13,938 research outputs found
The Actions and Feelings Questionnaire in Autism and Typically Developed Adults
Open access via Springer Compact Agreement We are grateful to Simon Baron-Cohen and Paula Smith of the Cambridge Autism Centre for the use of the ARC database in distributing the questionnaire, to all participants for completing it, to Eilidh Farquar for special efforts in distributing the link and to Gemma Matthews for advice on using AMOS 23. JHGW is supported by the Northwood Trust.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Affect and Group Attachments: The Role of Shared Responsibility
This paper theorizes the role of shared responsibility in the development of affective group attachments, interweaving ideas from social exchange and social identity theories. The main arguments are that (1) people engaged in task interaction experience positive or negative emotions from those interactions; (2) tasks that promote more sense of shared responsibility across members lead people to attribute their individual emotions to groups or organizations; and (3) group attributions of own emotions are the basis for stronger or weaker group attachments. The paper suggests that social categorization and structural interdependence promote group attachments by producing task interactions that have positive emotional effects on those involved
Happiness is assortative in online social networks
Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between
individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics. This propensity,
referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed as the correlation
between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent
results indicate that beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race,
even psychological states such as "loneliness" can be assortative in a social
network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social
networks it is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes
place in situations where social ties are mediated solely by online networking
services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show that general
happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6
month record of their individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the
Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is the first result that shows
assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply
that online social networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms
that cause assortative mixing in real social networks and that such assortative
mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalence of
online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels
of SWB may be an important instrument in better understanding how both positive
and negative sentiments spread through online social ties. Future research may
focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user
behavior in "real life".Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure
The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism: A Theoretical Approach to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development
There has been a widely held belief that people with autism spectrum disorders lack empathy. This article examines the empathy imbalance hypothesis (EIH) of autism. According to this account, people with autism have a deficit of cognitive empathy but a surfeit of emotional empathy. The behavioral characteristics of autism might be generated by this imbalance and a susceptibility to empathic overarousal. The EIH builds on the theory of mind account and provides an alternative to the extreme-male-brain theory of autism. Empathy surfeit is a recurrent theme in autistic narratives, and empirical evidence for the EIH is growing. A modification of the pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm could facilitate an experimental test of the EIH
Twitter reciprocal reply networks exhibit assortativity with respect to happiness
The advent of social media has provided an extraordinary, if imperfect, 'big
data' window into the form and evolution of social networks. Based on nearly 40
million message pairs posted to Twitter between September 2008 and February
2009, we construct and examine the revealed social network structure and
dynamics over the time scales of days, weeks, and months. At the level of user
behavior, we employ our recently developed hedonometric analysis methods to
investigate patterns of sentiment expression. We find users' average happiness
scores to be positively and significantly correlated with those of users one,
two, and three links away. We strengthen our analysis by proposing and using a
null model to test the effect of network topology on the assortativity of
happiness. We also find evidence that more well connected users write happier
status updates, with a transition occurring around Dunbar's number. More
generally, our work provides evidence of a social sub-network structure within
Twitter and raises several methodological points of interest with regard to
social network reconstructions.Comment: 22 pages, 21 figures, 5 tables, In press at the Journal of
Computational Scienc
You turn me cold: evidence for temperature contagion
Introduction
During social interactions, our own physiological responses influence those of others. Synchronization of physiological (and behavioural) responses can facilitate emotional understanding and group coherence through inter-subjectivity. Here we investigate if observing cues indicating a change in another's body temperature results in a corresponding temperature change in the observer.
Methods
Thirty-six healthy participants (age; 22.9±3.1 yrs) each observed, then rated, eight purpose-made videos (3 min duration) that depicted actors with either their right or left hand in visibly warm (warm videos) or cold water (cold videos). Four control videos with the actors' hand in front of the water were also shown. Temperature of participant observers' right and left hands was concurrently measured using a thermistor within a Wheatstone bridge with a theoretical temperature sensitivity of <0.0001°C. Temperature data were analysed in a repeated measures ANOVA (temperature × actor's hand × observer's hand).
Results
Participants rated the videos showing hands immersed in cold water as being significantly cooler than hands immersed in warm water, F(1,34) = 256.67, p0.1). There was however no evidence of left-right mirroring of these temperature effects p>0.1). Sensitivity to temperature contagion was also predicted by inter-individual differences in self-report empathy.
Conclusions
We illustrate physiological contagion of temperature in healthy individuals, suggesting that empathetic understanding for primary low-level physiological challenges (as well as more complex emotions) are grounded in somatic simulation
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