Defining key concepts for mental state attribution.

The terminology used in discussions on mental state attribution is extensive and lacks consistency. In the current paper, experts from various disciplines collaborate to introduce a shared set of concepts and make recommendations regarding future use.

Exploring Actual and Presumed Links between Accurately Inferring Contents of Other People's Minds and Prosocial Outcomes.

The term "empathic accuracy" has been applied to people's ability to infer the contents of other people's minds-that is, other people's varying feelings and/or thoughts over the course of a social interaction. However, despite the ease of intuitively linking this skill to competence in helping professions such as counseling, the "empathic" prefix in its name may have contributed to overestimating its association with prosocial traits and behaviors. Accuracy in reading others' thoughts and feelings, like many other skills, can be used toward prosocial-but also malevolent or morally neutral-ends.

Cues trigger depiction schemas for robots, as they do for human identities.

Clark and Fischer's three levels of depiction of social robots can be conceptualized as cognitive schemas. When interacting with social robots, humans shift between schemas similarly to how they shift between identity category schemas when interacting with other humans. Perception of mind, context cues, and individual differences underlie perceptions of which level of depiction is most situationally relevant.

No need to take what you already have: perspective taking's effect on empathic concern for low-need targets.

Recent studies have (quite persuasively) challenged a previous body of work suggesting that taking the perspective of targets described as experiencing highly distressing plights would increase empathic concern for those targets. In the current study, we test whether perspective-taking might still increase empathic concern for targets in less negative predicaments. College participants (N = 303) were given either perspective-taking instructions, or no instructions, before reading posts from targets describing negative, but not terrible, experiences.

The link between perspective-taking and prosociality - Not as universal as you might think.

The path from perspective-taking to prosocial behavior is not as straightforward or robust as it is often assumed to be. In some contexts, imagining the viewpoint of other person leads the perspective taker to thoughts about how that person might have negative thoughts or intentions toward them. It can also prompt other kinds of counter-productive egocentric projection.

When Polarization Triggers Out-Group "Counter-Projection" Across the Political Divide.

Although projecting one's own characteristics onto another person is pervasive, "counter-projection," or seeing the of oneself in others is also sometimes found, with implications for intergroup conflict. After a focused review of previous studies finding counter-projection (often unexpectedly), we map conditions for counter-projection to an individual out-group member. Counter-projection requires identified antagonistic groups, is moderated by in-group identity, and is moderated by which information is assessed in the target person.

It Is Hard to Read Minds without Words: Cues to Use to Achieve Empathic Accuracy.

When faced with the task of trying to "read" a stranger's thoughts, what cues can perceivers use? We explore two predictors of empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately infer another person's thoughts): use of stereotypes about the target's group, and use of the target's own words. A sample of 326 White American undergraduate students were asked to infer the dynamic thoughts of Middle Eastern male targets, using Ickes' (Ickes et al. 1990) empathic accuracy paradigm.

Perspective taking: motivation and impediment to shared reality.

Taking another person's perspective requires acknowledging that there is another viewpoint, which can challenge the concept of shared reality. At the same time, taking someone else's perspective can also preserve shared reality, by helping to explain how aspects of the world may be perceived differently by two different individuals. Thus, establishing or maintaining shared reality may be a primary motivator for perspective taking in everyday life.

Superfluous neuroscience information makes explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing.

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing? Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure? To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types. Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences.

From east to west: accessibility and bias in self-other comparative judgments.

People often weight information about the self more heavily than information about other people when making social comparative judgments. One possible explanation for this egocentrism is that information about the self is more accessible than information about others. We examine this egocentrism in samples from the United States and Taiwan.

When trying hard isn't natural: women's belonging with and motivation for male-dominated STEM fields as a function of effort expenditure concerns.

Feeling like one exerts more effort than others may influence women's feelings of belonging with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and impede their motivation. In Study 1, women STEM graduate students perceived they exerted more effort than peers to succeed. For women, but not men, this effort expenditure perception predicted a decreased sense of belonging, which in turn decreased motivation.

Reading between the minds: the use of stereotypes in empathic accuracy.

An ideal empathizer may attend to another person's behavior in order to understand that person, but it is also possible that accurately understanding other people involves top-down strategies. We hypothesized that perceivers draw on stereotypes to infer other people's thoughts and that stereotype use increases perceivers' accuracy. In this study, perceivers (N = 161) inferred the thoughts of multiple targets.

Parallel constraint satisfaction in memory-based decisions.

Three studies sought to investigate decision strategies in memory-based decisions and to test the predictions of the parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) model for decision making (Glöckner & Betsch, 2008). Time pressure was manipulated and the model was compared against simple heuristics (take the best and equal weight) and a weighted additive strategy. From PCS we predicted that fast intuitive decision making is based on compensatory information integration and that decision time increases and confidence decreases with increasing inconsistency in the decision task.

Giving birth to empathy: the effects of similar experience on empathic accuracy, empathic concern, and perceived empathy.

This study examined how having had a similar experience to a target person's experience affected three facets of empathy: empathic concern, empathic accuracy, and perceived empathy. Women who had never been mothers, who were pregnant with their first child, or who had just given birth to their first child (20 in each group) served as perceivers, watching videotapes of new-mother targets (N = 20) and providing measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. When perceivers had experienced the same life events as the targets, they expressed greater empathic concern and reported greater understanding of targets.

Empathy in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Using naturalistic stimuli, we assessed the ability to infer what other people are feeling in three groups of participants: healthy elderly adults, patients suffering from the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD-b), and patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD). After watching videotaped interviews of everyday people (nonactors) discussing an emotionally relevant event in their lives, participants answered questions regarding the interviewee's feelings. Both patient groups inferred emotions as accurately as the healthy elderly, provided the emotions were displayed unambiguously and consistently across the interview.