Empathic accuracy of intimate partners in violent versus nonviolent relationships

This study compared the empathic accuracy of men and women who had perpetrated physical intimate partner violence with that of partners in nonviolent but distressed and nonviolent and nondistressed relationships. Examined was the empathic accuracy (a) of partners for one another’s thoughts and feelings during a relationship problem discussion in the laboratory, (b) of partners’ empathic accuracy for each other with the empathic accuracy of objective observers who watched the couples’ interactions, and (c) the males’ empathic accuracy for their female partner to their empathic accuracy for female strangers. No significant group differences were found among women’s empathic accuracy, but the data suggest that violent men exhibit poor empathic accuracy when attempting to understand their female partner’s thoughts and feelings.     

Empathic accuracy in the interactions of male friends versus male strangers.

In unstructured interactions, male friends were found to be more accurate than male strangers in inferring each other's thoughts and feelings. Plausible reasons for this difference were that friends (a) interacted more and exchanged more information, (b) had more similar personalities and therefore more rapport with each other, and (c) had more detailed knowledge of each other's lives. Data confirmed that the friends did indeed interact more and were more similar in their sociability than the strangers; however, these differences did not account for the friends' greater empathic accuracy. Instead, this was primarily attributable to a difference in knowledge structures, namely, the friends' ability to accurately read their partners' thoughts and feelings about imagined events in another place or time.     

Getting a cue: the need to belong and enhanced sensitivity to social cues

To successfully establish and maintain social relationships, individuals need to be sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others. In the current studies, the authors predicted that individuals who are especially concerned with social connectedness--individuals high in the need to belong--would be particularly attentive to and accurate in decoding social cues. In Study 1, individual differences in the need to belong were found to be positively related to accuracy in identifying vocal tone and facial emotion. Study 2 examined attention to vocal tone and accuracy in a more complex social sensitivity task (an empathic accuracy task). Replicating the results of Study 1, need to belong scores predicted both attention to vocal tone and empathic accuracy. Study 3 provided evidence that the enhanced performance shown by those high in the need to belong is specific to social perception skills rather than to cognitive problem solving more generally.     

文化影响自我解释的神经机制

自我解释是指个体如何思考自我及其与他人的关系。在集体主义-个人主义维度下, 东西方人分属于典型的相依性-独立性自我解释：自我参照任务中, 东亚人的自我和重要他人(如母亲)均表征于内侧前额叶皮质(MPFC), 西方人的自我和重要他人分表征于不同脑区; 偶发任务和词-音不一致任务中, 相依性自我解释程度分别调节P3和N400的活动; 文化启动任务中, 双文化被试可通达相应的自我解释。社会脑假设、文化-基因协同进化论和神经-文化交互作用模型对此进行了阐释。未来应研究中国人的关系自我, 尤其是探索本土化的理论和研究方法。     

Depression and empathic accuracy in couples: an interpersonal model of gender differences in depression

We examine the link between depression and empathic accuracy, the ability to infer other people's thoughts and feelings, as a possible mechanism underlying gender differences in the association between depression and interpersonal difficulties within intimate relationships. Fifty-one heterosexual couples completed questionnaires assessing depressive symptoms and participated in both a lab and a daily diary procedure assessing empathic accuracy. In the lab measures, women's (but not men's) higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with lower empathic accuracy regarding partners' thoughts and feelings. In the daily diary data, women's depressive symptoms were specifically associated with lower levels of empathic accuracy for negative feelings but not for positive feelings, and with lower levels of their partners' empathic accuracy for the women's negative feelings. Men's depressive symptoms were again unrelated to levels of empathic accuracy. Our findings suggest that depressive symptoms may have a stronger impact on interpersonal perception in intimate relationships among women than among men.     

Empathic Accuracy,Meta-Perspective,and Satisfaction in the Coach-Athlete Relationship

This study investigated the empathic accuracy of sixty coach-athlete dyads, its antecedents (meta-perceptions of relationship) and consequences (perceptions of satisfaction). An adaptation of Ickes's (2001) unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm was used to assess empathic accuracy whereby coach-athlete dyads were filmed during training. A selection of video clips containing the dyads' interactions during a typical training session were shown to them. The dyad members were asked to report their recollected thoughts and/or feelings while making inferences about what their partners' thought and felt at specific points of interaction. Empathic accuracy was estimated by comparing the dyads' self-reports and inferences. The results of a structural equation model analysis indicated an association between members' meta-perceptions or judgments that their partner is positive about the athletic relationship and increased empathic accuracy. Increased empathic accuracy was in turn associated with higher levels of satisfaction. These results are discussed based on issues they raise for theory and measurement.     

I do not know you and I am keeping it that way: Attachment avoidance and empathic accuracy in the perception of strangers

Two studies examined the association between attachment avoidance and empathic accuracy when perceiving strangers. In Study 1, participants with high attachment avoidance revealed lower accuracy in identifying the thoughts and feelings of their interaction partner compared with participants with low attachment avoidance. High‐avoidance participants also tended to mentally distance themselves from the other and thought less often about him or her. Study 2 replicated the pattern of lower empathic accuracy for high‐attachment‐avoidance participants, this time, when respondents did not actually interact with the target of perception. We discuss reasons for why people with high attachment avoidance might show impaired empathic accuracy while interacting with strangers. We also consider more general influences of attachment avoidance on perception processes and, consequently, on social success.     

Cultural mediators of self-reported social anxiety

East Asians generally endorse higher social anxiety than do Westerners. Widely used measures of social anxiety, however, may not account for different social values across cultures. Drawing from Korean (n=251) and Euro-Canadian (n=250) community samples, this study used a cross-sectional design to examine the relationship between ratings of social anxiety and beliefs and self-views typically found in East Asian cultures. Results indicated that independent self-construal and identity consistency, views of the self that are typically associated with Western cultures, fully mediate the ethnic difference on self-reported social anxiety. Moreover, two indicators of East Asian views of the self in social contexts (interdependent self-construal and self-criticism) were partial mediators. Overall, the data suggest conceptualizations of pathological social anxiety may need to be revised to be useful for studying individuals in East Asian cultures.     

Getting to know you: the relational self-construal, relational cognition, and well-being

Individuals with a highly relational self-construal define the self in terms of their close relationships with others. Consequently, they seek to nurture and develop new relationships. These studies examine individual differences in the self-construal in the context of a new roommate relationship, with a focus on cognitive aspects of relationship development. Study 1 revealed that persons with a highly relational self-construal were better able than others to predict a new roommate's values and beliefs. Study 2 showed that highly relational individuals tended to think optimistically about a new roommate's feelings about the relationship. The relational self-construal was more strongly related to these measures of relationship cognition in distant relationships than in very close relationships. Participants' self-construals and their perceptions of the closeness of the roommate relationship interacted in predicting well-being, revealing an unexpected negative relation between closeness and well-being for participants with a low relational self-construal.     

Empathy in adolescence: Relations with emotion awareness and social roles

In this study, we aimed at gaining a better understanding of the individual differences contributing to feelings of empathy in adolescents. Therefore, we examined the extent to which emotion awareness (e.g., recognizing and appreciating one's own and the emotions of others) and a tendency for certain social roles (e.g., helping or teasing peers when being bullied) are related to adolescents’ levels of empathy. The sample was comprised of 182 adolescents aged between 11 and 16. Empathy and emotion awareness were assessed using self‐report measures. Peer reports were used to indicate adolescents’ different social roles: Bullying, defending the victim, and outsider behaviour. Outcomes demonstrated that evaluating one's own and the emotions of others, and more defending nominations were associated with both affective and cognitive empathy, whereas aspects of emotion awareness which are linked with internalizing symptoms were related to empathic distress, suggesting maladaptive emotion appraisal. Furthermore, outsider behaviour was associated with empathic distress, emphasizing a self‐focused orientation. In contrast, more bullying was negatively associated with cognitive empathy. Overall, these outcomes demonstrate that, besides social roles, emotion awareness is an important factor for adaptive empathic reactions, whereas emotion dysregulation might cause distress when witnessing the negative feelings of others.     

It takes two: the interpersonal nature of empathic accuracy

Although current theories suggest that affective empathy (perceivers' experience of social targets' emotions) should contribute to empathic accuracy (perceivers' ability to accurately assess targets' emotions), extant research has failed to consistently demonstrate a correspondence between them. We reasoned that prior null findings may be attributable to a failure to account for the fundamentally interpersonal nature of empathy, and tested the prediction that empathic accuracy may depend on both targets' tendency to express emotion and perceivers' tendency to empathically share that emotion. Using a continuous affect-rating paradigm, we found that perceivers' trait affective empathy was unrelated to empathic accuracy unless targets' trait expressivity was taken into account: Perceivers' trait affective empathy predicted accuracy only for expressive targets. These data suggest that perceivers' self-reported affective empathy can indeed predict their empathic accuracy, but only when targets' expressivity allows their thoughts and feelings to be read.     

Situational differences in dialectical emotions: Boundary conditions in a cultural comparison of North Americans and East Asians

Past research generally suggests that East Asians tolerate opposing feelings or dialectical emotions more than North Americans. We tested the idea that North Americans would have fewer opposing emotions than East Asians in positive, but not in negative or mixed situations. Forty-seven European American, 40 Chinese, and 121 Japanese students reported the emotions that a protagonist of standardised positive, negative, and mixed situations would feel. Emotions were coded into three valence categories: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant. As predicted, cultural differences in opposing emotion associations were found in positive situations only. Moreover, East Asians reported more neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant feelings, especially in mixed situations, possibly reflecting a deferral of valence appraisal due to expected change.     

The manageability of empathic (in)accuracy during couples’ conflict: Relationship-protection or self-protection?

The current study sought to expand upon research on motivated empathic (in)accuracy by testing assumptions underlying the empathic accuracy model, namely if a perceiver’s level of empathic accuracy is variable and might be associated with different outcomes depending the situation. More specifically, the model assumes that (a) the perception of threat in the thoughts/feelings of an interaction partner can result in a lower level of empathic accuracy, and (b) empathic accuracy can both improve and harm situational well-being on the personal and relationship level. These assumptions were tested in a laboratory-based study in which couples participated in a conflict interaction task and reported on their thought processes during a video-review task. All participants also completed a similar standard-stimulus task. A shift in participants’ motivation to be accurate to a motivation to be inaccurate in response to perceived threat could not be detected. Men’s higher levels of empathic accuracy for non-threatening feelings of their female partner were predictive of an increased feeling of closeness in men. Women’s higher levels of empathic accuracy for non-threatening feelings of the male partner were predictive for a better mood in women. A harmful effect of empathic accuracy for threatening thoughts/feelings on situational well-being was not found.     

Is the Interdependent Self More Sensitive to Question Context Than the Independent Self? Self-Construal and the Observation of Conversational Norms

Question answering requires close attention to the common ground to determine what the questioner wants to know. Because attentiveness to others is more likely to be a self-defining goal when the self is thought of as interdependent with others rather than independent of others, we predicted that self-construal influences attentiveness to the common ground. In Experiment 1, participants' temporary self-construal was manipulated through a priming technique. As predicted, interdependence-primed participants were more likely than independence-primed participants to take the recipient's knowledge into account and avoided providing redundant information in a self-administered questionnaire. Drawing on chronic differences in self-construal, Experiment 2 replicated these findings with participants from independent (Germany) and interdependent (China) cultures. Throughout, participants' differential attentiveness to the common ground resulted in differential question order effects, raising important methodological issues for cross-cultural research.     

The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to “read”?

Clinical psychologists have suggested that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are unusually accurate at “reading” other people. We investigated this claim by obtaining measures of trait accuracy and empathic accuracy in 38 same-sex dyads, each composed of one high BPD and one low BPD member. At first glance, the results suggested that the high borderline dyad members displayed both better trait accuracy and better empathic accuracy. Additional analyses revealed, however, that these effects were instead a consequence of the high BPD participants having more unusual, harder-to-predict personalities and more difficult-to-infer thoughts and feelings than those of their low BPD counterparts. We conclude that the relative empathic advantage displayed by high BPD individuals does not reflect greater ability; instead, they are simply more difficult to “read” than low BPD individuals are.     

Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy

Recent research suggests that lower-class individuals favor explanations of personal and political outcomes that are oriented to features of the external environment. We extended this work by testing the hypothesis that, as a result, individuals of a lower social class are more empathically accurate in judging the emotions of other people. In three studies, lower-class individuals (compared with upper-class individuals) received higher scores on a test of empathic accuracy (Study 1), judged the emotions of an interaction partner more accurately (Study 2), and made more accurate inferences about emotion from static images of muscle movements in the eyes (Study 3). Moreover, the association between social class and empathic accuracy was explained by the tendency for lower-class individuals to explain social events in terms of features of the external environment. The implications of class-based patterns in empathic accuracy for well-being and relationship outcomes are discussed.     

团体咨询成员的相互共情及其与效果的关系——社会关系模型在团体咨询研究中的应用

研究旨在探讨团体成员的相互共情及其与团体效果的关系。共收集10个团体,53名成员的数据,运用社会关系模型分析。结果发现：1.成员自评相互共情得分较高,但互评相关不显著;2.共情水平与会谈效果正相关,与团体反治疗性因素负相关;3.被共情水平与不信任负相关;4.共情准确性与团体治疗性因素正相关。结论：成员自评相互共情水平较高,但互评不匹配。成员自评共情水平越高,会谈效果越好,受团体反治疗性因素阻碍更少。越被准确评估情绪效价的成员,从治疗性因素中获益更多。     

Culture and diverging views of social events

The authors compared East Asians' and Americans' views of everyday social events. Research suggests that Americans tend to focus more on the self and to have a greater sense of personal agency than East Asians. The authors assessed whether, compared to East Asians, Americans emphasize main characters even when events do not involve the self and whether they see more agency or intentionality in actions, even when the actions are not their own. Whether East Asians would observe more emotions in everyday scenarios than would Americans also was investigated. In Study 1, Chinese and Americans read alleged diary entries of another person. Americans did focus more on main characters and on characters' intentionality. Study 2 replicated these results comparing Taiwanese and Americans on free recall of events concerning the self and of narratives and videos concerning others. Study 2 also found that Taiwanese made more comments about the emotional states of characters.     

Cross-cultural differences in the refusal to accept a small gift: the differential influence of reciprocity norms on Asians and North Americans

Asians are more likely than North Americans to refuse a small gift that is offered to them by a casual acquaintance. Five experiments confirmed this difference and explored the reasons for its occurrence. Asians, who are inclined to think of themselves in relation to others, are more likely than North Americans to invoke a reciprocity norm in exchanging gifts with casual acquaintances, and they refuse a gift in order to avoid the feeling of indebtedness they would experience if they cannot reciprocate. North Americans, however, who are inclined to think of themselves independently of others, are more likely to base their acceptance of the gift on its attractiveness without considering their obligation to reciprocate. These cultural differences are not evident when the gift is offered by a close friend with whom individuals have a communal relationship. Implications of our findings for miscommunication between members of different cultures are discussed.