The Grammar of Empathy:
Emotional Body Displays that Trigger Vicarious Victory
Livnat Leemori, Federica Cavicchioii, Simone Shamay-Tsooryi, and Wendy Sandleri
iUniversity of Haifa, iiUniversity of Padua
Empathy is the ability to feel, share and understand the emotions and thoughts of others. Evolutionary accounts hold that empathy evolved to motivate prosocial behaviors aimed at alleviating the distress of group members, and thus most studies on empathy have focused on negative situations. Furthermore, no studies to date have investigated the specific relation between the bodily displays of others’ emotions and positive and negative empathy. Here we conduct two studies to enhance our understanding of empathy.
Using as stimuli pictures of athletes who have just won or lost a competition, we show in Experiment 1 that the degree of positive empathy is comparable to the degree of negative empathy experienced, in contrast to the prevailing belief. Supported by research showing that body expansion/contraction is associated with victory/defeat and with dominance/submissiveness, respectively, in experiment 2 we show that features determining the degree of body expansion of the protagonist affect vicarious empathic experience. Taken together, the findings suggest to us that signaling dominance through body expansion is a strong trigger for vicarious victory, potentially offering a change in hierarchical social position for individuals in the group.
