-for example, disclosing less openly, and eliciting and perceiving less responsiveness from others. We identify important directions for future research and consider methods for encouraging intimacy-promoting processes among people with low self-esteem.

How, when and why abilities go social: researching children's empathy and prosocial behaviors in context

Introduction

The current paper undertakes interdisciplinary research on empathy in children by combining insights and methodological tools from the fields of psychology, education and anthropology. The researchers aim to map how children's individual empathic abilities studied on a cognitive level do or do not coincide with their empathic expressions as part of group dynamics in daily life at the classroom level.

Method

We combined qualitative and quantitative methods within three different classrooms at three different schools. In total, 77 children aged between 9 to 12 years participated.

Results

The results indicate how such an interdisciplinary approach can provide unique insights. Through the integration of data from our different research tools we could reveal the interplay between different levels. More specifically this meant showing the possible influence of rule-based prosocial behaviors versus empathy based prosocial behaviors, the interplay between community empathic abilities and individual empathic abilities, and the role of peer culture and school culture.

Discussion

These insights can be seen as encouragement toward a research approach that extends beyond the single disciplinary field in social science research.

How We Understand Others: A Theory of How Social Perspective Taking Unfolds

Social perspective taking—the process through which perceivers discern the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a target—is foundational for navigating social interactions, building relationships, maintaining mental health, promoting well-being, and a wide array of other desired outcomes. Despite its importance, little is known about how discrete social perspective taking attempts unfold. We propose a theory that the social perspective taking process consists of up to four distinguishable phases: perception of the target, motivation to engage in social perspective taking, strategy selection, and evaluation of the attempt. Scholars have emphasized two proximal outcomes of this process—social perspective taking effort and accuracy. We review the literature in support of these phases, noting the relative maturity of each area of research. In doing so, we hope this theory provides a framework for contextualizing how existing studies relate to one another across different subfields of psychology, facilitates testable predictions, prioritizes future investigations, and guides applied research designed to improve real-world social perspective taking.

Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research

Helping behavior are actions aiming at assisting another individual in need or to relieve their distress. The occurrence of this behavior not only depends on automated physiological mechanisms, such as imitation or emotional contagion, that is, the individual's emotion and physiological state matching with others, but also needs motivation to sustain. From a comparative and developmental perspective, we discover that the motivation for helping behavior has a deep foundation both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. For example, empathic concern for others, relieving personal distress and the desire for social contact are universal motivations across rodents, non-human primates and human early childhoods. Therefore, a circle-layered model integrating evidences for motivation for helping behavior from rodent to human early childhood research is proposed: the inner circle contains the emotional-behavioral system and the outer circle contains the affective-cognitive system. The application of this model has significance for both behavioral neuroscience research and cultivating prosocial behavior in human society.

Strategic Regulation of Empathy

Empathy is an integral part of socioemotional well-being, but recent research has highlighted some of its downsides. Here we examine literature that establishes when, how much, and what aspects of empathy promote specific outcomes. After reviewing a theoretical framework that characterizes empathy as a suite of separable components, we examine evidence showing how dissociations of these components affect important socioemotional outcomes and describe emerging evidence suggesting that these components can be independently and deliberately regulated. Finally, we advocate for an approach to a multicomponent view of empathy that accounts for the interrelations among components. This perspective advances scientific conceptualization of empathy and offers suggestions for tailoring empathy to help people realize their social, emotional, and occupational goals.

The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing

Research indicates that core dimensions of psychological well-being can be cultivated through intentional mental training. Despite growing research in this area and an increasing number of interventions designed to improve psychological well-being, the field lacks a unifying framework that clarifies the dimensions of human flourishing that can be cultivated. Here, we integrate evidence from well-being research, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and clinical psychology to highlight four core dimensions of well-being-awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We discuss the importance of each dimension for psychological well-being, identify mechanisms that underlie their cultivation, and present evidence of their neural and psychological plasticity. This synthesis highlights key insights, as well as important gaps, in the scientific understanding of well-being and how it may be cultivated, thus highlighting future research directions.

Sleep, emotional supportiveness, and socially straining behavior: A multidimensional approach

OBJECTIVE

To determine the associations of emotional supportiveness toward others and engagement in socially straining (negative) behavior toward others across close relationships with multiple dimensions of sleep health.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional.

SETTING

Community sample from the Midlife in the United States study (MIDUS).

PARTICIPANTS

Four-hundred and thirty-five participants from the MIDUS II Biomarker Project aged 35-85.

MEASUREMENTS

Self-report assessments of being emotionally supportive and engaging in socially straining behavior toward friends, family, and romantic partners; self-report assessments of demographic and other psychological and health variables; 7 nights of wrist actigraphy and sleep diary.

RESULTS

Being emotionally supportive and engagement in socially straining behavior were associated with multiple dimensions of sleep health. The inclusion of demographic, health, and psychological covariates reduced but did not eliminate these associations. Based on analyses adjusting for these covariates, being more emotionally supportive toward close others was most robustly related to higher daytime alertness, and engaging in more socially straining behavior was most robustly related to less sleep regularity, quality, and efficiency.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings implicate sleep health as a substantive correlate of being emotionally supportive toward and imposing social strain on others. They show that both daytime and nighttime dimensions of sleep health are important for social functioning across close relationships and highlight the need to examine both positive and negative aspects of relationships in relation to sleep.

Overcoming Barriers to Physical Activity in People with Osteoarthritis: the Role of Empathic Accuracy in Couples' Planning Discussions

BACKGROUND

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common chronic joint disease with significant individual and public health consequences. Physical activity can reduce OA symptoms, but patients often fall below recommended levels. Social support from an intimate partner can help them become more active; however, some couples are better than others at enacting effective support. We examined the role of empathic accuracy (EA)-the ability to understand another person's thoughts and feelings-in couples' ability to identify strategies for overcoming barriers to increasing activity. We also examined whether EA was associated with changes in affect and with emotion regulation and communication skills.

METHOD

Forty-two insufficiently physically active participants with OA identified a barrier to becoming more active in a recorded discussion with their partner. Next, both rated self and partner thoughts and feelings during the discussion. Raters coded EA and whether discussions reached a solution. Affect and skills were assessed with validated questionnaires.

RESULTS

An actor-partner interdependence model found higher EA for participants in couples who reached a solution compared to those who did not reach a solution in the allotted time. Both partners' EA was associated with reduced negative affect in the other member of the couple. Unexpectedly, EA in people with OA was associated with reduced positive affect for their partners. EA was positively associated with one skill: emotional clarity.

CONCLUSION

Findings from this early-stage study suggest that EA can help couples manage health-related issues together. Emotional clarity emerged as a skill related to EA, suggesting avenues for additional research.

Perceiving Change in Responsiveness From the Relationship Partner’s Behaviors

This study examined whether, and how, romantic partners can accurately judge each other’s state level of responsiveness during a conflict discussion. Dating couples ( N = 84 pairs) engaged in a 10-min videotaped discussion about an unresolved conflict and then reviewed the recorded discussion. For each 30-s segment of interaction, participants reported their own responsiveness and judged their partner’s responsiveness. Trained coders also coded each participant’s displayed interpersonal behaviors (e.g., smile) and displayed responsiveness within each segment. The results showed that (a) the perceiving partner could somewhat accurately judge the target’s change in responsiveness (as indexed by the target’s self-report and observers’ ratings) during the discussion and (b) some behaviors (e.g., rejection of suggestions) seemed to be linked to agreements between the perceiver and the target in their assessments of responsiveness. The nature of accurate judgment of responsiveness (or the perceiver-target agreement in their assessments) will be discussed.

Communicating Commitment: A Relationship-Protection Account of Dyadic Displays on Social Media

People often make their romantic relationships visible to others through dyadic displays (DDs). Yet, their reasons for doing so are not well-understood. We proposed and tested a relationship-protection account of DD use, focusing on a social media environment. We predicted that relationship-protection motivation would predict DDs and that DDs would serve a relationship-protective function. In Study 1, a correlational study of romantically involved Facebook users, relationship-protection motivation positively predicted DD use on Facebook even when controlling for feelings of interconnectedness. Relationship-protection motivation also mediated effects of relationship satisfaction and commitment on DD use. In Study 2, participants perceived a target whose Facebook profile we experimentally manipulated to include DDs (vs. not) as more likely to be in a high-quality relationship and less receptive to romantic advances from others, with implications for participants' interest in affiliating with the target. Our findings support a relationship-protection account of DD use on social media.

What really helps? Divergent implications of talking to someone with an empathic mindset versus similar experience for shame and self-evaluation in the wake of an embarrassing event

What kinds of social interactions help individuals recover from an embarrassing experience? The present experiment examined the possibility that whereas individuals do not benefit from interacting with someone who is merely trying to understand and empathize, they do benefit from interacting with someone who has undergone the same experience and thus accurately understands their feelings. The 'target' member of 142 dyads performed an embarrassing task in front of the 'perceiver', after which they had a face-to-face discussion. Unbeknownst to targets, some perceivers did the task themselves beforehand, and some perceivers adopted an empathic mindset during the exchange. Perceivers' previous experience predicted improvements in targets' self-evaluations that were mediated by more accurate perceptions of targets' feelings. In contrast, perceivers' empathic mindset had no benefits for targets, alone or in concert with prior experience. The only apparent benefits of perceivers' empathic mindset were that perceivers felt more empathy and liking for targets (both undetected by targets), and felt viewed more favourably by targets (not corroborated by targets). These results suggest greater efficacy of perceiver experience over empathic concern in facilitating targets' recovery from embarrassing events. Perceivers' dispositional empathy, involving a different type of experience accumulated over time, also predicted benefits to targets.

Hand-in-Hand Combat: Affectionate Touch Promotes Relational Well-Being and Buffers Stress During Conflict

Relational conflict has a considerable impact on relational and personal well-being, but whether that impact is positive or negative depends on how the conflict is managed. Individuals struggle to have constructive conflicts that protect their relationships and avoid excess stress, which can lead to declines in relationship quality over time. The current set of experiments tested whether a brief touch intervention would promote relational well-being and prevent stress during couple conflict discussions. Results indicated that engaging in touch prior to and during conflict was effective to improve couple-members’ conflict behavior and to buffer stress in real (Experiment 1) and imagined (Experiments 2a and 2b) contexts. The results of these experiments suggest that touch may be a simple yet effective intervention for improving couple conflict discussions. In addition, we provide initial evidence that enhanced state security and cognitive interdependence serve as mechanisms underlying these effects.

Using experience sampling to examine links between compassion, eudaimonia, and pro-social behavior

OBJECTIVE

Compassion has been associated with eudaimonia and pro-social behavior, and it has been regarded as a virtue, both historically and cross-culturally. However, the psychological study of compassion has been limited to laboratory settings and/or standard survey assessments. Here, we use an experience sampling method (ESM) to compare naturalistic assessments of compassion with standard assessments, and to examine compassion, its variability, and associations with eudaimonia and pro-social behavior.

METHOD

Undergraduate students (n = 200) took a survey that included standard assessments of compassion and eudaimonia. Then, over 4 days, they were repeatedly asked about their level of compassion, eudaimonia, and situational factors within the moments of daily life. Finally, pro-social behavior was tested using the Dual Gamble Task and an opportunity to donate task winnings.

RESULTS

Analyses revealed within-person associations between ESM compassion and eudaimonia. ESM compassion also predicted eudaimonia at the next ESM time point. While not impervious to situational factors, considerable consistency was observed in ESM compassion in comparison with eudaimonia. Further, ESM compassion along with eudaimonia predicted donating behavior. Standard assessments did not.

CONCLUSIONS

Consistent with virtue theory, some individuals' reports were indicative of a probabilistic tendency toward compassion, and ESM compassion predicted ESM eudaimonia and pro-social behavior toward those in need.

Who Cares? Effects of Social Approach and Avoidance Motivation on Responsiveness to Others

Responsiveness to others (i.e., our understanding, validation, and support of important aspects of others) significantly contributes to positive social relationships. In the present research, we found evidence that responsiveness has motivational origins. In two experiments, participants who were approaching positive social outcomes had a higher level of responsiveness compared with participants who were avoiding negative social outcomes. A third experiment disentangled the roles of motivation and situation valence. Positive (compared with negative) social situations were associated with higher approach motivation, lower avoidance motivation, and a higher level of responsiveness. However, within a given situation, both approach and avoidance motivation were associated with a higher level of responsiveness. This association was even stronger in negative situations, suggesting that both approach and avoidance motivation might be ways of behaving responsively in potentially difficult social situations. The effects were independent of relationship closeness and partly weaker in older compared with younger adults.

A People-as-Means Approach to Interpersonal Relationships

Interpersonal relationships and goal pursuit are intimately interconnected. In the present article, we present a people-as-means perspective on relationships. According to this perspective, people serve as means to goals-helping other people to reach their goals in a variety of ways, such as by contributing their time; lending their knowledge, skills, and resources; and providing emotional support and encouragement. Because people serve as means to goals, we propose that considering relationship processes in terms of the principles of goal pursuit can provide novel and important insights into the ways that people think, feel, and behave in these interpersonal contexts. We describe the principles of means-goals relations, review evidence for each principle involving people as means, and discuss implications of our approach for relationship formation, maintenance, and dissolution.

Perceiving emotion in non-social targets: The effect of trait empathy on emotional contagion through art

This research examines the role of trait empathy in emotional contagion through non-social targets—art objects. Studies 1a and 1b showed that high- (compared to low-) empathy individuals are more likely to infer an artist’s emotions based on the emotional valence of the artwork and, as a result, are more likely to experience the respective emotions themselves. Studies 2a and 2b experimentally manipulated artists’ emotions via revealing details about their personal life. Study 3 experimentally induced positive vs. negative emotions in individuals who then wrote literary texts. These texts were shown to another sample of participants. High- (compared to low-) empathy participants were more like to accurately identify and take on the emotions ostensibly (Studies 2a and 2b) or actually (Study 3) experienced by the “artists”. High-empathy individuals’ enhanced sensitivity to others’ emotions is not restricted to social targets, such as faces, but extends to products of the human mind, such as objects of art.

Cruel to Be Kind: Factors Underlying Altruistic Efforts to Worsen Another Person’s Mood

When aiming to improve another person’s long-term well-being, people may choose to induce a negative emotion in that person in the short term. We labeled this form of agent-target interpersonal emotion regulation altruistic affect worsening and hypothesized that it may happen when three conditions are met: (a) The agent experiences empathic concern for the target of the affect-worsening process, (b) the negative emotion to be induced helps the target achieve a goal (e.g., anger for confrontation or fear for avoidance), and (c) there is no benefit for the agent. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating perspective-taking instructions and the goal to be achieved while participants ( N = 140) played a computer-based video game. Participants following other-oriented perspective-taking instructions, compared with those following objective perspective-taking instructions, decided to induce more anger in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve a confrontation goal and to induce more fear in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve an avoidance goal.

Empathy during consoling touch is modulated by mu-rhythm: An EEG study

The aim of the present study was to examine the mechanisms of empathy for pain that contribute to consoling touch, a distress-alleviating contact behavior carried out by an observer in response to the suffering of a target. We tested romantic couples in a paradigm that involves consoling touch and examined the attenuation of the mu/alpha rhythm (8-13Hz) in the consoling partner. During the task, the toucher either held the consoled partner's right hand (human touch) or held onto the armrest of the chair (non-human touch), while the consoled partner experienced inflicted pain (pain condition) or did not experience any pain (no-pain condition). In accordance with our hypotheses, the results revealed an interaction between touch and pain at in mu/alpha rhythms in all central sites (C3, C4, Cz). Specifically, we found that the toucher's mu suppression was higher in the consoling touch condition, i.e., while touching the partner who is in pain, compared to the three control conditions. Additionally, we found that in the consoling touch condition, mu suppression at electrode C4 of the toucher correlated with a measure of situational empathy. Our findings suggest that electrophysiological and behavioral measures that have been associated with empathy for pain are modulated during consoling touch.

Development of a Synchronization Coefficient for Biosocial Interactions in Groups and Teams

Body movements, autonomic arousal, and electroencephalograms (EEGs) of group members are often coordinated or synchronized with those of other group members. Linear and nonlinear measures of synchronization have been developed for pairs of individuals, but little work has been done on measures of synchronization for groups. We define a new synchronization coefficient, SE, for a group based on pairwise correlations in time series data and employing the notions of a group driver, who most drives the group’s responses, and empath, who is most driven by the group. SE is developed here in the context of emotional synchronization based on galvanic skin response time series. A simulation study explores its properties, the balance between strong versus weak autocorrelational effects, transfer, group size, and direct versus oscillatory functions. Distributions of SE are not affected by group size up to 16 members. Norms for interpreting the coefficient are presented along with directions for new research.

Artificial consciousness and the consciousness-attention dissociation

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems-these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness.