Seeing isn't believing? Mixed effects of a perspective-getting intervention to improve mentoring relationships for science doctoral students

Science doctoral students can experience negative interactions with faculty mentors and internalize these experiences, potentially leading to self-blame and undermining their research self-efficacy. Helping students perceive these interactions adaptively may protect their research self-efficacy and maintain functional mentoring relationships. We conducted a pre-registered, longitudinal field experiment of a novel perspective-getting intervention combined with attribution retraining to help students avoid self-blame and preserve research self-efficacy. Science doctoral students ( n = 155) were randomly assigned to read about mentor perspectives on negative interactions (i.e., Perspective-getting Condition) or about mentoring with no mentor perspective (i.e., control condition). Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no main effects of the intervention on students' self-blame or research self-efficacy. However, for students with lower pre-intervention mentorship relationship satisfaction, the intervention preserved research self-efficacy six months later. This study provides evidence that perspective getting may be protective for students who are most in need of relationship intervention.

Educational Relevance and Implications Statement

Effective mentoring relationships are fundamental for promoting the success of doctoral students in science, yet not all mentoring relationships are high quality. This study assessed the effectiveness of a brief perspective-getting intervention (where students are given the perspective of what it is like to be a research mentor) that aimed to protect science doctoral students from blaming themselves for negative interactions with faculty mentors and maintain their research self-efficacy. Results showed that on average across all students, the intervention did not affect students' self-blame for negative interactions or their research self-efficacy. However, the intervention did help students with less satisfying mentoring relationships maintain their self-efficacy. Thus, perspective-getting shows some promise for protecting science doctoral students from harm that can be caused by negative interactions with faculty mentors.

Face and context integration in emotion inference is limited and variable across categories and individuals

The ability to make nuanced inferences about other people's emotional states is central to social functioning. While emotion inferences can be sensitive to both facial movements and the situational context that they occur in, relatively little is understood about when these two sources of information are integrated across emotion categories and individuals. In a series of studies, we use one archival and five empirical datasets to demonstrate that people could be integrating, but that emotion inferences are just as well (and sometimes better) captured by knowledge of the situation alone, while isolated facial cues are insufficient. Further, people integrate facial cues more for categories for which they most frequently encounter facial expressions in everyday life (e.g., happiness). People are also moderately stable over time in their reliance on situational cues and integration of cues and those who reliably utilize situation cues more also have better situated emotion knowledge. These findings underscore the importance of studying variability in reliance on and integration of cues.

The Misprediction of Helpers in Comforting Situations and Its Mechanism

Background

As a prosocial behavior, comforting behavior can prompt individuals to provide emotional support to others. After the comforting behavior, the comforter may estimate the consoled individual's reaction, and this prediction will influence their future behavior. According to social cognition theory, competence dominates self-cognition, and warmth dominates the cognition of others, which impacts the prediction accuracy of comforters. They may overestimate the negative reaction of the consoled. This misprediction has also been confirmed for other prosocial behaviors, such as helping behavior and sharing behavior.

Methods

In this study, 337 Chinese college students were investigated by convenience sampling. Through one real-world experiment and three imaginary-situation experiments, this study explored the phenomenon, effects and causes of the comforter's misprediction in the comfort condition.

Results

SPSS 23.0 and statistical methods such as analysis of variance, an independent sample t-test and an intermediary test were used. The comforters overestimated the negative responses and underestimated the positive responses of the recipients, and the intensity of this misprediction increased in the comfort failure condition. The comforters' misprediction arose because the recipients were more concerned with the warmth dimension of the comforters, whereas the comforters were more inclined to focus on their own competence dimension.

Conclusion

The comforter's prediction of the consoled's response was more negative than the actual situation, and this misprediction was more obvious when the consolation failed, which can be explained by social cognition theory. This study provides an understanding of how to relieve the psychological stress of comforters.

The Power of Empathy: Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Perspective-Focused Interventions on Support for Prison Reform

As a result of COVID-19, individuals have experienced situations that may help them relate to others, including more limited ability to interact with their environment. Thus, this survey experiment (N = 2,229) tests whether perspective-focused interventions can help increase support for prison reform. Findings suggest that perspective-getting (providing the perspective of an incarcerated individual via a narrative description of dealing with confinement) increased self-reported support for prison reform initiatives, compared with information only. In addition, a perspective-taking prompt-nudging participants to put themselves in the shoes of the incarcerated individual when reading their narrative-may help boost intention to take action in support of prison reform. Future avenues for research and implications are discussed.

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.

Challenges of measuring empathic accuracy: A mentalizing versus experience-sharing paradigm

Empathic accuracy, the ability to accurately infer the mental states of others, is essential to successful interpersonal relationships. Perceivers can interpret targets' emotional experiences by decoding facial and voice cues (mentalizing) or by using their own feelings as referents (experience-sharing). We examined the relative efficacy of these processes via a replication and extension of Zhou et al. (Psychol Sci., 28, 2017, 482) who found experience-sharing to be more successful but undervalued. Participants estimated targets' emotional ratings in response to positive, neutral and negative images in mentalizing or experience-sharing conditions. Our analysis of absolute magnitudes of error showed similar levels of accuracy across process conditions (a non-replication of Zhou et al.); however, our exploratory analysis of directional variation across valence using raw scores revealed a pattern of conservative estimates for affective stimuli, which was accentuated in the mentalizing condition. Thus, our exploratory analysis lends conceptual support to Zhou et al.'s finding that experience-sharing represents the more successful process, and we replicated their finding that it was nevertheless undervalued. Extending Zhou et al., we also found that empathic accuracy was predicted by individual differences in fiction-exposure. Future research may further examine the impact of individual differences and stimulus properties in the employment of empathic inferencing strategies.

Adversity-based identities drive social change

Adversity experiences have been linked to empathy and prosocial behavior. Here, we argue for unique additional advantages of such experiences, namely, the identity memberships that arise and their links to collective action and harmonious intergroup relations. We discuss challenges and future directions for the study of adversity as a source of identity.

Does the body talk to the body? The relationship between different body representations while observing others' body parts

The way human bodies are represented is central in everyday activities. The cognitive system must combine internal, visceral, and somatosensory, signals to external, visually driven information generated from the spatial placement of others’ bodies and the own body in the space. However, how different body representations covertly interact among them when observing human body parts is still unclear. Therefore, we investigated the implicit processing of body parts by manipulating either the body part stimuli’ posture (conditions a and b) or the participants’ response body posture (conditions c, d, and e) in healthy participants (N = 70) using a spatial compatibility task called Sidedness task. The task requires participants to judge the colour of a circle superimposed on a task‐irrelevant body part picture. Responses are facilitated when the spatial side of the responding hand corresponds to the spatial code generated by the hand stimulus's position with respect to a body of reference. Results showed that the observation of the task‐irrelevant body parts oriented participants’ attention and facilitated responses that were spatial compatible with the spatial position such body parts have within a configural representation of the body structure (i.e., Body Structural Representation) in all the five experimental conditions. Notably, the body part stimuli were mentally attached to the body according to the most comfortable and less awkward postures, following the anatomo‐physiological constraints. Moreover, the pattern of the results was not influenced by manipulating the participants’ response postures, suggesting that the automatic and implicit coding of the body part stimuli does not rely on proprioceptive information about one's body (i.e., Body Schema). We propose that the human body's morphometry knowledge is enriched by biomechanical and anatomo‐physiological information about the real body movement possibilities. Moreover, we discuss the importance of the automatic orienting of attention based on the sidedness within the context of imitational learning.

The errors of experts: When expertise hinders effective provision and seeking of advice and feedback

To be effective, experts need to simultaneously develop others (i.e. provide advice and feedback to novices) and advance their own learning (i.e. seek and incorporate advice and feedback from others). However, expertise, and the state of efficacy associated with it, can inhibit experts from engaging in these activities or doing so effectively. We discuss when and why cognitive entrenchment and reduced perspective taking lead experts to hold misperceptions about others. We then explain how these misperceptions lead experts to provide less helpful advice and feedback to novices and to be less likely to seek and take input from others. We offer insights to overcome these barriers, enhancing experts' ability to provide and propensity to seek advice and feedback.

Nuancing Perspective

Abstract. Two experiments manipulated participants’ familiarity with another person and examined their performance in future understanding of that person’s emotions. To gain familiarity, participants watched several videos of the target sharing experiences and rated her emotions. In the Feedback condition, perceivers learned about the actual emotions the target felt. In the Control condition, perceivers completed identical recognition tasks but did not know the target’s own emotion ratings. Studies ( Ntotal = 398; one preregistered) found that the Feedback group was more accurate than the Control in future understanding of the target’s emotions. Results provide a proof-of-concept demonstration that brief preliminary learning about past emotional experiences of another person can give one a more accurate understanding of the person in the future.

Perspective neglect: Inadequate perspective taking limits coordination

People need to take others’ perspectives into account in order to successfully coordinate their actions and optimally allocate limited resources like time, attention, or space. And yet, people often face frequent, but avoidable, coordination failures in the form of wait times, crowding, and unavailability of desirable options. Such poor coordination suggests that the necessary perspective taking (i.e., considering the likely motivations and behavior of others) may be either inadequate or incorrect. The current research suggests that coordination in such situations is frequently unsuccessful, not because people try to take others’ perspectives and are mistaken, but because they neglect to consider those perspectives sufficiently in the first place. Six experiments across a range of limited-resource contexts (e.g., choosing when to visit a store, stream on a limited bandwidth service, go to a popular vacation location, etc.) find that encouraging decision makers to consider what others might do and why they might do it can ameliorate such coordination problems. We further demonstrate a boundary condition: in situations where people’s motivations are inherently obvious, decision makers are naturally able to coordinate without an explicit nudge to perspective take. This research sheds light on a unique class of coordination problems in which people must consider others’ motivations without directly communicating with them, and provides theoretical and practical contributions with the potential to ameliorate common coordination failures.

Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test

Individual differences in understanding other people's emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals' performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others' emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others' emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

The Curse of Knowledge in Visual Data Communication

A viewer can extract many potential patterns from any set of visualized data values. But that means that two people can see different patterns in the same visualization, potentially leading to miscommunication. Here, we show that when people are primed to see one pattern in the data as visually salient, they believe that naïve viewers will experience the same visual salience. Participants were told one of multiple backstories about political events that affected public polling data, before viewing a graph that depicted those data. One pattern in the data was particularly visually salient to them given the backstory that they heard. They then predicted what naïve viewers would most visually salient on the visualization. They were strongly influenced by their own knowledge, despite explicit instructions to ignore it, predicting that others would find the same patterns to be most visually salient. This result reflects a psychological phenomenon known as the curse of knowledge, where an expert struggles to re-create the state of mind of a novice. The present findings show that the curse of knowledge also plagues the visual perception of data, explaining why people can fail to connect with audiences when they communicate patterns in data.

What stops revenge taking? Effects of observed emotional reactions on revenge seeking

What reaction stops revenge taking? Four experiments (total N = 191) examined this question where the victim of an interpersonal transgression could observe the offender's reaction (anger, sadness, pain, or calm) to a retributive noise punishment. We compared the punishment intensity selected by the participant before and after seeing the offender's reaction. Seeing the opponent in pain reduced subsequent punishment most strongly, while displays of sadness and verbal indications of suffering had no appeasing effect. Expression of anger about a retributive punishment did not increase revenge seeking relative to a calm reaction, even when the anger response was disambiguated as being angry with the punisher. It is concluded that the expression of pain is the most effective emotional display for the reduction of retaliatory aggression. The findings are discussed in light of recent research on reactive aggression and retributive justice.

Comparing self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

The ability to infer how confident other people are in their decisions is crucial for regulating social interactions. In many cooperative situations, verbal communication enables one to communicate one's confidence and to appraise that of others. However, in many circumstances, people either cannot explicitly communicate their confidence level (e.g., in an emergency situation) or may be intentionally deceitful (e.g., when playing poker). It is currently unclear whether one can read others' confidence in the absence of verbal communication, and whether one can infer it as accurately as for one's own confidence. To explore these questions, we used an auditory task in which participants either had to guess the confidence of someone else performing the task or to judge their own confidence, in different conditions (i.e., while performing the task themselves or while watching themselves perform the task on a pre-recorded video). Results demonstrate that people can read the confidence someone else has in their decision as accurately as they evaluate their own uncertainty in their decision. Crucially, we show that hetero-metacognition is a flexible mechanism that relies on different cues according to the context. Our results support the idea that metacognition leverages the same inference mechanisms as those involved in theory of mind.

Different faces of empathy: Feelings of similarity disrupt recognition of negative emotions

Empathizing with others is widely presumed to increase our understanding of their emotions. Little is known, however, about which empathic process actually help people recognize others' feelings more accurately. Here, we probed the relationship between emotion recognition and two empathic processes: spontaneously felt similarity (having had a similar experience) and deliberate perspective taking (focus on the other vs. oneself). We report four studies in which participants (total N = 803) watched videos of targets sharing genuine negative emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. In Study 1 we found that having had a similar experience to what the target was sharing was associated with lower recognition of the target's emotions. Study 2 replicated the same pattern and in addition showed that making participants' own imagined reaction to the described event salient resulted in further reduced accuracy. Studies 3 and 4 were preregistered replications and extensions of Studies 1 and 2, in which we observed the same outcome using a different stimulus set, indicating the robustness of the finding. Moreover, Study 4 directly investigated the underlying mechanism of the observed effect. Findings showed that perceivers who have had a negative life experience similar to the emotional event described in the video felt greater personal distress after watching the video, which in part explained their reduced accuracy. These results provide the first demonstration that spontaneous empathy, evoked by similarity in negative experiences, may inhibit rather than increase our understanding of others' emotions.

Practices to Foster Physician Presence and Connection With Patients in the Clinical Encounter

IMPORTANCE

Time constraints, technology, and administrative demands of modern medicine often impede the human connection that is central to clinical care, contributing to physician and patient dissatisfaction.

OBJECTIVE

To identify evidence and narrative-based practices that promote clinician presence, a state of awareness, focus, and attention with the intent to understand patients.

EVIDENCE REVIEW

Preliminary practices were derived through a systematic literature review (from January 1997 to August 2017, with a subsequent bridge search to September 2019) of effective interpersonal interventions; observations of primary care encounters in 3 diverse clinics (n = 27 encounters); and qualitative interviews with physicians (n = 10), patients (n = 27), and nonmedical professionals whose occupations involve intense interpersonal interactions (eg, firefighter, chaplain, social worker; n = 30). After evidence synthesis, promising practices were reviewed in a 3-round modified Delphi process by a panel of 14 researchers, clinicians, patients, caregivers, and health system leaders. Panelists rated each practice using 9-point Likert scales (-4 to +4) that reflected the potential effect on patient and clinician experience and feasibility of implementation; after the third round, panelists selected their "top 5" practices from among those with median ratings of at least +2 for all 3 criteria. Final recommendations incorporate elements from all highly rated practices and emphasize the practices with the greatest number of panelist votes.

FINDINGS

The systematic literature review (n = 73 studies) and qualitative research activities yielded 31 preliminary practices. Following evidence synthesis, 13 distinct practices were reviewed by the Delphi panel, 8 of which met criteria for inclusion and were combined into a final set of 5 recommendations: (1) prepare with intention (take a moment to prepare and focus before greeting a patient); (2) listen intently and completely (sit down, lean forward, avoid interruptions); (3) agree on what matters most (find out what the patient cares about and incorporate these priorities into the visit agenda); (4) connect with the patient's story (consider life circumstances that influence the patient's health; acknowledge positive efforts; celebrate successes); and (5) explore emotional cues (notice, name, and validate the patient's emotions).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

This mixed-methods study identified 5 practices that have the potential to enhance physician presence and meaningful connection with patients in the clinical encounter. Evaluation and validation of the outcomes associated with implementing the 5 practices is needed, along with system-level interventions to create a supportive environment for implementation.

How Well Can We Assess Our Ability to Understand Others' Feelings? Beliefs About Taking Others' Perspectives and Actual Understanding of Others' Emotions

People vary in their beliefs about their tendency to engage in perspective taking and to understand other's feelings. Often, however, those beliefs are suggested to be poor indicators of actual skills and thus provide an inaccurate reflection of performance. Few studies, however, have examined whether people's beliefs accurately predict their performance on emotion recognition tasks using dynamic or spontaneous emotional expressions. We report six studies (N ranges from 186 to 315; N total = 1,347) testing whether individuals' report of their engagement in perspective taking, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983), is associated with accurate emotion recognition. In Studies 1-3, emotion recognition performance was assessed using three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. To provide a more naturalistic test, we then assessed performance with a new emotion recognition test in Studies 4-6, using videos of real targets that share their emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. Across all studies, we found a modest, yet significant positive relationship: people who believe that they take the other's perspective also perform better in tests of emotion recognition (r = 0.20, p < 0.001). Beliefs about taking others' perspective thus reflect interpersonal reality, but only partially.

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.

Tracking the affective state of unseen persons

Emotion recognition is widely assumed to be determined by face and body features, and measures of emotion perception typically use unnatural, static, or decontextualized face stimuli. Using our method called affective tracking, we show that observers can infer, recognize, and track over time the affect of an invisible person based solely on visual spatial context. We further show that visual context provides a substantial and unique contribution to the perception of human affect, beyond the information available from face and body. This method reveals that emotion recognition is, at its heart, a context-based process.

Emotion recognition is an essential human ability critical for social functioning. It is widely assumed that identifying facial expression is the key to this, and models of emotion recognition have mainly focused on facial and bodily features in static, unnatural conditions. We developed a method called affective tracking to reveal and quantify the enormous contribution of visual context to affect (valence and arousal) perception. When characters’ faces and bodies were masked in silent videos, viewers inferred the affect of the invisible characters successfully and in high agreement based solely on visual context. We further show that the context is not only sufficient but also necessary to accurately perceive human affect over time, as it provides a substantial and unique contribution beyond the information available from face and body. Our method (which we have made publicly available) reveals that emotion recognition is, at its heart, an issue of context as much as it is about faces.

Perspective taking: motivation and impediment to shared reality

Taking another person's perspective requires acknowledging that there is another viewpoint, which can challenge the concept of shared reality. At the same time, taking someone else's perspective can also preserve shared reality, by helping to explain how aspects of the world may be perceived differently by two different individuals. Thus, establishing or maintaining shared reality may be a primary motivator for perspective taking in everyday life. However, depending on the content (e.g., self-perceptions, assumptions about other people, cherished beliefs) used in constructing another perspective and comparing it with one's own, perspective taking may in some cases instead highlight differences between how people view the world, thus hindering a sense of shared reality.