What are the determinants of altruism? While economists assume that altruism is mainly driven by fairness norms, social psychologists consider empathy to be a key motivator for altruistic behavior. To unite these two theories, we conducted an experiment in which we compared behavior in a standard economic game that assesses altruism (the so-called Dictator Game) with a Dictator Game in which participants’ behavioral choices were preceded either by an empathy induction or by a control condition without empathy induction. The results of this within-subject manipulation show that the empathy induction substantially increased altruistic behavior. Moreover, the increase in experienced empathy predicted over 40% of the increase in sharing behavior. These data extend standard economic theories that altruism is based on fairness considerations, by showing that empathic feelings can be a key motivator for altruistic behavior in economic interactions.

Aggressive individuals exhibit a strong tendency to attribute hostile intent to the behavior of others, which may lead to provocation and aggravation of socially inappropriate reactions. Limited research has investigated the hostile attribution bias in the perception of facial affect. This study examined a hostile response bias to emotionally ambiguous faces in a population of 55 incarcerated antisocial violent offenders as compared to matched control subjects. Results suggest that aggression is associated with a strong preference to interpret ambiguous stimuli containing proportions of an angry expression as hostile, while there was no evidence for a generally biased interpretation of distress cues under conditions of uncertainty. Thus, the tendency to misinterpret nonverbal cues in social interactions may at least partly underlie aggressive-impulsive behavior in susceptible individuals.

We demonstrated for the first time that perceptual insensitivity to facial affect can be addressed by an implicit training that directs attention to salient regions of a face and gradually decreases the intensity of the emotional expression. Future studies should focus on the potential of this intervention to effectively increase empathy and inhibit violent behavior in antisocial individuals.

Depressive reactions and posttraumatic distress may commonly occur after spinal injuries but will usually improve over time. It might be useful to routinely arrange follow-up contacts post-discharge in order to timely identify patients who are at risk of developing chronic psychopathology and require intervention.

The present study aimed to investigate the identification of threat-related facial expressions in aggressive individuals with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Thirty-two male delinquents and matched healthy controls were presented with a series of animated morph-clips that gradually display the onset and development of angry, fearful, and happy facial expressions. ASPD subjects required significantly higher levels of emotional intensity to correctly identify the onset of an angry facial expression as compared to control participants. In contrast, recognition of fearful and happy expressions was unimpaired. These findings suggest a specific deficit in the identification of hostile facial expressions in ASPD populations.