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Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

TLDR
Evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics is discussed, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping.
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Social effects of oxytocin in humans: context and person matter

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The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise

TLDR
This work takes stock of the notable progress made by early research in characterizing the neural systems supporting two empathic sub-processes: sharing others' internal states and explicitly considering those states and describes methodological and conceptual pitfalls into which this work has sometimes fallen.
View on Nature (opens in a new tab)

Empathy: a motivated account.

  • J. Zaki
  • Psychology
    Psychological bulletin
  • 1 November 2014
TLDR
Interdisciplinary evidence highlights the motivated nature of empathy, and a motivated model holds wide-ranging implications for basic theory, models of psychiatric illness, and intervention efforts to maximize empathy.
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Oxytocin Selectively Improves Empathic Accuracy

TLDR
Observations imply that rather than working universally, oxytocin may selectively facilitate social cognition given certain constraints, which would be consistent with broader interactionist views emphasizing that individual differences in competencies interact with situational variables to determine behavior.
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Interpersonal emotion regulation.

TLDR
This work maps a "space" differentiating classes of interpersonal regulation according to whether an individual uses an interpersonal regulatory episode to alter their own or another person's emotion, and identifies 2 types of processes--response-dependent and response-independent--that could support interpersonal regulation.
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Social Influence Modulates the Neural Computation of Value

TLDR
These findings document the utility of neuroimaging to demonstrate the private acceptance of social norms and suggest that exposure to social norms affected participants’ neural representations of value assigned to stimuli.
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Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking

TLDR
Results show that participants who performed any type of perspective-taking task reported feeling more empathetic and connected to the homeless than the participants who only received information, and the theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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The neural bases of empathic accuracy

TLDR
It is found that empathically accurate, as compared with inaccurate, judgments depended on structures within the human mirror neuron system thought to be involved in shared sensorimotor representations, and regions implicated in mental state attribution, the superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex.
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Effects of oxytocin on recollections of maternal care and closeness

TLDR
It is found that the effects of oxytocin were moderated by the attachment representations people possess, with less anxiously attached individuals remembering their mother as more caring and close after oxytoc in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover designed study.
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