Trust and cooperation often break down across group boundaries, contributing to pernicious consequences, from polarized political structures to intractable conflict. As such, addressing such conflicts require first understanding why trust is reduced in intergroup settings. Here, we clarify the structure of intergroup trust using neuroscientific and behavioral methods. We found that trusting ingroup members produced activity in brain areas associated with reward, whereas trusting outgroup members produced activity in areas associated with top-down control. Behaviorally, time pressure-which reduces people's ability to exert control-reduced individuals' trust in outgroup, but not ingroup members. These data suggest that the exertion of control can help recover trust in intergroup settings, offering potential avenues for reducing intergroup failures in trust and the consequences of these failures.

Lay intuitions suggest that the ability to share, celebrate, and enjoy others' positive emotions - a phenomenon we term positive empathy - bolsters individual well-being and relationship strength. However, it is unclear from the current literature whether (i) positive empathy is distinct from highly related constructs and (ii) whether positive empathy is associated with salutary social and personal outcomes. Here, we begin by examining basic evidence suggesting that positive empathy is related to, but independent from, constructs such as general positivity and empathy for others' distress. We then review evidence that positive empathy correlates with increased prosocial behavior, social closeness, and well-being. Lastly, we discuss open directions for the study of positive empathy, such as investigating the potential role of positive empathy (or its disruption) in psychiatric disorders.

Humans use rich intuitive theories to explain other people’sbehavior. Previous work in lay psychology of behavior havetended to treat emotion as causing primarily unintentional be-havior (e.g., being sad causes one to cry), neglecting how peo-ple incorporate emotions into explanations of rational, inten-tional actions. Here, we provide preliminary explorations intointegrating emotions into a theory of folk psychology. Specif-ically, we show that in the lay theory, people are willing toendorse emotions as causes of intentional actions. Moreover,people readily attribute beliefs and desires as explanations foremotional expressions. This work provides a first step in elabo-rating people’s rich understanding of emotions as an importantcomponent of intuitive social cognition.

Observers often judge agents who miss a desired outcome by a small, compared to a large, margin to be less happy. This nearmiss effect has typically been examined in situations where the agents have control over outcomes (e.g., missing a flight). Here, we extend this work in three ways. First, we show that near-miss effects play into observers’ intuitive theories of emotion even for randomly-determined outcomes over which agents demonstrably have no control. Second, we find data consistent with a hypothesis in which—even in randomly determined cases—near-miss effects reflect an illusion of control over those events. Finally, we integrate near-miss effects into a broader model of affective cognition, and quantify the psychological cost of a missing a desired outcome by relatively little distance, relative to winning or losing that outcome

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with elevated negative and diminished positive affective experience. However, little is known about the way in which individuals with SAD perceive and respond emotionally to the naturally-unfolding negative and positive emotions of others, that is, cognitive empathy and affective empathy, respectively. In the present study, participants with generalized SAD (n = 32) and demographically-matched healthy controls (HCs; n = 32) completed a behavioral empathy task. Cognitive empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets and participants continuous ratings of targets emotions, whereas affective empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets and participants continuous self-ratings of emotion. Individuals with SAD differed from HCs only in positive affective empathy: they were less able to vicariously share others positive emotions. Mediation analyses revealed that poor emotional clarity and negative interpersonal perceptions among those with SAD might account for this finding. Future research using experimental methodology is needed to examine whether this finding represents an inability or unwillingness to share positive affect.

We often make decisions on behalf of others, such as pickingout gifts or making restaurant recommendations. Yet, withoutdirect access to others’ preferences, our choices on behalf ofothers depend on what we think they like. Across twoexperiments, we examined whether and how accuratelypeople are able to infer others’ preferences by observing theirchoices. Our results suggest that people are capable of makingreasonably accurate predictions about what others will choosenext, given what they have chosen before. These results laythe groundwork to systematically study how people makenovel predictions about others’ preferences, and whendifferent strategies might be appropriate.

Social interactions are dynamic and unfold over time. To make sense of social interactions, people must aggregate sequential information into summary, global evaluations. But how do people do this? Here, to address this question, we conducted nine studies (N = 1,583) using a diverse set of stimuli. Our focus was a central aspect of social interaction-namely, the evaluation of others' emotional responses. The results suggest that when aggregating sequences of images and videos expressing varying degrees of emotion, perceivers overestimate the sequence's average emotional intensity. This tendency for overestimation is driven by stronger memory of more emotional expressions. A computational model supports this account and shows that amplification cannot be explained only by nonlinear perception of individual exemplars. Our results demonstrate an amplification effect in the perception of sequential emotional information, which may have implications for the many types of social interactions that involve repeated emotion estimation.