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THE HELPING EYE
Self-ServingSelf-serving orientations are those intended not to help other people.
Behaviors that can be described as self serving include:• Habitually seeking one's own advantage.• Being preoccupied with one's own
interests • Often disregarding the interests or well-
being of others.
ProsocialProsocial Orientations are those intended to help other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include: • Concern for others• Behaving in ways to help or
benefit other people.• Feeling empathy
Empathy• The ability to understand and
share the feelings of another.
Empathic responses/reactions are genuine responses indicating that you understand the other person's emotional state and can respond accordingly.
Past Research
■ Suggests that pro-social orientations show that there are psychological benefits that leads to being better at empathic responses in detecting facial expressions.
■ Self-serving behavior modifies mood in ways that disengages an individual from being able to detect facial feedback (Lana et al., 2007).
■ There could be gender benefits. ■ It has been shown that women are more empathically
accurate than men (Hall, 1978).
My Study
■Connected to past research I focused my study on prosocial oriented participants and self-serving oriented participants
■In contrast to past research Linked prosocial or self serving orientations to specific nonverbal cues such as eye expressions.
HypothesisHigher
Empathy levels
Empathic response
Empathically
Accurate
Prosocial Behavior■ -
Hypothesis Continued
■Prosocial orientations will be a better pre cursor for detecting an emotion through eye expressions than those who behave in a self serving orientation.
■Females will be better than males at detecting eye expressions (empathic accuracy)
■Gender will not interact with levels of prosocial or self-serving behaviors
Method
■22 female and 7 male undergraduate students enrolled at William Paterson University
■IV1- Orientations■IV2-Gender■DV- Empathic Accuracy■Randomly Assigned one of two conditions
Method continued• Levels of Independent Variable 1 - Prosocial
orientations vs Self serving orientations• -Writing task/ Give an example of one or
the other conditions-Willing to help others vs Unwilling to help others
• Levels of Independent Variable 2 – Male vs Female
• - Select option
Method Continued
• Dependent Variable- being Empathically accurate in detecting an emotion through the eyes
Method continued• Participants were presented
with 18 photos of different eye expressions for a durations of 30 seconds each
• They were asked to attempt to accurately select the emotion displayed
• Lastly, participants were asked demographic questions like age, gender and ethnicity
Results• Excluded 6 Participants
due to incompletion
• Based on the 2 way between subjects Anova the ME of prosocial or self serving orientations was not significant. F (1, 25) =.062, p = . 805
• The ME of Gender was not significant F (1, 25) = 1.282, p =.268
• Interactions of Orientations and gender were not significant, F = (1, 25) = .296, p = .591
• According to the results I retain the null hypothesis. There is no effect of my independent variables (prosocial or self-serving) (Male or Female) on my dependent variable (Empathic Accuracy).
Conclusion• I conducted a study in which individuals were randomly assigned to think about either pro-social or self-serving situations
•An empathic response/ reaction was then expected to be present or not
•Then I measured the participant’s ability to accurately detect an eye expression through various photos.
• I did not find any significance at or below .05
Limitations
•Manipulation of orientations (IV1) were not strong enough to make the participants state of mind be within a prosocial or self-serving perspective.
• Should have used colored photos or videos of eye expressions
• Sample size was not diverse as it should have been in terms of gender (IV2)
Implications
• Significant results may point towards further research relating other-oriented people to nonverbal cues that better determines intent through the eyes
• We can promote other-oriented tasks that increases empathy levels to better relate to one another
Has empathic responses decreased as individualistic cultures focus more on themselves?
OverallThis study intended to draw connections between behavior and levels of empathy that makes a person better or worse at detecting the emotions of another.
I intended to draw attention to human interactions and how situational aspects can effect the ability an individual has to respond accurately to the emotions of another through nonverbal cues.
This research informs other areas of research like social cognition. People can process social information by relating non verbal cues like eye expressions to the encoding, retrieval and application in social situations; whether it is prosocial or self-serving.
