Cruel to Be Kind: Factors Underlying Altruistic Efforts to Worsen Another Person’s Mood
Copyright policy )Cruel to Be Kind: Factors Underlying Altruistic Efforts to Worsen Another Person’s Mood
When aiming to improve another person’s long-term well-being, people may choose to induce a negative emotion in that person in the short term. We labeled this form of agent-target interpersonal emotion regulation altruistic affect worsening and hypothesized that it may happen when three conditions are met: (a) The agent experiences empathic concern for the target of the affect-worsening process, (b) the negative emotion to be induced helps the target achieve a goal (e.g., anger for confrontation or fear for avoidance), and (c) there is no benefit for the agent. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating perspective-taking instructions and the goal to be achieved while participants ( N = 140) played a computer-based video game. Participants following other-oriented perspective-taking instructions, compared with those following objective perspective-taking instructions, decided to induce more anger in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve a confrontation goal and to induce more fear in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve an avoidance goal.
- University of Salford United Kingdom
- Plymouth University United Kingdom
Adult, Male, Adolescent, Emotions, BF, HM, Anger, Young Adult, Avoidance Learning, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Avoidance Learning/physiology, Fear, Anger/physiology, QP, Altruism, Affect, Video Games, Fear/psychology, Emotions/physiology, Female, Empathy, Empathy/physiology
Adult, Male, Adolescent, Emotions, BF, HM, Anger, Young Adult, Avoidance Learning, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Avoidance Learning/physiology, Fear, Anger/physiology, QP, Altruism, Affect, Video Games, Fear/psychology, Emotions/physiology, Female, Empathy, Empathy/physiology
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