Stephanie D Preston
University of Michigan, Psychology, Faculty Member
- Behavioral Neuroscientist and Empirical Psychologistedit
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Empathy and altruism are both “prosocial emotions.” They are most often discussed together under the rubric of “empathy-based altruism” theories, which allow for a truly other-oriented and selfless motivation to give. In addition, most... more
Empathy and altruism are both “prosocial emotions.” They are most often discussed together under the rubric of “empathy-based altruism” theories, which allow for a truly other-oriented and selfless motivation to give. In addition, most integrative theories of empathy-based altruism assume that this prosocial motivation evolved from the need for altricial mammals to care for helpless offspring, which was extended in evolutionary history to group members and even strangers. This view is widespread and empirically supported. However, there are many times when empathy does not produce altruism and when altruism does not derive from shared affect; there are also prosocial phenomena that are overlooked and distorted by oversimplifications of the empathy-altruism hypothesis. The current chapter reviews empathy and altruism, including definitional issues, distinct features in empathy versus altruism, the neural and physiological mechanisms behind empathy and altruism, and how the two interact during a typical prosocial act, focusing on points of contention or confusion in the literature.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Animal Behavior, Medicine, Comparative psychology, and 15 moreComparative, Psychological Well Being, Aggression, Movement, Female, Animals, Male, Heart rate, Pilot study, Rhesus macaques, Grooming, Macaca Mulatta, Physical Environment, Social Behavior, and Pilot Projects
Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Evolution, Medicine, Behavioral Neuroscience, and 15 moreComparative psychology, Helping Behavior, Emotions, Empathy, Humans, Child, Animals, Facilitation, Mental Disorders, Biological evolution, Inclusive Fitness, Adult, Human Perception, Age Groups, and Haplorhini
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Only a broad theory that looks across levels of analysis can encompass the many perspectives on the phenomenon of empathy. We address the major points of our commentators by emphasizing that the basic perception-action process, while... more
Only a broad theory that looks across levels of analysis can encompass the many perspectives on the phenomenon of empathy. We address the major points of our commentators by emphasizing that the basic perception-action process, while automatic, is subject to control and modulation, and is greatly affected by experience and context because of the role of representations. The model can explain why empathy seems phenomenologically more effortful than reflexive, and why there are different levels of empathy across individuals, ages, and species.
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How the body and brain respond to a gentle stroke dynamically changes depending on how familiar someone is with the other person.
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IntroductionWhy do people help strangers? Prior research suggests that empathy motivates bystanders to respond to victims in distress. However, this work has revealed relatively little about the role of the motor system in human altruism,... more
IntroductionWhy do people help strangers? Prior research suggests that empathy motivates bystanders to respond to victims in distress. However, this work has revealed relatively little about the role of the motor system in human altruism, even though altruism is thought to have originated as an active, physical response to close others in immediate need. We therefore investigated whether a motor preparatory response contributes to costly helping.MethodsTo accomplish this objective, we contrasted three charity conditions that were more versus less likely to elicit an active motor response, based on the Altruistic Response Model. These conditions described charities that (1) aided neonates versus adults, (2) aided victims requiring immediate versus preparatory support, and (3) provided heroic versus nurturant aid. We hypothesized that observing neonates in immediate need would elicit stronger brain activation in motor-preparatory regions.ResultsConsistent with an evolutionary, caregiv...
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Understanding community members' flood risk perceptions is critical for developing new approaches to managing flood risks for climate resilience. “Risk as feelings” has informed research on how people perceive flood risks based on... more
Understanding community members' flood risk perceptions is critical for developing new approaches to managing flood risks for climate resilience. “Risk as feelings” has informed research on how people perceive flood risks based on intuition and personal experiences, complementing experts' technical assessment. However, attention has been primarily on riverine and coastal flooding. We expand the “risk as feelings” concept to investigate community members' risk perceptions of urban pluvial flooding as well as perceived safety of novel vs. familiar nature-based solutions (NBS). For the novel practice, we focus on floodable sites that temporarily inundate urban open spaces under storm conditions. For the familiar practice, we focus on retention ponds that store excessive runoff under storm conditions. Data were collected through visualization-assisted surveys of residents from high and low flood hazard areas in three US cities (N = 884). We found that over half of respondent...
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IntroductionPeople exhibit a strong attachment to possessions, observed in behavioral economics through loss aversion using new items in the Endowment or IKEA effects and in clinical psychology through pathological trouble discarding... more
IntroductionPeople exhibit a strong attachment to possessions, observed in behavioral economics through loss aversion using new items in the Endowment or IKEA effects and in clinical psychology through pathological trouble discarding domestic items in Hoarding Disorder. These fields rarely intersect, but both document a reticence to relinquish a possessed item, even at a cost, which is associated with feelings of loss but can include enhanced positive states as well.MethodsTo demonstrate the shared properties of these loss-related ownership effects, we developed the Pretzel Decorating Task (PDT), which concurrently measures overvaluation of one’s own over others’ items and feelings of loss associated with losing a possession, alongside enhanced positive appraisals of one’s items and an effort to save them. The PDT was piloted with 31 participants who decorated pretzels and responded to their own or others’ items during functional neuroimaging (fMRI). Participants observed one item p...
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Abstract Pro-environmental appeals that strive to protect a natural area often invoke psychological ownership, or a personal, emotional connection to the place. However, in Western cultures, legal ownership is often suggested as a way to... more
Abstract Pro-environmental appeals that strive to protect a natural area often invoke psychological ownership, or a personal, emotional connection to the place. However, in Western cultures, legal ownership is often suggested as a way to preserve natural resources and avoid the “commons problem.” Based on research on human prosocial behavior, we hypothesized that psychological ownership would be a more effective way to preserve natural resources. Using an online U.S. sample (N = 543), we manipulated people's sense of ownership for natural areas, with a fully-factorial design. We confirmed that activating the motives of ownership produced a sense of psychological ownership of the place and “mine-ness,” associated with similar psychological ownership attributes as occurs in other domains (i.e., intimate familiarity, incorporation into the self-identity, investment of time/effort, positive memories and experiences). Legal owners also experienced a sense of mine-ness and felt more control and territoriality over the place, but felt less of a psychological connection and rated the psychological attributes lower. As predicted, psychological ownership increased people's willingness to protect and oppose exploiting natural areas—particularly for self-reported willingness and hours donated to preserve the place. This may explain why legal ownership often fails to reduce environmental exploitation in Western populations, despite fostering a sense of responsibility toward owned resources. Invoking psychological ownership may be a more effective way to encourage environmental protection.
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Abstract Clinical compulsive washing and hoarding are intercorrelated and share comorbidities even though they are distinct and appear to manifest through opposing extremes of cleanliness and disorder (respectively). We attempted to... more
Abstract Clinical compulsive washing and hoarding are intercorrelated and share comorbidities even though they are distinct and appear to manifest through opposing extremes of cleanliness and disorder (respectively). We attempted to resolve this paradox by testing five hypotheses in online, non-clinical samples (Nstudy 1 = 123, Nstudy 2 = 177, Nstudy 3 = 217). We replicated the intercorrelation of washing and hoarding tendencies in all studies, despite observing non-clinical individual differences. Both washing and hoarding were associated with anxiety, depression, and fears of social rejection and failure, but they were also distinguishable. Compulsive washing was associated with greater anxiety, disgust, perceptions of infection vulnerability, and the desire to organize a cluttered space, whereas hoarding was associated with reduced concerns about germs and full or cluttered spaces and higher concerns about assault, threats to safety, and insects. A third study tested and confirmed the hypothesis that washing and hoarding may be related because they are adaptive in combination during stressful conditions, like a global pandemic. During COVID-19, washing and hoarding tendencies were even more strongly interrelated, and disease-avoidant behaviors like wearing a mask and avoiding people increased with washing tendencies but decreased with hoarding tendencies. Overlapping psychopathological states can be distinguished even in non-clinical samples through psychopathological profiles and the content of concerns—that shift with one's context. Treatment may benefit from not only working to cease undesirable behaviors but also from ameliorating root fears and anxieties that are dissociable by condition and individual but not always linked to the behavioral expression.
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The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a well–studied experimental paradigm known to simulate both intact and impaired real-world decision making in choice tasks that involve uncertain payoffs. Prior work has used computational reinforcement... more
The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a well–studied experimental paradigm known to simulate both intact and impaired real-world decision making in choice tasks that involve uncertain payoffs. Prior work has used computational reinforcement learning models to successfully reproduce a range of task phenomena. In this prior work a set of models were fit to individual decision making data, the best-fit models were selected based on group-averaged metrics, and then theoretical conclusions were drawn based on group-averaged parameters. In the present work we investigate the performance of this class of reinforcement learning models in fitting individual data. This class of learning models has provided a useful starting point for characterizing decision making performance in the aggregate. However, we demonstrate that no one best-fit model aptly captures individual differences and our results caution against using aggregate parameters from best fit models to characterize decision making across ...
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Caching food is an economic, decision-making process that requires animals to take many factors into account, including the risk of pilferage. However, little is known about how food-storing animals determine the risk of pilferage. In... more
Caching food is an economic, decision-making process that requires animals to take many factors into account, including the risk of pilferage. However, little is known about how food-storing animals determine the risk of pilferage. In this study, the authors examined the effect of a dominant competitor species on the caching and behavior of Merriam’s kangaroo rat (Dipodomys merriami). The authors found that, as with conspecific competitors, kangaroo rats did not alter caching in response to the mere presence of a heterospecific competitor, but moved caches to an unpreferred area when the competitor’s presence was paired with pilferage. These data suggest that Merriam’s kangaroo rat assesses pilfer risk from actual pilferage by a competitor and adaptively alters cache strategy to minimize future risk. Many species including birds, rodents, and humans cache food in order to ensure even access despite an uneven supply (Vander Wall, 1990). In order for this behavior to be effective, ani...
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We investigated the effects of pilferage on caching behavior in the Merriam’s kangaroo rat by manipulating two factors associated with pilferage: the presence of a conspecific, and the opportunity for pilferage. In one experiment we... more
We investigated the effects of pilferage on caching behavior in the Merriam’s kangaroo rat by manipulating two factors associated with pilferage: the presence of a conspecific, and the opportunity for pilferage. In one experiment we assessed animals in either ‘‘Stealer’ ’ or ‘‘Victim’ ’ roles and measured changes in caching, space use, and behavior after caches were pilfered. Victims shifted from a majority scatter-hoarding to a majority larder-hoarding strategy after their caches were pilfered by the Stealer. In Experiment 2, we measured changes after exposure to a conspecific when there was no pilferage, with or without prior exposure to pilferage from Experiment 1. Merriam’s kangaroo rats were vigilant when a conspecific was present, but did not change cache strategy. Prior exposure did not have any major effect on caching or behavior. Food storage is an economic decision that is often made by a solitary forager. Our results suggest that social competition nonetheless influences ...
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You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself
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Affect and emotion have potent motivational properties that can be leveraged to promote desirable behavior change. Although interventions often employ fear appeals in an effort to motivate change, both theory and a growing body of... more
Affect and emotion have potent motivational properties that can be leveraged to promote desirable behavior change. Although interventions often employ fear appeals in an effort to motivate change, both theory and a growing body of empirical evidence suggest that positive affect and emotions can promote change by serving as proximal rewards for desired behaviors. This article reviews examples of such efforts in the domains of healthy diet and exercise, prosocial behavior, and pro-environmental behavior, documenting the strong potential offered by behavioral interventions using this approach. The extent to which positive affect experience prospectively drives behavior change (as distinct from rewarding the desired behavior) is less clear. However, a variety of possible indirect pathways involving incidental effects of positive affect and specific positive emotions deserve rigorous future study.
There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and... more
There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicariousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teaching, and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy di...
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The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a well–studied experimental paradigm known to simulate both intact and impaired real-world decision making in choice tasks that involve uncertain payoffs. Prior work has used computational reinforcement... more
The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a well–studied experimental paradigm known to simulate both intact and impaired real-world decision making in choice tasks that involve uncertain payoffs. Prior work has used computational reinforcement learning models to successfully reproduce a range of task phenomena. In this prior work a set of models were fit to individual decision making data, the best-fit models were selected based on group-averaged metrics, and then theoretical conclusions were drawn based on group-averaged parameters. In the present work we investigate the performance of this class of reinforcement learning models in fitting individual data. This class of learning models has provided a useful starting point for characterizing decision making performance in the aggregate. However, we demonstrate that no one best-fit model aptly captures individual differences and our results caution against using aggregate parameters from best fit models to characterize decision making across ...
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Empathy and altruism are both “prosocial emotions.” They are most often discussed together under the rubric of “empathy-based altruism” theories, which allow for a truly other-oriented and selfless motivation to give. In addition, most... more
Empathy and altruism are both “prosocial emotions.” They are most often discussed together under the rubric of “empathy-based altruism” theories, which allow for a truly other-oriented and selfless motivation to give. In addition, most integrative theories of empathy-based altruism assume that this prosocial motivation evolved from the need for altricial mammals to care for helpless offspring, which was extended in evolutionary history to group members and even strangers. This view is widespread and empirically supported. However, there are many times when empathy does not produce altruism and when altruism does not derive from shared affect; there are also prosocial phenomena that are overlooked and distorted by oversimplifications of the empathy-altruism hypothesis. The current chapter reviews empathy and altruism, including definitional issues, distinct features in empathy versus altruism, the neural and physiological mechanisms behind empathy and altruism, and how the two intera...
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The cache decisions of scatter-hoarding animals are influenced by a number of factors, including satiety, food quality, number of competitors, and the risk of predation and pilferage. However, it is unknown how animals assess these... more
The cache decisions of scatter-hoarding animals are influenced by a number of factors, including satiety, food quality, number of competitors, and the risk of predation and pilferage. However, it is unknown how animals assess these variables. We investigated this process experimentally in free-ranging fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) by measuring the effects of nut characteristics and social context on nut-handling behavior and subsequent cache decisions. We found that a behavior involved in nut handling, the head flick, was correlated with nut quality, shell presence, the decision to cache rather than eat the nut, andthe time and energy spent caching. In contrast, a 2nd nut-handling behavior, the paw maneuver, was correlated with the social context but not the cache decision, and may instead reflect a response to social competition.Our results suggest that fox squirrels assess nut quality using overt, observable nut-handling behaviors. The experimental study of these behaviors can hel...
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What makes a flagship species effective in engaging conservation donors? Large, charismatic mammals are typically selected as ambassadors, but a few studies suggest butterflies—and monarchs in particular—may be even more appealing. To... more
What makes a flagship species effective in engaging conservation donors? Large, charismatic mammals are typically selected as ambassadors, but a few studies suggest butterflies—and monarchs in particular—may be even more appealing. To gather more information about people’s responses to monarchs, we conducted an empirical study of member submissions to a successful conservation campaign, the Monarch Story Campaign, conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The set of 691 stories along with their associated demographic and donation data was analyzed in a mixed-methods study using qualitative analysis and tests of association. The results showed that people often described encounters with monarchs in childhood and as adults. They expressed strong, positive emotions, and lauded the monarch’s beauty and other “awe-inspiring” qualities and expressed wonder at their lifecycle (i.e., metamorphosis and migration). They also raised conservation themes of distress at monarch loss, cal...
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This article demonstrates how researchers from both the sciences and the humanities can learn from Charles Darwin’s mixed methodology. We identify two basic challenges that face emotion research in the sciences, namely a mismatch between... more
This article demonstrates how researchers from both the sciences and the humanities can learn from Charles Darwin’s mixed methodology. We identify two basic challenges that face emotion research in the sciences, namely a mismatch between experiment design and the complexity of life that we aim to explain, and problematic efforts to bridge the gap, including invalid inferences from constrained study designs, and equivocal use of terms like “sympathy” and “empathy” that poorly reflect such methodological constraints. We argue that Darwin’s mixed methodology is a model for addressing these challenges even in laboratory work on emotion, because it shows how close observation of emotional phenomena makes sense only within broader historical contexts. The article concludes with 5 practical research recommendations.