Abstract
Social cognition allows humans to understand and predict other people’s behavior by inferring or sharing their emotions, intentions and beliefs. Few studies have investigated the impact of one’s own emotional state on understanding others. Here, we tested the effect of being in an angry state on empathy and theory of mind (ToM). In a between-groups design we manipulated anger status with different paradigms in three studies (autobiographical recall (N = 45), negative feedback (N = 49), frustration (N = 46)) and checked how this manipulation affected empathic accuracy and performance in the EmpaToM. All paradigms were successful in inducing mild anger. We did not find the expected effect of anger on empathy or ToM performance but observed small behavioral changes. Together, our results validate the use of three different anger induction paradigms and speak for rather weak behavioral effects of mild state anger on empathy and ToM.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0255068 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 7 July 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 Weiblen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.