Effects of one's emotional state on perspective taking and prosocial behavior.

Bukowski, Henryk [UCL] Samson, Dana [UCL]

Little is known about the influence of our emotional state on our ability to take another’s perspective. We designed a pseudo-interactive virtual card game in order to induce guilt, anger or joy through the interaction with the game partner. After performing the card game, each participant completed a visual perspective-taking task in which they were asked to judge from their own or the perspective of their game partner. Participants also completed a tombola tickets sharing task to measure prosocial behavior. Physiological recordings and retrospective self-reports confirmed that the guilt and anger induction were successful and resulted in emotional responses. As expected from previous studies, participants in the guilt condition shared more tombola tickets with their game partner than participants in the anger condition. Interestingly, the emotional state had not only effects on prosocial behavior but also on participants’ performance in the visual perspective taking task: participants in the anger condition gave more weight to their own perspective than their partner’s perspective whereas the opposite was found for the participants in the guilt condition. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that emotions can influence perspective taking even its most cognitive aspects and in very different ways depending on the emotion.