Agency and communion are fundamental human motives, often conceptualized as being in tension. This study examines the notion that moral exemplars overcome this tension and adaptively integrate these 2 motives within their personality. Participants were 25 moral exemplars-recipients of a national award for extraordinary volunteerism-and 25 demographically matched comparison participants. Each pa...

The literature concerning the relationship between emotional exhaustion and performance led researchers to raise questions about the extent to which the variables are related. In 2 time-lagged samples, the authors found that motivation mediates the emotional exhaustion-job performance relationship. Moreover, the authors found that participants appear to target their investment of resources in r...

Although empathic accuracy is considered a stable skill, few individual difference measures consistently predict performance on Ickes’ (e.g., 2001) empathic accuracy measure. Because past work has shown that women are more empathically accurate than men when female gender roles are made salient before an empathic accuracy task, we hypothesized that self-reported communion and related variables ...

A series of studies found that the personality dimension of unmitigated communion (H. L. Fritz & V. S. Helgeson, 1998) leads negotiators to make concessions to avoid straining relationships. Results indicate that even within the population of successful business executives, this dimension of relational anxiety can be identified distinctly from more general relational orientations, such as agree...

In the present study, we used a valence classification task to investigate the common and distinct neural basis of the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition (agency and communion) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results showed that several brain areas associated with mentalizing, along with the inferior parietal gyrus in the mirror system, showed overlap in resp...

The authors suggest that social comparison research has neglected communal feelings and concerns because it typically asks participants to compare objective characteristics that invite evaluative rankings (e.g., test scores) with acquaintances or strangers without any interaction. The authors asked 138 undergraduates to record their spontaneous social comparisons for 1 week; they found that par...