As social animals, we regularly act in the interest of others by making decisions on their behalf. These decisions can take the form of choices between smaller short-term rewards and larger long-term rewards, and can be effectively indexed by temporal discounting (TD). In a TD paradigm, a reward loses subjective value with increasing delay presumably because it becomes more difficult to simulate how much the recipient (e.g., future self) will value it. If this is the case, then the value of delayed rewards should be discounted even more steeply when we are choosing for someone whose feelings we do not readily simulate, such as socially distant strangers. Second, the ability to simulate shows individual differences and is indexed by trait empathy. We hypothesized that individuals high in trait empathy will more readily simulate, and hence discount less steeply for distant others, compared to those who are low on trait empathy. To test these predictions, we asked 63 participants from the general population to perform a TD task from the perspectives of close and distant others, as well as their own. People were found to discount less steeply for themselves, and the steepness of TD increased with increasing distance from self. Additionally, individuals who scored high in trait empathy were found to discount less steeply for distant others compared to those who scored low. These findings confirm the role of empathy in determining how we choose rewards for others.

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The current study created a novel stimulus set called Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): a collection of 166 short magic trick video clips that aim to induce a variety of epistemic emotions. MagicCATs are freely available for research and can be used in a variety of ways to examine epistemic emotions. Rating data also support that the magic tricks elicit a variety of epistemic emotions with sufficient inter-stimulus variability, demonstrating good psychometric properties for their use in psychological experiments. Keywords intrinsic motivation. epistemic emotions. curiosity. science of magic Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the topic of socalled epistemic emotions. Epistemic emotions refer to a group of emotions which are related to the knowledgegenerating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities (Brun, Doğuoğlu, & Kuenzle, 2008; Muis, Chevrier, & Singh, 2018). These emotions typically include surprise, curiosity and interest. Recent studies have revealed that these epistemic emotions have profound implications for cognitive processing * Hiroki Ozono

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are associated with diminished responsiveness to social stimuli, and especially to social rewards such as smiles. Atypical responsiveness to social rewards, which reinforce socially appropriate behavior in children, can potentially lead to a cascade of deficits in social behavior. Individuals with ASC often show diminished spontaneous mimicry of social stimuli in a natural setting. In the general population, mimicry is modulated both by the reward value and the sociality of the stimulus (i.e., whether the stimulus is perceived to belong to a conspecific or an inanimate object). Since empathy and autistic traits are distributed continuously in the general population, this study aimed to test if and how these traits modulated automatic mimicry of rewarded social and nonsocial stimuli. High and low rewards were associated with human and robot hands using a conditioned learning paradigm. Thirty-six participants from the general population then completed a mimicry task involving performing a prespecified hand movement which was either compatible or incompatible with a hand movement presented to the participant. High autistic traits (measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient, AQ) predicted lesser mimicry of high-reward than low-reward conditioned human hands, whereas trait empathy showed an opposite pattern of correlations. No such relations were observed for high-reward vs. low-reward conditioned robot hands. These results demonstrate how autistic traits and empathy modulate the effects of reward on mimicry of social compared to nonsocial stimuli. This evidence suggests a potential role for the reward system in underlying the atypical social behavior in individuals with ASC, who constitute the extreme end of the spectrum of autistic traits. Autism Res 2013, 6: 614-620.

Individuals with low empathy often show reduced attention towards social stimuli. A limitation of this literature is the lack of empirical work that has explicitly characterized how this relationship manifests itself over time. We investigate this issue by analysing data from two large eye-tracking datasets (total n = 176). Via growth-curve analysis, we demonstrate that self-reported empathy (as measured by the empathy quotient—EQ) predicts the temporal evolution of gaze behaviour under conditions where social and non-social stimuli compete for attention. In both datasets, we found that EQ not only predicted a global increase in social attention, but predicted a different temporal profile of social attention. Specifically, we detected a reliable effect of empathy on gaze towards social images after prolonged viewing. An analysis of switch latencies revealed that low-EQ observers switched gaze away from an initially fixated social image more frequently and at earlier latencies than high-EQ observers. Our analyses demonstrate that modelling these temporal components of gaze signals may reveal useful behavioural phenotypes. The explanatory power of this approach may provide enhanced biomarkers for conditions marked by deficits in empathy-related processes.

Humans generally prefer social over nonsocial stimuli from an early age. Reduced preference for social rewards has been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). This preference has typically been noted in separate tasks that measure orienting toward and engaging with social stimuli. In this experiment, we used two eye-tracking tasks to index both of these aspects of social preference in in 77 typical adults. We used two measures, global effect and preferential looking time. The global effect task measures saccadic deviation toward a social stimulus (related to ‘orienting’), while the preferential looking task records gaze duration bias toward social stimuli (relating to ‘engaging’). Social rewards were found to elicit greater saccadic deviation and greater gaze duration bias, suggesting that they have both greater salience and higher value compared to nonsocial rewards. Trait empathy was positively correlated with the measure of relative value of social rewards, but not with their salience. This study thus elucidates the relationship of empathy with social reward processing.