![]() Furthermore, induced sadness in comparison to happiness was found to facilitate ToM performance. ![]() For example, in a study involving therapists, pre-session positive affect was negatively correlated with empathy during the session, while pre-session anxiety was positively correlated with ToM performance. Interestingly though, only few studies investigated the impact of one’s own mental and especially emotional state on social cognition. This is also described as cognitive empathy or mentalizing.īoth routes to social cognition require distinguishing between one’s own and the other’s mental state. ToM describes processes in which people take someone else´s perspective by projecting themselves into the situation of others, inferring their thoughts and feelings from the context and their own supposed experience in this situation. When confronted with negative emotions in another person, empathic distress is the emergence of strong, negative, self-related feelings which lead to withdrawal from the situation, while compassion describes positive feelings like warmth and care which are other-related and motivate to approach and help. When it comes to sharing others´ negative emotional states, Singer and Klimecki distinguish two forms of empathic responses: empathic distress and compassion. These phenomena are also coined affective empathy or experience sharing. Empathy describes processes in which people vicariously take on affective states, mental states, facial expressions, and postures of others´, literally sharing their experience. This involves two complementary systems : empathy and theory of mind (ToM). Because humans cannot directly perceive others’ thoughts or feelings, they use their own experiences, thoughts and feelings to understand the internal experiences of others. Social cognition refers to how we think about our own or others’ traits, understand others’ feelings, consider a person’s intentions or take the perspective of others into account. In this paper, we will focus on the state aspect of both concepts. Both anger and social cognition can be studied as a trait, meaning a relatively stable disposition or ability, or a state, meaning the current situational anger or social evaluations. In the present study, we addressed this question by experimentally manipulating anger status before testing participants’ social cognition in established empathy and theory of mind paradigms (empathic accuracy EmpaToM ). However, it is unclear if a person’s current state of anger affects understanding and sharing mental states of others. Studies have found a negative correlation between empathy and anger expressions in children, as well as impaired empathy in men with a history of legally relevant aggressive behavior. ![]() However, surprisingly few studies have formally tested the relationship between anger and understanding or sharing others’ mental states. In everyday life, being angry is often associated with irrational decision making, with saying things one regrets later and with being unable or unwilling to understand or share another person’s point of view (“blinded by rage”). ![]() įunding: UK received funding (KR3691/8-1) from the DFG (German Research Foundation RW is supported by the sdw (Stiftung der deutschen Wirtschaft, We acknowledge financial support by Land Schleswig-Holstein within the funding programme Open Access Publikationsfonds.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data files for all three studies are available in the public repository “OSF”. Received: ApAccepted: JPublished: July 29, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Weiblen et al. PLoS ONE 16(7):Įditor: Hedwig Eisenbarth, Victoria University of Wellington, NEW ZEALAND (2021) The influence of anger on empathy and theory of mind. Citation: Weiblen R, Mairon N, Krach S, Buades-Rotger M, Nahum M, Kanske P, et al. ![]()
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