title: Taking your place or matching your face: two paths to empathic embarrassment.
abstract: Empathic responding may be elicited by different processes, depending on the available situational and affective cues. We investigated two such processes, perspective-taking and nonverbal mimicry. In Study 1, participants watched an embarrassed or unembarrassed confederate dancing to music while either remaining objective or engaging in perspective-taking. Both manipulations affected empathic embarrassment. Study 2 further examined the effects of targets' embarrassment displays and observers' prior experience with the situation upon spontaneous perspective-taking, expressive mimicry, and empathic embarrassment. Embarrassment displays increased mimicry, but also spontaneous perspective-taking and subsequent empathy. Prior experience moderated the effects of embarrassment displays on perspective-taking and empathy. Path analyses demonstrated that embarrassment displays exerted indirect effects on empathic embarrassment through both perspective-taking and mimicry. The results suggest that available affective and situational cues can activate different routes to empathy, and highlight the value of simultaneously investigating target- and observer-based sources of influence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. s.t.hawk@uu.nl
authors.forename: Skyler T
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Hawk
authors.forename: Agneta H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Fischer
authors.forename: Gerben A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Van Kleef
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult