In our digitally connected world, interpersonal interactions increasingly occur through online platforms offering varied information channels. This research investigates the unique contribution of visual cues to emotional communication, examining both cognitive and affective aspects. We categorize affective experiences into three domains and explore how visual feedback enhances each and promotes prosocial behavior. Across three ecological dyadic studies on Zoom (N = 710), findings show that while visual information does not significantly enhance emotion-assessment accuracy, it shapes the affective experience of communication. Visual cues increased perceptions of listening, togetherness, and empathy, primarily influencing storytellers' perceptions. Active engagement through body gestures and eye gaze proved crucial in fostering positive interactions, even in online settings. Visual feedback also enhanced prosocial behavior, suggesting that visual elements not only enhance the experience of “being seen,” but motivate altruistic actions as well. The results reveal a complex interplay between visual and auditory cues, with vocal responsiveness only partially compensating for absent visual feedback. These findings have significant implications for social relations in a digital world, as the absence or presence of visual cues can profoundly shape the outcomes of our social interactions.

Inequity aversion is a fundamental social preference. Concern for others’ welfare is yet another fundamental social preference. What do people prefer when maximizing others’ welfare creates an inequality that disadvantages them? Prior research has shown that people’s preferences depend on their level of agency, that is, their control over the allocation. Behaviorally, agentic decision makers have been shown to be more likely to prefer allocations that give another person more than them, compared to non-agentic ones. However, the cognitive processes underlying this shift of preference remain unclear. Here, we used mouse-tracking and reaction times to investigate how agency shapes social preferences in such cases. We examined decision conflict, the level of conflict experienced in arriving at a given choice, as a way to uncover whether different underlying social preferences are at play when one has versus does not have agency. We predicted an interaction effect of agency and choice on conflict, where choosing the prosocial option would be associated with less conflict in the Agency condition compared to the No-Agency condition, and that the opposite would be true for the equitable option. In our task, on each of trial, participants were presented with two allocation options: an equitable option (e.g., 50 cents for self, 50 cents for other) and an inequitable and prosocial option, favoring the other participant over oneself (e.g., 50 cents for self, 70 cents for other). Agentic participants chose one option to be implemented, whereas non-agentic participants indicated their preference, knowing that the lab manager had already made the decision. In two studies (N = 586), including a preregistered one, an interaction effect emerged in both mouse trajectory and reaction time analyses. These results suggest that agency alters social preferences during the decision-making process, and challenge traditional inequity aversion models claiming that people inherently dislike inequitable outcomes. Granting agency may be a powerful tool for maximizing social welfare in situations where equity and prosocial behavior are at odds.

In five preregistered studies (n = 3,471), we examined differences in perception of empathic responses thought to be AI-generated or written by humans, to further understand the value of human empathy. We provided participants with AI-generated empathic responses, while manipulating the responses’ perceived source to be written by humans or AI-generated. We measured participants’ perception of empathy in the response, as well as positive emotions, negative emotions and support felt following the response. We further tested whether thinking that a human response was edited by AI, or an AI response was edited by a human, influences these emotional reactions (studies 2 and 3). In study 3 we examined which aspects of the empathic response (understanding, sharing of emotions, caring) affect perceived empathy, depending on the perceived source. While all responses were rated positively, participants’ belief about any AI involvement reduced ratings of empathy, support and positive emotions. Specifically, emotional sharing and care had unique value when perceived as coming from humans. Lastly, to examine how much a human response is valued and why, we tested how long people are willing to wait for a human to respond (study 4) or even just read about (study 5) their emotional experience, compared to receiving an immediate AI response. There were no differences between the waiting times, with some participants willing to wait up to two years for a human to respond or just read about their experience. Choosing to wait was due to participants’ intuition that humans could better empathize with them compared to AI. Together, results suggest that people attribute greater emotional value to communication they believe to be human, as opposed to communication with an AI, or involving it. These differences may stem from humans’ unique potential to genuinely feel and care, which AI does not possess. These findings have broad implications regarding how to wisely implement AI in our social - emotional lives.

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Research in psychology has long underscored the significance of contextual influence on social cognition processes and behavior. However, the exploration of sexual interactions as a unique context affecting these processes has largely been neglected by previous research, despite their prominent role in our daily lives and potentially consequential outcomes. We outline the relevance of various basic social cognition processes to sexual interactions and propose a line of research integrating theoretical insights and methodologies from social cognition research with those from sex and relationship research. We elaborate on theoretical and applied contributions to both fields

The present research utilized the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to explore the motives driving individuals to adhere to recommended health standards. One month into the first lockdown and eight months before the availability of vaccinations, a large sample of 1,263 individuals completed measures of empathic concern and personal distress in response to a person who contracted the virus. In addition, we measured their COVID-related behaviors, relating to benefitting another person (i.e., donation), the self (i.e., physical hygiene), or both self and other (i.e., physical distancing). Consistent with the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis (Batson et al., 2015), we found that individuals who experience higher empathic concern, maintain greater physical distance and physical hygiene and act more generously. We further found that individuals who experienced high personal distress were less likely to act generously, albeit more likely to maintain personal hygiene and physical distance. These findings suggest that compliance with health recommendations can be encouraged by eliciting empathic concern or personal distress. Yet, compliance per se is not prosocial behavior. Any intervention aiming to increase prosocial motivation should focus on enhancing empathic concern while minimizing personal distress.

In the pursuit of mental and physical health, effective pain management stands as a cornerstone. Here, we examine a potential sex bias in pain management. Leveraging insights from psychological research showing that females’ pain is stereotypically judged as less intense than males’ pain, we hypothesize that there may be tangible differences in pain management decisions based on patients’ sex. Our investigation spans emergency department (ED) datasets from two countries, including discharge notes of patients arriving with pain complaints (N = 21,851). Across these datasets, a consistent sex disparity emerges. Female patients are less likely to be prescribed pain-relief medications compared to males, and this disparity persists even after adjusting for patients’ reported pain scores and numerous patient, physician, and ED variables. This disparity extends across medical practitioners, with both male and female physicians prescribing less pain-relief medications to females than to males. Additional analyses reveal that female patients’ pain scores are 10% less likely to be recorded by nurses, and female patients spend an additional 30 min in the ED compared to male patients. A controlled experiment employing clinical vignettes reinforces our hypothesis, showing that nurses (N = 109) judge pain of female patients to be less intense than that of males. We argue that the findings reflect an undertreatment of female patients’ pain. We discuss the troubling societal and medical implications of females’ pain being overlooked and call for policy interventions to ensure equal pain treatment.

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) language models have elevated the vision of using conversational AI support for mental health, with a growing body of literature indicating varying degrees of efficacy. In this paper, we ask when, in therapy, it will be easier to replace humans and, conversely, in what instances, human connection will still be more valued. We suggest that empathy lies at the heart of the answer to this question. First, we define different aspects of empathy and outline the potential empathic capabilities of humans versus AI. Next, we consider what determines when these aspects are needed most in therapy, both from the perspective of therapeutic methodology and from the perspective of patient objectives. Ultimately, our goal is to prompt further investigation and dialogue, urging both practitioners and scholars engaged in AI-mediated therapy to keep these questions and considerations in mind when investigating AI implementation in mental health.

 

Empathy, the capacity to share others’ emotional experiences, has been proposed as a key motivation for altruistic behavior in both humans and animals. Sharing another’s emotional experience may generate a self-embodied simulation of their emotional state, fostering understanding and promoting prosocial behavior. Vicarious pain responders report sensing physical pain when observing others in pain. Whether this ability extends to emotional experiences remains unexplored. Using both questionnaires and ecologically valid behavioral tasks, we explored whether vicarious pain responders differ from nonresponders in empathic abilities and prosocial behavior. Participants watched video clips of people describing a negative emotional life event. We operationalized several empathic abilities and responses (empathic accuracy, affective synchrony, emotional reaction, and empathic motivation) based on participants’ and targets’ responses during and after watching the videos. Participants were also engaged in a donation task measuring tendency for prosocial behavior. Findings reveal that compared to nonresponders, vicarious pain responders exhibit enhanced empathic accuracy, intensified emotional reactions to others’ emotional pain, and a greater motivation to communicate with the target. This study marks the first behavioral evidence showcasing vicarious pain responders’ empathic abilities, reactions, and motivation in response to nonphysical pain of others, expanding our knowledge of this phenomenon and its association with broader empathic abilities.

Abstract

Intragroup empathy is vital for resilience. However, it is often impaired in advantaged-dominated environments when one adopts advantaged-group characteristics to climb the social ladder. The current work examines contextual factors that may affect intragroup empathy: the motivation behind adopting the advantaged-group characteristics, and negative encounters with members of the advantaged group. We hypothesized that coercively, versus willingly, adopting advantaged-group characteristics will increase intragroup empathy both when the outcomes are negative and positive. We further hypothesized that a negative encounter with an advantaged-group member would increase intragroup empathy, compared to no encounter. In three studies, Palestinian students in Israeli academia were assigned to read scripts depicting the academic experience of a Palestinian student adopting advantaged-group characteristics. We tested (a) the effects of motivation following a negative outcome (N = 182); (b) the effects following a positive outcome (N = 205); and (c) the interaction between a negative encounter with an advantaged-group member and motivation, and its effect on intragroup empathy (N = 282). Intragroup empathy was higher in the coerced condition compared to the free-willing condition both for negative and positive outcomes. A negative encounter with an advantaged-group member increased intragroup empathy in the willing condition. By illuminating contextual variables that shape intragroup empathy, this research shows that impairment in intragroup empathy is not inevitable. This work may serve as a foundation for future interventions.

Groups of people in pain evoke our empathic reactions. Yet how does one empathize with a group? Here, we aim to identify psychological mechanisms that underlie empathic reactions to groups. We theorize that because empathy is an egocentric process routed through the self, people are strongly attuned to the impact on each individual, and less so to the number of individuals affected. In five pre-registered experiments, involving different types of stimuli and valences of the outcomes, we repeatedly find that participants' level of empathy depends on the pain experienced by each individual, but not on the number of individuals in the group. The experiments support our hypothesis. They also add to alternative explanations such as psychophysical numbing and strategic regulation of negative emotions, providing valuable insights into the phenomenon of scope insensitivity. The findings also bear implications for the ongoing debate on the role of empathy in public policy decisions.

Empathy provides a cognitive and emotional bridge that connects individuals and promotes prosocial behavior. People empathize with others via two complementary perceptual routes: Cognitive Empathy or the ability to accurately recognize and understand others' emotional states, and Affective Empathy or the ability to 'feel with' others. This Element reviews past and current research on both cognitive and affective empathy, focusing on behavioral, as well as neuroscientific research. It highlights a recent shift towards more dynamic and complex stimuli which may capture better the nature of real social interaction. It expands on why context is crucial when perceiving others' emotional state, and discusses gender differences, biases affecting our understanding of others, and perception of others in clinical conditions. Lastly, it highlights proposed future directions in the field

Spontaneous speech is produced in chunks called intonation units (IUs). IUs are defined by a set of prosodic cues and presumably occur in all human languages. Recent work has shown that across different grammatical and sociocultural conditions IUs form rhythms of ∼1 unit per second. Linguistic theory suggests that IUs pace the flow of information in the discourse. As a result, IUs provide a promising and hitherto unexplored theoretical framework for studying the neural mechanisms of communication. In this article, we identify a neural response unique to the boundary defined by the IU. We measured the EEG of human participants (of either sex), who listened to different speakers recounting an emotional life event. We analyzed the speech stimuli linguistically and modeled the EEG response at word offset using a GLM approach. We find that the EEG response to IU-final words differs from the response to IU-nonfinal words even when equating acoustic boundary strength. Finally, we relate our findings to the body of research on rhythmic brain mechanisms in speech processing. We study the unique contribution of IUs and acoustic boundary strength in predicting delta-band EEG. This analysis suggests that IU-related neural activity, which is tightly linked to the classic Closure Positive Shift (CPS), could be a time-locked component that captures the previously characterized delta-band neural speech tracking.

Empathy is a crucial aspect of our daily lives, as it enhances our wellbeing and is a proxy for prosocial behavior. It encompasses two related but partially distinct components: cognitive and affective empathy. Both are susceptible to context, biases and an individual’s physiological state. Few studies have explored the effects of a person’s mood on these empathy components, and results are mixed. The current study takes advantage of an ecological, naturalistic empathy task – the empathic accuracy (EA) task – in combination with physiological measurements to examine and differentiate between the effects of one’s mood on both empathy components. Participants were induced with positive or negative mood and presented videos of targets narrating autobiographical negative stories, selected from a Chinese empathy dataset that we developed (now publicly available). The stories were conveyed in audio-only, visual-only and full-video formats. Participants rated the target’s emotional state while watching or listening to their stories, and physiological measures were taken throughout the process. Importantly, similar measures were taken from the targets when they narrated the stories, allowing a comparison between participants’ and targets’ measures. We found that in audio-only and visual-only conditions, participants whose moods were congruent with the target showed higher physiological synchrony than those with incongruent mood, implying a mood-congruency effect on affective empathy. However, there was no mood effect on empathic accuracy (reflecting cognitive empathy), suggesting a different influence of mood on the two empathy components

Empathy generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is convincing and well received until recipients realize that it is artificial — a phenomenon that I term the ‘artificial-empathy paradox’. I explain this phenomenon by examining the three subcomponents of human empathy and the gaps between each of them and AI from the perspective of the empathy recipient. I propose that as AI revolutionizes much of our lives, empathy will persist as one of a few domains that are more highly valued in their human form. I argue that what seems to be a limitation of human empathizers — the fact that they are biological beings with finite energy resources for care and support — is why their empathy will surpass that of AI.

Empathy and executive functions (EFs) are multimodal constructs that enable individuals to cope with their environment. Both abilities develop throughout childhood and are known to contribute to social behavior and academic performance in young adolescents. Notably, mentalizing and EF activate shared frontotemporal brain areas, which in previous studies of adults led researchers to suggest that at least some aspects of empathy depend on intact EF mechanisms. Despite the substantial development that empathy and EF undergo during adolescence, no study to date has systematically examined the associations between components of empathy and EF in this age group. Here, we explore these associations using data from an online battery of tasks, collected as part of a longitudinal twin study (N = 593; Mage 11.09 ± 0.2; 53.46% female, Israeli adolescents from Jewish decent). Using a confirmatory factor analysis, we quantified the associations between the main components of empathy (mentalizing and interpersonal concern) and of EF (working memory [WM], inhibition and shifting [IaS]). We found that WM was related to both mentalizing and interpersonal concern, whereas IaS were related to mentalizing but not to interpersonal concern. We also discuss the genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in each factor. Our findings show both similarities and differences from previous findings in adults, suggesting that the ongoing brain maturation processes and environmental age-dependent experiences in adolescence may affect the developing relation between cognitive and emotional development. These results have implications for better understanding and treating clinical populations demonstrating executive or emotional deficits, specifically during adolescence.

In mediated interactions (e.g. video calls), less information is available about the other. To investigate how this affects our empathy for one another, we conducted an electroencephalogram study, in which 30 human participants observed 1 of 5 targets undergoing painful electric stimulation, once in a direct interaction and once in a live, video-mediated interaction. We found that observers were as accurate in judging others' pain and showed as much affective empathy via video as in a direct encounter. While mu suppression, a common neural marker of empathy, was not sensitive to others' pain, theta responses to others' pain as well as skin conductance coupling between participants were reduced in the video-mediated condition. We conclude that physical proximity with its rich social cues is important for nuanced physiological resonance with the other's experience. More studies are warranted to confirm these results and to understand their behavioral significance for remote social interactions

The seminal theory of motivational conflicts distinguishes between approach–approach (AP-AP) conflicts, in which a decision is made between desirable alternatives, and avoidance–avoidance (AV-AV) conflicts, in which a decision is made between undesirable alternatives. The behavioral differences between AP-AP and AV-AV conflicts are well documented: abundant research showed that AV-AV conflicts are more difficult to resolve than AP-AP ones. However, there is little to no research looking into the neural underpinnings of the differences between the two conflict types. Here, we show that midfrontal theta, an established neural marker of conflict, distinguished between the two conflict types such that midfrontal theta power was higher in AV-AV conflicts than in AP-AP conflicts. We further demonstrate that higher midfrontal theta power was associated with shorter decision times on a single-trial basis, indicating that midfrontal theta played a role in promoting successful controlled behavior. Taken together, our results show that AP-AP and AV-AV conflicts are distinguishable on the neural level. The implications of these results go beyond motivational conflicts, as they establish midfrontal theta as a measure of the continuous degree of conflict in subjective decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

This study examined whether typically developing (TD) twins of non-TD children demonstrate enhanced empathy and prosociality. Of 778 Hebrew-speaking Israeli families who participated in a twin study, 63 were identified to have a non-TD child with a TD twin, and 404 as having both twins TD. TD twins of non-TD children (27% males) were compared to the rest of the cohort of TD children (46% males) on measures of empathy and prosociality. Participants were 11 years old. TD twins of non-TD children scored significantly higher than TD twins of TD children in a measure of cognitive empathy (d = .43). No differences were found in emotional empathy and prosociality. The specificity of the positive effect on cognitive empathy is discussed.