The influence of the fear facial expression on prosocial responding

Abstract

Perceiving distress cues appears to be associated with prosocial responding. This being the case, it was hypothesised that the fear facial expression would elicit prosocial responding in perceivers. In Study 1, participants indicated that fear and sadness expressions would be associated with greater sympathy and willingness to help the expresser than would neutral expressions. In Study 2, participants were primed with fear or neutral expressions before reading vignettes featuring protagonists in mild distress. Fear-primed participants reported more sympathy and desire to help the protagonists than neutral-primed participants. Moreover, participants who recognised fear most accurately, as measured by a standard facial expression recognition task, showed the greatest increases in prosocial responding following fear expression primes. This corroborates the notion, supported by research as disparate as behavioural research on bystander intervention and clinical research on psychopaths, that exposure to and correct interpretation of certain distress cues may predict an individual's likelihood of behaving prosocially.

These studies were conducted as part of the doctoral dissertation of the first author and were supported in part by an NIMH National Research Service Award (#1F31MH067332–1A1) to the first author and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers grant (#BCS-9733706) to the second author.

These studies were conducted as part of the doctoral dissertation of the first author and were supported in part by an NIMH National Research Service Award (#1F31MH067332–1A1) to the first author and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers grant (#BCS-9733706) to the second author.

Acknowledgments

We thank Michael Stevenson, Callie Watkins and Dena Gromet for their assistance in conducting this research, and we thank Nicholas Epley, Ken Nakayama, Steven Pinker, Daniel Wegner, Sarit Golub, and Heather Gray for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Notes

These studies were conducted as part of the doctoral dissertation of the first author and were supported in part by an NIMH National Research Service Award (#1F31MH067332–1A1) to the first author and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers grant (#BCS-9733706) to the second author.

¹When the Capability variable was analysed to exclude dominance ratings, the significance of the various effects did not change.