Journal
COGNITIVE THERAPY AND RESEARCH
Volume 40, Issue 1, Pages 38-45Publisher
SPRINGER/PLENUM PUBLISHERS
DOI: 10.1007/s10608-015-9718-0
Keywords
Social anxiety; Empathy; Empathy gap; Social pain; Emotion perception
Categories
Funding
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
- SSHRC research Grant
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We examined whether dispositional social anxiety influenced empathy for individuals who experience aversive social events. Participants (N = 121) were randomly assigned to an experimental condition designed to increase state anxiety via social threat or to a control condition. They then observed videos of target individuals discussing high school events in which they were either socially included or excluded. Both participants and targets rated the emotions the targets felt when discussing those situations. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that social anxiety was associated with greater accuracy for targets' negative social emotions but only under conditions of social threat. These results suggest that individual differences in social anxiety may influence empathic accuracy for others' social pain.
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