Fear recognition skills predict kind actions

Psychopaths are impaired at recognizing people’s fearful facial expressions (see related article, Crime Times, 2007, Vol. 13, No. 1, Page 5), which may help to explain their failure to respond to the distress of their victims. Conversely, new research indicates that people who are very good at recognizing fear in other people’s faces are likely to exhibit “prosocial” behaviors such as donating money or complimenting other people.

Abigail Marsh and colleagues conducted three studies to investigate the relationship between fear recognition and prosocial behavior. The majority of the participants—a total of 28 in the first study, 56 in the second, and 32 in the third—were undergraduate students.

In the first study, participants believed that the researchers were investigating typical reactions to radio broadcasts. The participants listened to an audiotape—a fictional creation of the research team—of a young woman named Katie describing her parents’ death and her struggles to care for her siblings. The researchers instructed one group of participants to empathize with the woman, while telling a control group to focus on technical aspects of the recording. Next, while having participants fill out questionnaires used to disguise the real intent of the study, the researchers handed out a letter from Katie describing her need for help, accompanied by pledge forms and envelopes. Afterward, they gave the participants a test measuring their ability to identify emotions in photos of adult faces.

Not surprisingly, participants told to empathize with Katie donated more than those told to listen to the tape for technical accuracy. In addition, facial fear recognition skills played a powerful role in predicting their generosity. “The accuracy with which participants recognized the fear expression significantly and positively predicted their donations of time and money, respectively, to Katie,” Marsh and her colleagues report.

In the second study, the researchers analyzed how participants’ fear recognition skills influenced their rating of people’s photos as attractive or unattractive if they thought the photographed subjects would be told about the ratings. This design created an opportunity for the participants to exhibit prosocial behavior by being kind to the people in the photos (that is, by rating them as more attractive than they really were). Another group of participants, who did not believe that the photographed people would hear their opinions, served as controls.

This study found that participants skilled at identifying facial fear (as well as sadness) responded the most kindly in the rating task. “It is important, however,” the researchers say, “[that] this was only true for participants for whom the task was framed as a prosocial one—who believed their judgments would be shown to the people being rated.” In the control group, which did not think the researchers would share their opinions with the photo subjects, fear or sadness recognition skills played no role in the participants’ ratings.

The third study duplicated Study 2, adding additional analyses to confirm that higher ratings in the prosocial task stemmed from participants’ efforts to be kind. In this study, fear recognition again proved to be a strong predictor of prosocial behavior.

The researchers conclude, “The results of the three studies … consistently support the hypothesis that the ability to recognize the fear facial expression predicts individual differences in prosocial behavior.” This is consistent with studies involving psychopaths, they say, because those studies “suggest that individuals less prone to experiencing states associated with prosocial behavior (e.g., empathy, concern, and guilt) are less able to recognize distress cues such as the fear facial expression.”