Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Psychology

Major Professor

Edelyn Verona, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Jonathan Rottenberg, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Peter Clayson, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Joseph Vandello, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Brent Small, Ph.D.

Keywords

compassion, distress cue, empathy, fearful facial expression, innate releasing stimuli

Abstract

Empathy, care, and prosocial behavior are essential to social group cohesion, and antisocial and violent criminal behavior, on the other pole, can cause serious disruptions in group cohesion and negatively impact society as a whole. Different psychopathological conditions tend to present with impairments in affective empathy/caring and prosocial behavior, as is observed in psychopathic traits, which are tied to antisocial behavior and outcomes. It is essential to understand how empathy and care function, both in psychopathology and normal prosocial functioning, in order to inform interventions for empathy/care deficits and avoid the potential harm that such deficits can cause for others (e.g., through aggressive/violent behavior).

The present two-experiment study involved the use and attempted validation of a paradigm to assess approach behavior in response to stimuli (e.g., persons in distress) hypothesized to be associated with activation of empathy, conceptualized as a “care drive” with associated behavioral predispositions. The goal was to extend and conceptually replicate findings from the few studies that have asserted that the dominant behavioral response to fearful facial expressions is motoric approach, as an indicator of care drive activation (Hammer & Marsh, 2015; Kaltwasser et al., 2017; Marsh, Ambady, et al., 2005). Specifically, Experiment 1 of the study tested whether adult fearful facial expressions (representing persons in distress) elicited faster approach (relative to avoidance) behavior on the Visual Approach/Avoidance of the Self Task (VAAST) across individuals recruited from an undergraduate student sample. Experiment 1 also examined the construct validity of the fear-anger VAAST through exploring moderation by trait empathy and participant gender. Experiment 2 attempted to replicate and extend the results of Experiment 1 to examine whether the tendency to approach fearful faces is associated with the strength of approach motivation for infant faces (in a separate task), individual differences in trait empathy and participant gender, as well as our key moderator, psychopathic traits.

Overall, the results did not show evidence of faster approach responses (relative to avoidance) to fearful faces, as would be expected if fearful faces serve as releasing stimuli for the care drive. Further, the construct validity analyses did not support that the fear-anger VAAST scores reflected a tendency toward care drive-related behavior, if we operationalize the tendency to approach fearful faces as reflecting care drive strength. On the one hand, possible methodological components, including the task’s design and stimuli used, may have impacted the results, leading them to differ from those of previous studies using approach-avoidance tasks to examine this phenomenon. On the other hand, results of this study and past studies suggest variability in the extent to which individuals show a bias toward approach vs. avoidance reactions to fearful faces, and as such, it appears that the care drive and associated behavioral manifestations may be more context-dependent than previously assumed. Future research using the VAAST for this purpose should consider explicitly contextualizing the nature of the approach and avoidance responses to aid in interpretability. Additionally, efforts should be made to directly replicate the original Marsh et al. (2005), Hammer and Marsh (2015), and Kaltwasser et al. (2017) studies with larger sample sizes, in order to further examine the validity of their conclusions that the dominant response to fearful faces is approach.

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