Empathic Anger and Personal Anger in Response to Fairness Violations: Relations to Self and Other-Oriented Motivation and Behavior

Prosocial behavior research has shown that empathy-elicited compassionate concern often motivates actions performed with an ultimate goal of helping others even at cost to oneself, whereas empathic distress motivates low-cost help with an ultimate goal of helping oneself. Less is known about the motivational outcomes of empathic anger felt when witnessing injustice or harm to others. Though empathic anger predicts third-party compensation and punishment, it is unclear whether this motivation is ultimately self or other-oriented. Three experimental studies examined the empathic anger-altruism hypothesis, that empathic anger evoked when witnessing another being treated unjustly would evoke altruistic motivation to help the victim or punish the offender. In all three studies, empathic anger evoked motivation to punish a third-party offender. In contrast to the empathic anger-altruism hypothesis, Studies 2 and 3 found that witnessing third-party injustice typically led participants to punish an unfair offender, rather than help a third-party victim. Participants were equally likely to choose to punish an unfair delegator when witnessing third party unfairness as when they were personally treated unfairly. The lack of willingness to help may be explained by low empathic concern evoked when witnessing a stranger be treated unfairly, compared to when remembering or imagining a close other be treated unfairly. Study 3 also found that motivation to punish the unfair offender was not altruistic, as participants overwhelmingly chose to self-compensate or avoid a decision when their response decision was costly. Implications for our understanding of the mechanisms underlying empathic anger, and the fundamental self or other-oriented nature of the emotional response, are discussed

Curiosity and Compassion: Curiosity and Attachment Security\u27s Relationship with Empathic Responding to Hardship

Compassion requires both attention and motivation to engage with another person’s experience. Two studies examined whether curiosity—the interest and motivation to explore new or complex information—promotes empathic concern and suppresses personal distress. These studies also examined whether attachment insecurity moderates curiosity’s effect on empathy. Study 1 identified correlations among curiosity, attachment security, empathic concern, and personal distress traits. In Study 2, participants were primed with high or low curiosity before watching a video of a peer experiencing hardship, then reported state curiosity, empathic concern, personal distress, and prosocial motivation. Trait and state curiosity predicted greater empathic concern and prosocial motivation. In Study 1, greater attachment anxiety was shown to weaken trait curiosity’s relationship with empathic concern. In Study 2, greater attachment anxiety also weakened the relationship between state curiosity and personal distress. These results suggest curiosity may be a way to promote compassion and willingness to help

The ties that bind: university nostalgia fosters relational and collective university engagement

Does nostalgia for one’s time at university predict current intentions to engage with the university? In Study 1, US participants’ nostalgia for their university experience (university nostalgia) at a southern public university predicted stronger intentions to socialize with fellow alumni, attend a future reunion, volunteer for their university, and donate money to their university. Study 2 replicated these findings with alumni from a northeastern private university, and extended them by finding that the links between university nostalgia and university engagement emerged even when controlling for the positivity of university experience. In both studies, feelings of university belonging mediated most of the associations between university nostalgia and university engagement. In Study 2, the positivity of the university experience moderated the relation between university nostalgia and two indices of university engagement. Specifically, university nostalgia was more strongly associated with intentions to attend a reunion and donate money among those who had a negative (compared to positive) university experience. Nostalgia for one’s university past predicts future engagement with the university as well as its members

Development of the Gratitude at Work Scale

Development of a workplace-specific gratitude scale

Gray (Literature) Matters: Evidence of Selective Hypothesis Reporting in Social Psychological Research

Selective reporting practices (SRPs)—adding, dropping, or altering study elements when preparing reports for publication—are thought to increase false positives in scientific research. Yet analyses of SRPs have been limited to self-reports or analyses of pre-registered and published studies. To assess SRPs in social psychological research more broadly, we compared doctoral dissertations defended between 1999 and 2017 with the publications based on those dissertations. Selective reporting occurred in nearly 50% of studies. Fully supported dissertation hypotheses were 3 times more likely to be published than unsupported hypotheses, while unsupported hypotheses were nearly 4 times more likely to be dropped from publications. Few hypotheses were found to be altered or added post hoc. Dissertation studies with fewer supported hypotheses were more likely to remove participants or measures from publications. Selective hypothesis reporting and dropped measures significantly predicted greater hypothesis support in published studies, supporting concerns that SRPs may increase Type 1 error risk

Data from the Human Penguin Project, a cross-national dataset testing social thermoregulation principles

In the Human Penguin Project (N = 1755), 15 research groups from 12 countries collected body temperature, demographic variables, social network indices, seven widely-used psychological scales and two newly developed questionnaires (the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) and the Kama Muta Frequency Scale (KAMF)). They were collected to investigate the relationship between environmental factors (e.g., geographical, climate etc.) and human behaviors, which is a long-standing inquiry in the scientific community. More specifically, the present project was designed to test principles surrounding the idea of social thermoregulation, which posits that social networks help people to regulate their core body temperature. The results showed that all scales in the current project have sufficient to good psychometrical properties. Unlike previous crowdsourced projects, this dataset includes not only the cleaned raw data but also all the validation of questionnaires in 9 different languages, thus providing a valuable resource for psychological scientists who are interested in cross-national, environment-human interaction studies

Many Labs 3: Evaluating Participant Pool Quality across the Academic Semester via Replication

The university participant pool is a key resource for behavioral research, and data quality is believed to vary over the course of the academic semester. This crowdsourced project examined time of semester variation in 10 known effects, 10 individual differences, and 3 data quality indicators over the course of the academic semester in 20 participant pools (N = 2696) and with an online sample (N = 737). Weak time of semester effects were observed on data quality indicators, participant sex, and a few individual differences—conscientiousness, mood, and stress. However, there was little evidence for time of semester qualifying experimental or correlational effects. The generality of this evidence is unknown because only a subset of the tested effects demonstrated evidence for the original result in the whole sample. Mean characteristics of pool samples change slightly during the semester, but these data suggest that those changes are mostly irrelevant for detecting effects