Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person.

Evidence-based interventions to favor more harmonious interactions in difficult relationships remain scarce. This study examined whether compassion training may have beneficial effects in an ongoing tense relationship with a disliked person, by reducing schadenfreude toward them and increasing felt interpersonal closeness. 108 participants were assigned to one of three 5-week trainings in a longitudinal randomized controlled study: compassion training, reappraisal training (emotion regulation control condition), or Italian language training (neutral active control condition). The disliked person was not targeted during the trainings to test potential transfer effects. Misfortune scenarios and a measure of interpersonal closeness were used to test whether schadenfreude and closeness feelings toward a disliked person changed from pre- to post-training, across different experimental and control groups. Only compassion and reappraisal trainees reported a decrease of schadenfreude feelings toward the disliked person compared to their pre-training ratings, no changes were observed in the Italian language training. Importantly, feelings of closeness toward the disliked person increased in the compassion training group compared to the other two groups. This increase of closeness feelings could be a central mechanism for improving social interactions. These transfer effects open new perspectives concerning emotion regulation interventions in conflict resolution.

Back to the future: A way to increase prosocial behavior.

Previous studies suggest a link between future thinking and prosocial behaviors. However, this association is not fully understood at state and trait level. The present study tested whether a brief future thinking induction promoted helping behavior in an unrelated task. In addition, the relation between mental time travel and prosocial behaviors in daily life was tested with questionnaire data. Forty-eight participants filled in questionnaires and were asked to think about the future for one minute or to name animals for one minute (control condition) before playing the Zurich Prosocial Game (a measure of helping behavior). Results revealed that participants in the future thinking condition helped significantly more than participants in the control condition. Moreover, questionnaire data showed that dispositional and positive orientation toward the future and the past was significantly associated with self-reported prosocial behaviors. The present findings suggest that thinking about the future in general has positive transfer effects on subsequent prosocial behavior and that people who think more about the past or future in a positive way engage more in prosocial behavior.

Quarreling After a Sleepless Night: Preliminary Evidence of the Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Interpersonal Conflict.

Although poor sleep has been found to correlate with deteriorations in romantic relationships, its causal impact on interpersonal conflict has not previously been studied. Therefore, 30 couples were randomly assigned to either a single night of total sleep deprivation or a night of normal sleep to test the effects of sleep deprivation on couples' conflict. After the experimental night, all participants discussed a topic of recurrent conflict for 15 min. We collected pre- and post-conflict measures of cortisol, self-reports of feelings, and satisfaction with the conflictual discussion. Multilevel analyses revealed higher cortisol levels during conflict and less positive affect prior to and after the conflict for sleep-deprived couples compared to couples in the control condition. These findings provide initial evidence for a causal negative impact of sleep deprivation on couples' conflicts. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00076-4.

Emotions in attacker-defender conflicts.

The distinction between attackers and defenders might help refine the understanding of the role of emotions in conflicts. Here, we briefly discuss differences between attackers and defenders in terms of appraisals, action tendencies, emotional preferences, and brain activities. Finally, we outline how attackers and defenders may differ in their response to emotion-based interventions that aim to promote conflict resolution.