Source: Wikipedia

It’s common to think that upbeat, outwardly happy people are better at empathizing than the rest of us, since they seem more eager to pursue relationships and “connect” with others in general. And if you were to ask a cheerful connector about his or her prowess, they’d probably tell you that they’re confident in their ability to read people well.

The assumption makes sense, but is it really true? A new study investigated the claim and found that feeling positive doesn't make you any better at empathy than others, and in some ways it's a handicap.

The research team recruited a group of 121 adult participants and assessed their level of “trait positive affect” – meaning how happy they feel from day to day. They were then asked to tell the researchers how effective they are at empathizing with others. As predicted, those with a happier average mood reported feeling the most confident in their ability to empathize.

The participants were then asked to watch videos of people describing an autobiographical event (some negative, some positive), and to rate the level of negative or positive emotion they thought the speaker was feeling. The ratings were given as a “play by play”, rather than an overall impression, to make sure that the participants were trying to read the speakers’ emotions throughout the video.

Even though the upbeat study participants thought they’d do better on this task than others, the results didn’t back their . Not only were they generally no better at reading the speakers’ emotions than less upbeat people in the study, they were actually worse at reading negative emotions.

The only area where happier people outperformed less upbeat people was in reading significantly positive shifts in emotions. In other words, they were better at identifying emotions similar to their own.

Another way to describe the study findings is that, despite their confidence, upbeat connectors are somewhat tone deaf to negative emotions, but more attuned to positives ones.

I corresponded with two of the study’s authors, Hillary Devlin and June Gruber, and asked them to comment on its implications.



DiSalvo: Based on this study's conclusions, is it fair to say that positive people tend to overestimate the positive signals in others' tones, and downplay the negative? What might account for this ?

June Gruber: Happier people–those who experience more intense positive feelings–do appear to have a more fine-tuned emotional radar for positive emotional experiences in others. They track them more carefully in moment-to-moment observations of others. This emotional radar appears uniquely attuned to positive states, and less attuned to capturing shifts in negative emotions of others.

Hillary Devlin: We find happier participants exhibit an increased sensitivity when tuning in to the positive emotions of other happy individuals. We think this could be explained in part by prior work that finds when we experience positive emotion it tends to facilitate our ability to access and recall positive information more generally. This may help happier individuals to tap into the positive emotions of other happy individuals, but could at times disrupt their ability to “drop down” and accurately perceive the emotions of a person in high distress.

One takeaway from this study might be that empathy is in the eye of the beholder -- that we tend to rate our level of empathy in accordance with our more predominate emotional state. True?

June Gruber: One way to phrase the takeaway is that how accurate our ability to empathize with others is in the ‘heart’ of the beholder; that is, it is largely influenced by a person’s emotional dispositions, especially positive ones.

Hillary Devlin: We do feel this is an important takeaway of the study. Happier individuals tended to report that they were better at empathizing, and this applied both when the target in question was happy or sad. In fact, after completing the task within our study, participants higher in trait positive emotion tended to believe that they had done a better job at taking the perspective of a highly-distressed target; however, in reality, they had actually done worse than other participants in accurately tracking this target’s emotion.

Overall, what’s your study telling us to keep in mind?

Hillary Devlin: Our work suggests that our self-reported beliefs about how empathic we are may not always accurately reflect actual empathic abilities. In the case of this study, trait positive emotionality [how happy we feel] appears to be one factor that can lead to a striking divergence between beliefs and abilities.

June Gruber: There appears to be a chasm between how positive feelings influence our belief and ability, or between subjective perceptions and objective performance in empathizing with the emotions of others around us.

The study was published in the online journal PLoS.ONE.

You can find David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website, daviddisalvo.org.