A Selection of Compassion Week 2022 Abstracts

 - Marta Caserotti (University of Padua, Italy)

- “The weight of reasons in the choice to vaccinate against COVID-19”

The project investigated the effect of participants’ reasons on vaccination decisions in a representative sample of 1,689 Italians (collected Mar-Apr 2021). While previous studies offered lists of reasons to evaluate, we asked people to freely report up to 3 reasons for and against COVID-19 vaccines, and the associated decisional weight. Results highlight that emotional competences and risk perception predict the generation of pro and against vaccination. In addition, as pro-reasons increase, vaccination adherence increases, while the opposite happens as against reasons increase. Furthermore, when both pro-and against-vaccination reasons are generated, just one strong positive reason is sufficient to unbalance the decision toward vaccination acceptance. Knowing how people react affectively to such an important choice can suggest new communication insights to reduce possible negative reactions toward vaccination and people’s hesitancy. Vaccination hesitancy is a continuum characterized by different reasons that may or may not favor vaccination, and they do not all weigh equally. Knowing how these reasons influence immunization choice is of focal importance for developing effective communication campaigns.

- Sean Reilly (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)

- “Gratitude’s influence on perceptions of the expressor”

Previous work investigating the functional role of gratitude has focused on beneficiaries’ perception of, and behavior towards, a benefactor post benefit delivery. The current study extends previous work by investigating the benefactor’s perception of, and behavior towards a beneficiary post gratitude expression. We hypothesized that participants who received a message expressing gratitude for their recommendation would perceive the international student as being more grateful, would have more favorable perceptions of, and express greater intentions to socially affiliate with, international students compared to a control condition. The results supported our hypotheses: participants in the gratitude condition liked, accepted, felt closer to, and were more likely to befriend and invite the international student to a social gathering compared to control participants who did not receive a grateful message. This work extends previous findings in an ecologically valid context using international students. Expressing gratitude is a relatively low-cost way of establishing and maintaining cooperative relationships. As our data suggest, a simple expression of gratitude positively influenced perceptions of the expressor. I hope this work can encourage readers to express gratitude to the benefactors in their lives.

- Libera Ylenia Mastromatteo (University of Padua, Italy)

- “Cooperative hearts: Stress and cardiac vagal tone in children’s cooperative acts”

This study addressed the effects of acute and chronic stress on school age children’s cooperative behaviors. We also investigated if children’s ability to self-regulate and adapt to environmental demands could moderate the stress-cooperation link. We asked 117 primary school children from low and medium-high SES neighborhoods to play at a video game where they had to decide whether to cooperate or not. To investigate the effect of acute stress children played a control and a stress round. Findings show how cooperation increase with age and is linearly related with the ability to self-regulate and adapt to the environment (i.e., rMSSD). Children cooperated more when under acute stress as opposed to the control condition, yet self-regulation did not moderate this relationship. However, when taking into account SES, children from low SES neighborhoods with worse self-regulatory abilities, cooperated less under stress than their peers living in higher SES environments. That is, when chronic and acute stress cumulate only children very good at self- regulating can engage in cooperative behaviors. Prevention programs aimed to increase children’s self-regulation abilities to promote cooperative behaviors should be implemented, especially in low-SES neighborhoods.

- Enrico Rubaltelli (University of Padua, Italy)

- “Psychological processes underlying risk and benefit judgments of COVID-19 vaccines”

In April 2021, the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine was paused to investigate whether it had caused serious blood clots to six women (out of 6.8 million Americans who were administered that vaccine). As these events were unfolding, we surveyed a sample of Americans (N = 625) to assess their reactions to this news, whether they supported the pausing of the vaccine, and to measure a series of psychological factors. Results showed that political ideology influenced the support for the pausing of the vaccine; liberals were more likely to oppose it, while conservative were more likely to be in favor. In addition, the effect of political ideology was mediated by the difference between perceived benefit and risk and the language style used to produce reasons in support (or against) the decision to pause the vaccine. Liberals (vs. conservatives) perceived the benefit of vaccines higher than the risk, used a more analytic language style when writing their reasons, and had a more positive attitude toward the vaccine. By mixing different methodologies and employing automated text analyses as a supporting method to more classical quantitative measures we contributed in several ways to the literature on vaccine hesitancy and risk perception. We were able to analyze the reasons that were directly produced by the respondents as the events were unfolding and to provide a more direct measure of their thinking processes rather than inferring them indirectly. Our work provides important insights on how risk perception and reasoning impact citizens decision on risk and important matters in the society and future studies should assess if they generalize to other contexts (e.g., gun control or climate change).

- Sarah Coffin (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)

- “Naturalness in decision-making: predicting support of eco-technology”

Climate change and threats to sustainability require human-based solutions to reduce emissions, shift energy sources, and promote sustainable behaviors. Eco-technologies, or technologies aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change, offer possible solutions in reaching climate goals, but have faced barriers in public support and adoption of technologies. We hypothesized that perception of how natural a technology is (also known as “naturalness”) shapes public willingness to support technology such that technology that is seen as more natural will be associated with higher willingness to support. To test this, we ran two preregistered studies (N = 1,003; N = 1,007) in an adult U.S. sample, asking participants to rate their perceptions of three of sixteen total possible eco-technologies, including six alternative food proteins (i.e., cultured beef), six carbon dioxide removal methods (i.e., direct air carbon capture and storage) and four low-carbon energy methods (i.e., nuclear energy). Results confirmed our hypothesis that perceptions of naturalness shapes public support of technology along with other relevant factors, such that technologies seen as more natural, more familiar, more understood, more beneficial, and less risky are more preferred. These findings were consistent across all types of technology examined and suggest that technologies seen as unnatural pose barriers to broad public support and carry implications for efforts to address climate change. Thus, perception of naturalness, along with other decision-making factors including familiarity, understanding, risk perception, and benefit perception, should be considered in making decisions about which technology solutions to move forward in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

- William Swann (University of Texas at Austin, USA)

- “Patriotism beats tribalism: Antidote to the ascent of authoritarianism”

This research focused on the causes of partisanship and authoritarianism in a longitudinal study of the 2020 U.S. presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Deep alignment (fusion) with one’s preferred presidential candidate or associated political party predicted the perception that members of the opposing party represented an existential threat to the American way of life and endorsement of authoritarian actions against them. In contrast, fusion with the United States diminished both the perception that members of the opposing party represented an existential threat and endorsement of authoritarian actions against them. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how to foster compassion toward partisan rivals.

- Tom Gordon-Hecker (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)

- “The effects of sleep deprivation on empathy”

We investigated the effects of sleep deprivation on empathy and on empathy-based decisions. We analyzed medical records from ED in hospitals in Israel and USA and found that physicians are less likely to prescribe analgesics for patients in pain during night shifts compared to during the day. Accordingly, patients report night shift physicians to be less empathic than daytime physicians. Finally, in a large preregistered online study, participants who had to wake up throughout the night showed less empathy to the pain of others compared to those who slept with no interruptions. Taken together, our findings reveal the adverse effect of sleep deprivation on empathy. With more and more people working night shifts, and with 67% of the adult population who report sleep problems, our findings have immense implications, as they shed light on a crucial hurdle for increasing empathy in the public.

-Stephan Dickert (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria and Queen Mary University of London, England)

-“The influence of COVID-19 mortality rate formats on emotional reactions, risk perception, and self-protective behavioral intentions”

We investigated whether different mortality rate formats used to express the same objective probability affected people’s emotional reactions, risk perception, and protective behavioral intentions. A sample from the Italian population (N = 604) was exposed to six different formats (i.e., Absolute value; Raw ratio; 1 in X; Verbal; Percentage; Probability) to report the mortality rate of COVID-19 in a between-subject design. In line with expectations, the Probability format led to lower emotional reactions compared to all the other formats. Results from a path analysis showed that each of the tested mortality rate formats led to higher negative emotional reactions and risk perception compared to the Probability format. The mortality rate formats also had an indirect effect on behavioral intentions to protect oneself, which was mediated by emotional reactions and risk perception. The direct effect of risk on intentions was found to differ among the two dimensions of risk. Affective Risk led to higher behavioral intentions, while Deliberative Risk had the opposite effect. We discuss these results considering the multidimensional nature of risk perception and offer practical implications for risk management during health crises like COVID-19.