Trait Empathy Modulates Patterns of Personal and Social Emotions During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused profound consequences on people's personal and social feelings worldwide. However, little is known about whether individual differences in empathy, a prosocial trait, may affect the emotional feelings under such threat. To address this, we measured 345 Chinese participants' personal emotions (e.g., active, nervous), social emotions (i.e., fearful and empathetic feelings about various social groups), and their empathy traits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the representational similarity analysis (RSA), we calculated the pattern similarity of personal emotions and found the similarity between the positive and negative emotions was less in the high vs. low empathy groups. In addition, people with high (vs. low) empathy traits were more likely to have fearful and sympathetic feelings about the disease-related people (i.e., depression patients, suspected COVID-19 patients, COVID-19 patients, flu patients, SARS patients, AIDS patients, schizophrenic patients) and showed more pattern dissimilarity in the two social feelings toward the disease-related people. These findings suggest a prominent role of trait empathy in modulating emotions across different domains, strengthening the polarization of personal emotions as well as enlarging social feelings toward a set of stigmatized groups when facing a pandemic threat.

Self-choice preference: The propensity to under-delegate irrespective of sense of control.

People are more likely to make choices themselves than delegate to an agent, even when it may not be the most optimal decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. Previous studies have demonstrated that retaining authority and controllability might be the primary reason for preferring self-choice. The current study asks whether impairment of controllability associated with self-choice can increase the rate of delegation and whether there are self-other discrepancies in self-choice preference. In three studies, we directly manipulated participants' controllability associated with choice through literal instructions (experiment 1) and visual presentation (experiments 2 and 3). We found that participants showed a robust propensity to under-delegate even when they were aware of their impaired controllability associated with self-choice. Moreover, only 40% impairment of controllability (but not 20%) can decrease the propensity to under-delegate. This trend differed between decision-for-self and decision-for-other. These findings suggest that pursuing a sense of control cannot fully explain self-choice preference and appears to occur equally in decisions for oneself as well as for others.