Anger at unfair treatment has been called moral outrage. However, moral outrage-anger at the violation of a moral standard-should be distinguished from personal anger at being harmed and empathic anger at seeing another for whom one cares harmed. Across a preliminary experiment and a main experiment, both designed to manipulate the appraisal conditions for these three forms of anger, we found evidence of personal anger and empathic anger, but little evidence of moral outrage. Participants perceived unfair treatment of another, even another for whom they had not been induced to feel empathy, to be as unfair as participants perceived unfair treatment of themselves. But the appraisal conditions that evoked anger were unfair treatment of self and unfair treatment of a cared-for other, not unfairness per se. In the absence of empathic concern, unfair treatment of another evoked little anger. Possible implications for understanding moral emotion and moral motivation are suggested.

Philosophers, psychologists, and religious teachers have suggested that imagining yourself in another's place will stimulate moral action. The authors tested this idea in two different situations. In Experiment 1, participants had the opportunity to assign themselves and another research participant to tasks, with one task clearly more desirable than the other. Imagining oneself in the other's place did little to increase the morality (fairness) of the decision. A different form of perspective taking, imagining the other's feelings, increased direct assignment of the other to the desirable task, apparently due to increased empathy. In Experiment 2, participants confronted a different decision: either accept an initial task assignment that would give them highly positive consequences and the other participant nothing or change the assignment so they and the other would each receive moderately positive consequences. In this situation, imagining oneself in the other's place did significantly increase moral action.

Why does empathy promote prosocial behavior? Previous research suggests that empathically aroused individuals help those in need, even when physical escape from the need situation is easy, and this evidence has been used to support the claim that empathy evokes an altruistic motive. However, existing research has not addressed the possibility that empathically aroused participants help because ease of physical escape fails to provide adequate psychological escape from awareness of the victim's suffering and the aversive empathic arousal such awareness produces. The two experiments reported here examined this issue by directly manipulating empathic arousal and the perceived ease of psychological escape among potential helpers. In both experiments, higher rates of helping were observed among empathically aroused participants, even under conditions of easy psychological escape. The findings of both experiments suggest that empathy evokes an altruistic motive to reduce the victim's suffering rather than an egoistic aversive-arousal reduction motive. In addition, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that concern for psychological escape from the suffering of others may constitute an important independent prosocial motive in need of future study.

Much research has investigated the cognitive-perceptual factors that promote empathic concern. However, little research has investigated such factors for a related emotion: empathic embarrassment. We suggest that 2 factors promote empathic embarrassment for a target in a compromising situation: liking the target, and imagining oneself in the target's situation. Results revealed that liking a socially compromised target increases both empathic concern and empathic embarrassment (Experiment 1). Furthermore, imagining the person's thoughts and feelings increases empathic concern and a desire for future exposure to the person, whereas imagining oneself in the person's situation primarily increases empathic embarrassment (Experiment 2). Implications of these results for future empathy research and applications for those who suffer from chronic embarrassability are discussed.j asp_699 1..26

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Confessions represent one of the most influential types of evidence, and research has shown that mock jurors often fail to dismiss unreliable confession evidence. However, recent studies suggest that jurors might believe in the false confession phenomenon more than they once did. One possible reason for this could be increased publicity regarding false confession cases. To assess this possibility, we administered an extensive online survey to a sample of potential jurors in the United States from 11 universities and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perceptions of confession behaviors (as related to others and oneself), Miranda waivers, interrogation methods, dispositional risk factors, and confession admissibility and evidentiary weight were assessed, in addition to respondents' self-reported crime-media activity and familiarity with disputed confession cases. Respondents' perceptions were generally consistent with empirical research findings. Respondents believed suspects do not understand their Miranda rights; gauged interrogation tactics usage relatively accurately; viewed psychologically coercive tactics as coercive and more likely to result in false, rather than true, confessions; and recognized that confessions elicited via coercive measures should be inadmissible as evidence in court. However, respondents' perceptions did not align with research on interrogation length, and respondents did not fully appreciate the risk youth poses in interrogations. Moreover, being familiar with disputed confession cases resulted in more negative views of interrogations and confessions. Overall, potential jurors are seemingly more cognizant of false confessions and the tactics that elicit them than in the past, and evidence suggests that media outlets can be used to promote interrogation and confession knowledge.

It is widely believed that impairment in an ability to experience affective empathy for others is a central feature of psychopathy. The authors tested this assumption by covertly manipulating and measuring state experiences of emotional contagion and empathic concern in college undergraduates and male forensic inpatients. Surprisingly, they found little evidence of a negative association between psychopathy and affective empathy in either sample. In those instances in which associations were found, they tended to indicate that higher psychopathy was associated with increased affective empathy. Follow-up analyses also revealed that psychopathy was positively associated with pervasive experiences of sadness, anger, and fear, and negatively associated with pervasive experiences of happiness among nonforensic individuals. This research raises questions about existing conceptualizations of interpersonal affect in psychopathy and offers suggestions for advancing future understanding of the role-played by emotional processes in psychopathy.

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