ANXIETY
(-Anxiety) = (+Empathy
(+Empathy = (-Anxiety)
(-Stress) = (+Empathy
(+Empathy = (-Stress)
(-Fear) = (+Empathy
(+Empathy = (-Fear)
By Kira M. Newman | August 10, 2015
"A study suggests that stress and surprise can hurt your ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes....
In short, my empathy for others plummeted as my anxiety mounted—and a recent paper helps explain this phenomenon by linking anxiety to egocentrism. In doing so, it provides yet another reason why cultivating empathy is so crucial."
Anxious and egocentric: how specific emotions influence perspective taking.
"People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental experiences of anxiety on perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking.
Compared with participants experiencing other negative, high-arousal emotions (i.e., anger or disgust) or neutral feelings, anxious participants displayed greater egocentrism in their mental-state reasoning: They were more likely to describe an object using their own spatial perspective, had more difficulty resisting egocentric interference when identifying an object from others' spatial perspectives, and relied more heavily on privileged knowledge when inferring others' beliefs."
The Isolating Effects of Anxiety
When you are nervous, empathy can fail you
"Presumably, the primary aim of this lamentable endeavor is to establish some sort of interpersonal connection. Unfortunately, though, new research in social psychology suggests that the creeping apprehension a first date may arouse could undermine people’s ability to form just this sort of empathic bond. Anxiety, this research shows, uniquely interferes with “perspective-taking”—that is, people’s capacity to put themselves in others’ shoes."
Anxious and egocentric: how specific emotions influence perspective taking.
Todd, A. R., Forstmann, M., Burgmer, P., Brooks, A. W., & Galinsky,
"People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental experiences of anxiety on perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Compared with participants experiencing other negative, high-arousal emotions (i.e., anger or disgust) or neutral feelings, anxious participants displayed greater egocentrism in their mental-state reasoning"
Todd, A. R., Forstmann, M., Burgmer, P., Brooks, A. W., & Galinsky, A. D. (2015). Anxious and egocentric: How specific emotions influence perspective taking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 374-391.