Can’t get you out of my mind: Empathy, Distress, and Recurring Thoughts about a Person in Need

Research suggests that empathic concern and distress give rise to different patterns of helping behavior. It has been proposed that this difference is caused by the effects of these emotions on recurrent thoughts about the person in need. However, no research has directly investigated this potential explanation. To remedy this, we tested the hypotheses that distress, but not empathic concern, is associated with both anticipated recurring thoughts (Study 1) and experienced recurring thoughts (Study 2) about a victim. We also tested the hypothesis that distress is associated with thoughts about the victim, whereas empathic concern is associated with thoughts about the victim’s situation (Study 3), which is potentially a consequence of the motives associated with each emotion. Lastly, we assessed the causal relations between distress, empathic concern, and recurrent thoughts (Study 4). Overall, results demonstrate a distinctive, and important, pattern of associations among empathic concern, distress, and different forms of recurrent thoughts about an emotion-eliciting stimulus

Cruel to be Kind: Factors Underlying Altruistic Efforts to Worsen Another Person's Mood

When aiming to improve another person’s long-term well-being, people may choose to induce that person to experience a negative emotion in the short term. We labelled this form of agent–target interpersonal emotion regulation altruistic affect worsening and hypothesized that it may happen when three conditions are met: (1) The agents experience empathic concern for the target of the affect-worsening process; (2) the negative emotion to be induced helps the target achieve a goal (anger for confrontation or fear for avoidance); and (3) there is no benefit for the agent. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating perspective taking instructions and the goal to be achieved whilst participants (N = 140) played a computer video game with different goals. Participants following other-oriented perspective taking instructions decided to induce more anger or fear in a supposed fellow participant working to achieve a confrontational or avoidance goal, respectively

Prosociality and life satisfaction: a daily-diary investigation among Spanish university students

With a diary study, we tested the positive effect of prosociality on life satisfaction. Fifty-six Spanish undergraduate students (45 females; Mage = 21.08 years) rated their life satisfaction, prosociality, self-esteem, and physical appearance for 5 consecutive days. Multilevel results indicated that within-individual positive deviations in prosociality (i.e., behaving more prosocial than usual) were uniquely and significantly associated with higher life satisfaction on that specific day. Students’ self-esteem, physical appearance, and positive daily events were also predictive of life satisfaction. Exploratory analyses revealed that the positive effect of prosociality on life satisfaction was significant only for those students with low or medium levels of satisfaction with their physical appearance. The findings are discussed in relation to the individual determinants of subjective well-being during early adulthood

Impact of the Intensive Program of Emotional Intelligence (IPEI) on middle man-agers’ emotional intelligence

Background: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of the Intensive Program of Emo-tional Intelligence (IPEI; Fernández, 2015) on middle managers’ emotional intelligence, as this variable may have a significant impact on personal satisfaction, task performance, and work environment. Method: The intervention was applied on work team supervisors from a big call center, as it is an overlooked sector in this topic. Two-hundred and eighty-two supervisors from a Spanish multinational Madrid-based company (51.4% males and 48.6% females) participated in this study. Participants were assigned to the experimental group (n = 190) or the control group (n = 92) by availability, according to management decision. All supervisors filled in two questionnaires to evaluate the differ-ent components of intrapersonal emotional intelligence (i.e., attention, clarity, and repair; TMMS-24; Fernández-Berrocal, Extremera, & Ramos, 2004) and cognitive and affec-tive empathy (i.e., perspective taking, emotion understanding, empathic joy, and person-al distress; TECA; López-Pérez, Fernández, & Abad, 2008). Results: The findings showed an increase in the studied variables for the experimental group. Conclusions: The obtained results support middle managers’ training on emotional competences through short, efficient, and economic programs, and it was discussed potential limita-tions and implications of the obtained results

Children’s and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Happiness at School and its Relation with their own Happiness and their Academic Performance

Previous research on children’s and adolescents’ well-being at school has been focused on the possible determinants. However, no previous research has analysed children’s and adolescents’ lay-beliefs or conceptualizations of happiness at school. In the present work, we studied children’s (N = 104, 9-10-year-olds) and adolescents’ (N = 113, 15-16-year-olds) conceptualizations of happiness at school and its link with self-reported happiness (assessed three months later) and academic achievement (assessed seven months later). For both samples, seven conceptualizations emerged: happiness as ‘being with friends’, ‘being praised’, ‘getting good grades’, ‘learning’, ‘leisure’, ‘enjoyment’, and ‘helping’. Age differences appeared for the conceptualizations of ‘being friends’ and ‘helping’, as children mentioned significantly more the former and adolescents the latter. No gender differences emerged. For adolescents, the conceptualizations of happiness at school as ‘being with friends’, ‘being praised’, ‘helping’, and not ‘having leisure time’ were positively related to self-reported happiness, which was positively related to academic achievement. For children, none of the conceptualizations were positively related to self-reported happiness. The conceptualization of happiness as ‘learning’ was positively related to academic achievement. The results are discussed in regards to their implications for children’s and adolescents’ well-being at school

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Children: Age, Gender and Cross-cultural Differences using a Serious Game

Interpersonal emotion regulation entails a wide array of strategies aimed at influencing others’ emotions. Despite its importance for successful social interactions, only a few studies have evaluated interpersonal emotion regulation in children. In detail, the study of developmental changes in the use of emotion regulation strategies overlooked age, gender and cultural differences across different emotions. To address this gap, the present study used the serious game Emodiscovery, a simulation game targeted at 8-10 year-olds, which measures the strategies selected by children to improve the emotions of anger, sadness, and fear displayed by 3D virtual characters. One-hundred British (M = 9.10 years; 39% girls) and 108 Spanish (M = 9.04, 44% girls) 8-10 year-olds played three different levels or scenarios of the game. In each level, the character displayed a negative emotion (i.e., sadness, anger, and fear, respectively) and children were first asked to indicate what emotion the character was feeling and afterwards to interact three times with the character to improve his/her mood. In each interaction, four possible regulation strategies (two adaptive and two maladaptive) were displayed for children to select. Results showed that in the scenario where the character was displaying sadness, 8-year-olds chose significantly less adaptive strategies than 10-years-olds. In the scenario where the character was angry, boys who accurately recognized the emotion of anger chose more adaptive strategies than those who did not recognize the emotion. For the scenario depicting fear, boys chose less adaptive strategies than girls. The obtained results highlight the importance of looking at specific emotions when researching interpersonal emotion regulation

Cheering My Friends up: The Unique Role of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Strategies in Social Competence

A systematic investigation has been lacking regarding children’s deliberate regulation of others’ emotions which is labelled interpersonal emotion regulation (ER). Based on a theoretically derived model of Interpersonal Affect Classification (IAC, Niven et al., 2009), we examined children’s interpersonal ER strategy use in the peer group. Participants were 398 4th and 5th grade children from the Midwestern United States. Children rated themselves regarding their use of intrapersonal and interpersonal ER strategies as well as attention to friends’ emotions. Teacher-report and peer nominations were used to assess social competence regarding prosocial behavior and emotion sharing. Awareness of and attention to friends’ emotions were positively and more strongly associated with interpersonal ER than intrapersonal ER. Children reported affective engagement most strongly followed by humor, cognitive engagement, and attention to improve friends’ feelings. Among the four interpersonal ER strategies, only affective engagement was uniquely associated with social competence; intrapersonal ER was not associated with social competence. The findings support the significance of broadening the focus of ER to the interpersonal domain to promote the development of children’s ER and social competence

High spatial resolution and high contrast optical speckle imaging with FASTCAM at the ORM

In this paper, we present an original observational approach, which combines, for the first time, traditional speckle imaging with image post-processing to obtain in the optical domain diffraction-limited images with high contrast (1e-5) within 0.5 to 2 arcseconds around a bright star. The post-processing step is based on wavelet filtering an has analogy with edge enhancement and high-pass filtering. Our I-band on-sky results with the 2.5-m Nordic Telescope (NOT) and the lucky imaging instrument FASTCAM show that we are able to detect L-type brown dwarf companions around a solar-type star with a contrast DI~12 at 2" and with no use of any coronographic capability, which greatly simplifies the instrumental and hardware approach. This object has been detected from the ground in J and H bands so far only with AO-assisted 8-10 m class telescopes (Gemini, Keck), although more recently detected with small-class telescopes in the K band. Discussing the advantage and disadvantage of the optical regime for the detection of faint intrinsic fluxes close to bright stars, we develop some perspectives for other fields, including the study of dense cores in globular clusters. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that high contrast considerations are included in optical speckle imaging approach.Comment: Proceedings of SPIE conference - Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III (Conference 7735), San Diego 201

The positivity scale: Concurrent and factorial validity across late childhood and early adolescence

Despite the well-established protective functions of positivity (i.e., a dispositional selfevaluative tendency to view oneself, life, and future under a positive outlook) from middle adolescence to old age, its reliable assessment and contribution to a proper psychological functioning have received little attention during previous developmental phases. In this article, we aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties and construct validity of the eight-item Positivity Scale (P Scale; Caprara et al., 2012) during late childhood and early adolescence in a sample of British students (N = 742; 48% boys) from both primary (M age = 10.75, SD = 0.52) and secondary schools (M age = 13.38 years, SD = 0.94). First, results from confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) attested to the plausibility of the hypothesized 1-factor structure of the P Scale in a revised CFA model including the correlation between the residuals of two items similar in their wording. Next, we found evidence for strong (scalar) measurement invariance of the P Scale across late childhood and early adolescence as well as for its concurrent validity as indicated by expected relations of positivity to indicators of adjustment (i.e., prosocial behavior) and maladjustment (i.e., externalizing and internalizing problems). Overall, these findings support the concurrent and factorial validity of the P Scale as a short self-report instrument to measure children's tendency to view their experience from a positive stance. We discuss the implications of our results for improving the wording of the items composing P Scale as well as for understanding the dispositional mechanisms conducive to psychological health and wellbeing across late childhood and early adolescence