Exercising empathy: The role of adolescents’ developing empathy in conflicts with parents

The goal of the present dissertation was to provide insight into the role of adolescents’ empathy development in adolescent-parent conflict. Two empathy dimensions become increasingly developed in adolescence: emotional empathic concern for others, and the cognitive ability to engage in perspective taking. The first issue we examined is how empathy develops in adolescence. Our results showed that empathic concern predicted adolescents’ development of perspective taking. Furthermore, mothers’ perspective taking predicted their daughters’ perspective taking development. Finally, adolescents’ empathic concern was more stable than their perspective taking. Together, these findings suggest that perspective taking is particularly susceptible to development in adolescence. In another study, we examined differences between adolescents in developmental trajectories of empathy. Prior studies had focused instead on average developmental trajectories across adolescents. We identified groups of high-empathy, average-empathy, and low-empathy adolescents. The empathy differences between these groups became further amplified from early- to mid-adolescence. This highlights the importance of identifying adolescents’ low empathy early, to prevent adolescents from falling further behind their peers. The second issue we investigated is whether empathy development is related to adolescent-parent conflict frequency, and adolescents’ conflict resolution behaviors. We found that the aforementioned low-empathy adolescents and their parents reported significantly more frequent conflict throughout adolescence than the average- and high-empathy adolescents. In another study, we found that adolescents’ perspective taking development was more strongly associated with shifts towards constructive conflict behaviors than empathic concern. In an experiment, we investigated the effects of affective and cognitive empathy inductions on behaviors and outcomes in adolescent-mother conflict discussions. Inducing cognitive empathy reduced adolescents’ conflict escalation, and promoted other-oriented listening for low-perspective taking adolescents. Inducing affective empathy instead promoted active problem solving. For low-empathic concern adolescents, affective and cognitive empathy inductions both promoted outcome satisfaction, but only cognitive empathy promoted perceived fairness. These findings suggested that cognitive empathy in particular allows adolescents to distance themselves from the emotional heat of a conflict and listen to mothers’ point of view, leading to outcomes perceived as both satisfying and fair. Finally, we investigated whether high empathy adolescents are more sensitive to conflict. In one study, we found that high-empathy adolescents’ reports of conflict frequency were in agreement with both parents’ reports throughout adolescence, whereas average and low-empathy adolescents under-reported conflict. This suggests that high-empathy adolescents are more sensitive to the detection of conflict. In a second study, we found that conflict predicted significant emotion dysregulation for high-empathy adolescents, but not for average and low-empathy adolescents. This suggests that high-empathy adolescents are more sensitive to conflict-related emotion dysregulation. Thus, although high empathy was associated with more prosocial conflict behavior across two studies, high-empathy adolescents’ greater sensitivity to conflict suggests that the benefits of high empathy may depend on the family context. When adolescent-parent conflict is relatively frequent, high empathy may render adolescents vulnerable. Parents might thus be well advised to exercise their own empathy and consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of high versus low-empathy adolescents, and attempt to address adolescents’ developing perspective taking to resolve matters amicably

A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates

Using machine learning to identify important predictors of COVID-19 infection prevention behaviors during the early phase of the pandemic

Before vaccines for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became available, a set of infection-prevention behaviors constituted the primary means to mitigate the virus spread. Our study aimed to identify important predictors of this set of behaviors. Whereas social and health psychological theories suggest a limited set of predictors, machine-learning analyses can identify correlates from a larger pool of candidate predictors. We used random forests to rank 115 candidate correlates of infection-prevention behavior in 56,072 participants across 28 countries, administered in March to May 2020. The machine-learning model predicted 52% of the variance in infection-prevention behavior in a separate test sample—exceeding the performance of psychological models of health behavior. Results indicated the two most important predictors related to individual-level injunctive norms. Illustrating how data-driven methods can complement theory, some of the most important predictors were not derived from theories of health behavior—and some theoretically derived predictors were relatively unimportant

Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor

© 2018 The Authors. Do acts of kindness improve the well-being of the actor? Recent advances in the behavioural sciences have provided a number of explanations of human social, cooperative and altruistic behaviour. These theories predict that people will be ‘happy to help’ family, friends, community members, spouses, and even strangers under some conditions. Here we conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the experimental evidence that kindness interventions (for example, performing ‘random acts of kindness’) boost subjective well-being. Our initial search of the literature identified 489 articles; of which 24 (27 studies) met the inclusion criteria (total N = 4045). These 27 studies, some of which included multiple control conditions and dependent measures, yielded 52 effect sizes. Multi-level modeling revealed that the overall effect of kindness on the well-being of the actor is small-to-medium (δ = 0.28). The effect was not moderated by sex, age, type of participant, intervention, control condition or outcome measure. There was no indication of publication bias. We discuss the limitations of the current literature, and recommend that future research test more specific theories of kindness: taking kindness-specific individual differences into account; distinguishing between the effects of kindness to specific categories of people; and considering a wider range of proximal and distal outcomes. Such research will advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of kindness, and help practitioners to maximise the effectiveness of kindness interventions to improve well-being

Longitudinal Linkages Between Father and Mother Autonomy Support and Adolescent Problem Behaviors: Between-Family Differences and Within-Family

Despite existing evidence on negative associations between parental autonomy support and children’s internalizing and externalizing problem behavior, it is difficult to draw conclusions on the effect that parents’ autonomy support has on children’s problem behavior. This study contributed to the existing literature by unraveling the temporal ordering of parental autonomy support and adolescent problem behavior. In addition, this study examined whether these linkages differed by parent’s sex, child sex, and reporter of autonomy support. Data of 497 adolescents (mean age at T1 = 13.03 years, percentage male = 56.9) and their parents from six annual waves of the Dutch study Research on Adolescent Development And Relationships (RADAR) were used. The results showed that stable differences between families explained most linkages between autonomy support and problem behavior. Adolescents with fewer problem behaviors have fathers (both child- and parent-reported) and mothers (only child-reported) who are more autonomy supportive. The results did not differ between boys and girls. The findings suggest that prior studies may have overstated the existence of a causal effect of parental autonomy support on adolescent problem behavior

The influence of fathers and mothers equally sharing childcare responsibilities on children’s cognitive development from early childhood to school age

There is increasing awareness that the intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantages is filtered through intra-familial dynamics, in particular, parenting practices. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated what role the extent to which fathers and mothers equally share childcare responsibilities plays in this transmission. Using data from 2,027 families in a Dutch prospective cohort study, our structural equation modelling analyses showed direct effects of equally sharing responsibilities for playful activities on children’s cognitive development. Additionally, our study yielded some evidence for the hypothesis that equally sharing responsibilities for playful activities mediates the impact of parents’ educational attainment on children’s cognitive development. This suggests that the extent to which fathers and mothers equally share childcare responsibilities functions as an underlying mechanism for maintaining social class disparities in children’s cognitive development. Our findings also suggest that policies and programmes that encourage fathers and mothers to equally share playful activities may help promote children’s cognitive development

A review of applications of the Bayes factor in psychological research

The last 25 years have shown a steady increase in attention for the Bayes factor as a tool for hypothesis evaluation and model selection. The present review highlights the potential of the Bayes factor in psychological research. We discuss six types of applications: Bayesian evaluation of point null, interval, and informative hypotheses, Bayesian evidence synthesis, Bayesian variable selection and model averaging, and Bayesian evaluation of cognitive models. We elaborate what each application entails, give illustrative examples, and provide an overview of key references and software with links to other applications. The paper is concluded with a discussion of the opportunities and pitfalls of Bayes factor applications and a sketch of corresponding future research lines

In pursuit of visual attention: SSVEP frequency-tagging moving targets.

Previous research has shown that visual attention does not always exactly follow gaze direction, leading to the concepts of overt and covert attention. However, it is not yet clear how such covert shifts of visual attention to peripheral regions impact the processing of the targets we directly foveate as they move in our visual field. The current study utilised the co-registration of eye-position and EEG recordings while participants tracked moving targets that were embedded with a 30 Hz frequency tag in a Steady State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) paradigm. When the task required attention to be divided between the moving target (overt attention) and a peripheral region where a second target might appear (covert attention), the SSVEPs elicited by the tracked target at the 30 Hz frequency band were significantly, but transiently, lower than when participants did not have to covertly monitor for a second target. Our findings suggest that neural responses of overt attention are only briefly reduced when attention is divided between covert and overt areas. This neural evidence is in line with theoretical accounts describing attention as a pool of finite resources, such as the perceptual load theory. Altogether, these results have practical implications for many real-world situations where covert shifts of attention may discretely reduce visual processing of objects even when they are directly being tracked with the eyes

Lives versus Livelihoods? Perceived economic risk has a stronger association with support for COVID-19 preventive measures than perceived health risk

This paper examines whether compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures is motivated by wanting to save lives or save the economy (or both), and which implications this carries to fight the pandemic. National representative samples were collected from 24 countries (N = 25,435). The main predictors were (1) perceived risk to contract coronavirus, (2) perceived risk to suffer economic losses due to coronavirus, and (3) their interaction effect. Individual and country-level variables were added as covariates in multilevel regression models. We examined compliance with various preventive health behaviors and support for strict containment policies. Results show that perceived economic risk consistently predicted mitigation behavior and policy support—and its effects were positive. Perceived health risk had mixed effects. Only two significant interactions between health and economic risk were identified—both positive