Research Projects
Published Research
The Decline and Rise in Empathy (2023)
Historically, concerns about declining empathy among youth have been prevalent. However, our new research reveals a surprising surge in empathic traits among American youth post-2008.
Research with Youth Populations (2023)
Tests of whether intervention programs can result in positive outcomes in the lives of young people hinge on adequately overcoming six main challenges.
Eavesdropping Improves Theory of Mind (2023)
Eavesdroppers outperform conversational participants on tests of theory of mind. This suggests that frequent exposure to situations that demand listening may enhance social cognition over time.
The Random App of Kindness (RAKi) is a smartphone app designed to enhance empathy. In a study of 106 adolescents, RAKi users reported feeling kinder and more compassionate.
Random App of Kindness (2023)
Empathy, Narcissism, and Social Media (2022)
In American adults, more social media use is tied to lower empathy and higher narcissism. However, in Europe and among children younger than 18 years, using social media more often is linked to higher empathy.
Racial Disparities in Virtual Reality (2022)
Black participants consistently reported a higher sense of presence than White participants. Addressing these demographic differences in presence can help ensure that VR is equally accessible for everyone.
The Limited Benefits of VR for Empathy (2022)
This research challenges the view of VR as the "ultimate empathy machine." While VR can temporarily increase emotional empathy, these effects largely dissipate after 10 days. Additionally, VR’s effect on cognitive empathy is no greater than low-tech solutions like audiobooks.
Rationality And Empathy (2022)
We demonstrate that various types of cognitive empathy (perspective-taking, emotion recognition, and fantasy) are positively correlated with self-reported rationality, but unrelated to rational performance.
Virtual Reality & Empathy Meta-analysis (2021)
Despite the popularity of using VR to enhance empathy, research indicates that these technologies fall short in multidimensional empathy, especially cognitive empathy. To date, research only consistently shows that VR produces short term benefits in emotional empathy.
The advantages of using VR, summarized by the acronym "DREAM" (data collection, realism, experimental control, adaptability, and mobility), enable psychologists to address previously impractical or impossible questions about human behavior.
Using VR in Research (2021)
This research found that hearing a sexual assault disclosure often triggers empathic feelings of shame rather than anger, which may motivate people to create distance between themselves and the assault survivor.
Shameful Empathy (2020)
Making Psychological Science Less WEIRD (2018)
Almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science, relies on Western samples and uses these data unreflectively to make inferences about humans in general. To take us forward, we offer a set of concrete proposals for authors, journal editors, and reviewers
Ongoing Projects
Burnout and Empathy
We are exploring whether empathic people are more or less likely to burnout through a systematic review and meta-analysis.
By utilizing the data on body movement, eye gaze and gestures we hope to create a VR measure of empathy that can be used to quantify people’s empathic reactions in a variety of virtual situations.
Measuring Empathy with VR
Curiosity and Empathy
Through a variety of offline and online experiments we are determining whether increasing curiosity subsequently increases empathy.
Empathic Listening
In online zoom discussion groups, we are determining what listening strategies lead to understanding others thoughts and feelings most accurately.
We are analyzing mass survey data to determine whether pet owners are on average more empathic than non-pet owners, and whether the type of pet matters.
Pet Owners’ Empathy Levels
Forest Bathing
Using the UW-Green Bay arboretum and a VR replica we will attempt to quantify the stress reducing benefits of forest bathing.
Politics and Empathy
We are collecting data from people from all over the political spectrum to determine their empathy levels using both questionnaires and performance measures.
Charitable Giving
Although empathic people tend to give more to charity we are exploring what types of charities this many be more or less true for.