The Musical Sign That You Have High Empathy (M)

Music is much more than just entertainment: it is a way for people to connect with each other.

Music is much more than just entertainment: it is a way for people to connect with each other.


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The Best Way Of Empathising Might Surprise You

Most people are wrong about the best way to empathise with others.

Most people are wrong about the best way to empathise with others.

Surprisingly, systematic reasoning beats gut instinct for working out what other people are thinking and feeling.

The result is surprising as the same research found that people thought that gut instinct would triumph.

Dr Jennifer Lerner, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others – that is, to be empathically accurate.

Some are better at this than others, a difference that may be explained in part by mode of thought.

Until now, however, little was known about which mode of thought, intuitive versus systematic, offers better accuracy in perceiving another’s feelings.”

In the first of a series of studies, the psychologists found that most people believed that relying on gut instinct was the best way to read and understand other people.

Actually, though, when they checked this out scientifically, it emerged that carefully analysing information worked better.

Dr Christine Ma-Kellams, the study’s first author, said:

“Importantly, three out of the four studies presented here relied on actual professionals and managers.

This sample represents a highly relevant group for which to test empathic accuracy, given the importance of empathic accuracy for a host of workplace outcomes, including negotiations, worker satisfaction and workplace performance.”

One of the studies found that people who habitually thought systematically rather than intuitively were better at reading other people.

Another study, though, encouraged half the participants to think in a systematic way with the following instruction:

“…write about a situation in which carefully reasoning through a situation led them in the right direction and resulted in a positive outcome.”

The other group were encouraged to think intuitively.

Once again, analytical thought prevailed.

Dr Lerner said:

“The many settings in which the value of intuition is extolled — for example a job interview — may need to be reassessed with a more nuanced perspective.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Ma-Kellams & Lerner, 2016).

Empathy Can Sometimes Motivate This Dark, Unjustified Behaviour (M)

Empathy has a dark side which is at odds with its image as a cure-all for the world’s problems.

Empathy has a dark side which is at odds with its image as a cure-all for the world's problems.


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A Trick To Read People’s Emotions From Their Eyes

Whether people widen or narrow their eyes gives you a huge amount of information about their emotions.

Whether people widen or narrow their eyes gives you a huge amount of information about their emotions.

When the eyes narrow it signals that someone is discriminating, research finds.

This could mean they are angry, suspicious, aggressive or contemptuous.

When the eyes widen, though, it means they are highly sensitive to the information they are receiving.

This could mean their are interested, awe-struck or even feeling cowardly.

The way the eyes move to communicate emotions is linked to how we actually use our eyes for vision.

For example, narrowing our eyes allows us to see farther, while opening them wider lets in more light.

Dr Daniel H. Lee, the study’s first author, explained:

“For example, if you’re watching ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ and wonder why when Larry David squints his eyes that conveys scrutiny, our work offers a theory that explains it.

Narrowing the eyes for visual scrutiny also communicates scrutiny.”

The conclusions come from a study in which people looked at pairs of eyes showing different emotions and shapes.

Despite the tremendous complexity of facial expressions, the widening and narrowing of the eyes is surprisingly informative.

Dr Lee said:

“Human expressions are highly complex — when enumerating our facial muscles, we computed that there are at least 3.7 x 1016 different expression combinations, which is about the same probabilistic space as two Powerball jackpots.

We looked at a subset of this space — just the eye region — and found that one simple physical dimension (widening vs. narrowing) explained a majority of this complex space in social communication.”

The eyes remain vital to understanding other people’s emotions, even when we can see the rest of the face, the researchers found.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Lee & Anderson, 2017).

People Prone To This Emotion Are Better At Reading Facial Expressions (M)

Some good can come of this negative emotion — but less so from its close cousin, shame.

Some good can come of this negative emotion -- but less so from its close cousin, shame.


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The Type of People Most Likely To Be Manipulative, Self-Admiring Psychopaths (M)

The type of people most likely to be psychopaths, narcissists and manipulators.

The type of people most likely to be psychopaths, narcissists and manipulators.


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Grandmothers Have Strong Empathic Link To Grandchildren (M)

Grandmothers feel what their grandchildren are feeling, but want to understand the thought processes of their adult children.

Grandmothers feel what their grandchildren are feeling, but want to understand the thought processes of their adult children.


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You Can Instantly ‘See’ Through Another Person’s Eyes

Perspective taking helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

Perspective taking helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

We can spontaneously form images of the world from another person’s perspective, research finds.

This allows us to virtually see things from another person’s perspective in an instant.

The new study shows our brains can change our perspective without doing any ‘mental rotation’.

Mental rotation is our ability to manipulate objects in our minds and, cognitively, it is hard work.

Ms Eleanor Ward, the study’s first author, explains that sometimes we don’t need to do this mental rotation:

“Imagine you’re in a car and you see a pedestrian crossing the road, and a bus is travelling at speed towards the crossing.

Suddenly you realize the driver hasn’t seen the pedestrian and could hit them, so you beep your horn.

How did you make this split-second decision?

Our study suggests you automatically put yourself in the bus driver’s shoes and saw the scene through their eyes.”

The results come from a study in which 203 people had to judge whether letters had been rotated or not.

Below is an example:

All the Rs on the top row are the ‘same’ R rotated.

The Rs on the bottom row are all mirror-image Rs and are also the ‘same’ R.

The Rs on the top row are not the same as the Rs on the bottom row.

The results of the study showed that people were much quicker to spot whether the letters matched when they took someone else’s perspective.

In other words, they didn’t have to mentally rotate the images — they ‘saw’ the image through the other person’s eyes.

Dr Patric Bach, study co-author, said:

“Perspective taking is an important part of social cognition.

It helps us understand how the world looks from another’s point of view.

It is important for many everyday activities in which we need interact with other people.

It helps us to empathize with them, or to work out what they are thinking.

Our study provides new insights that people can do this because they very quickly and spontaneously form a mental image of how the world looks to another person.

As soon as we have such a mental image, it is easy to put ourselves in the other person’s place and to predict how they will behave.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Ward et al., 2019).