Too much experience: A desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking.

Too much experience: a desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking.

People often use their own feelings as a basis to predict others' feelings. For example, when trying to gauge how much someone else enjoys a television show, people might think "How much do I enjoy it?" and use this answer as basis for estimating others' reactions. Although personal experience (such as actually watching the show oneself) often improves empathic accuracy, we found that gaining t...

Perspective Taking and Racial Bias 1 Running Head: PERSPECTIVE TAKING AND RACIAL BIAS Perspective Taking Combats Automatic Expressions of Racial Bias

Five experiments investigated the hypothesis that perspective taking—actively contemplating others’ psychological experiences—attenuates automatic expressions of racial bias. Across the first three experiments, participants who adopted the perspective of a Black target in an initial context subsequently exhibited more positive automatic interracial evaluations, with changes in automatic evaluat...

Teenage Blood Donors: Are We Asking Too Little and Taking Too Much?

Young blood donors contribute substantially to the US blood supply, yet these are the donors at greatest risk of immediate reactions and other adverse health effects related to their blood donations. Sixteen and 17-year-old adolescents constitute only 2.8% of the US population, but they contribute an estimated 10% of the blood supply, with more than 1 million donations per year.1 Mass recruitme...

How much vitamin A is too much?

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

In this perspective article, we consider the relationship between experience sharing and turn-taking. There is much evidence suggesting that human social interaction is permeated by two temporal organizations: (1) the sequential framework of turn-taking and (2) the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity. From this perspective, we introduce two alternative hypotheses about how the relatio...