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When aiming to improve another person's long-term well-being, people may choose to induce a negative emotion in that person in the short term. We labeled this form of agent-target interpersonal emotion regulation altruistic affect worsening and hypothesized that it may happen when three conditions are met: (a) The agent experiences empathic concern for the target of the affect-worsening process, (b) the negative emotion to be induced helps the target achieve a goal (e.g., anger for confrontation or fear for avoidance), and (c) there is no benefit for the agent. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating perspective-taking instructions and the goal to be achieved while participants ( N = 140) played a computer-based video game. Participants following other-oriented perspective-taking instructions, compared with those following objective perspective-taking instructions, decided to induce more anger in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve a confrontation goal and to induce more fear in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve an avoidance goal.

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription Observing a person in need usually provokes a compound and dynamic emotional experience 3 made up of empathy and personal distress which, in turn, may influence helping behavior. As the 4 exclusive use of rating scales to measure these two emotions does not permit the analysis of their 5 concurrent evolution, we added the Analogical Emotional Scale (AES) in order to measure how 6 these two emotions evolve throughout the emotional experience, from its onset to its conclusion. 7Therefore, in two studies, the concurrence of empathy and personal distress was induced, both 8 rating scales and AES were used, and participants were given an unexpected opportunity to help. 9Two effects were found. First, the helping behavior was lower when personal distress prevailed 10 over empathy at the end of the experience (Studies 1 and 2). Second, this "end" effect was 11 coherent with the nature of the different motives evoked by personal distress and empathy -12 directed to increasing either one's own welfare (egoistic) or the victim's welfare (altruism) 13 (Study 2). These results support the usefulness of combining the rating scales and the AES for 14 gaining a better understanding of the nature and behavioral consequences of complex, compound 15 and dynamic emotional experiences. 16Keys words: empathy, personal distress, helping behavior. Can we feel both empathy and personal distress together? Yes, we can. Research has 3 consistently shown that these two emotions (a) are elicited by the situation of perceiving a person 4 in need, (b) are usually reported in rating scales as occurring simultaneously, and (c) may lead to 5 an increase in helping behavior (for a review, see Batson, Fultz, Schoenrade & Paduano 1987). 6 However, our initial question is not altogether irrelevant; while previous studies have shown that 7 the response to another's relatively severe and unexpected need involves the emotional 8 experiences of empathy and distress, distinguishing between these two emotional reactions has 9 been highlighted as important, and for two reasons: they are easily confused with one another 10 (Batson, Early & Salvarani, 1997) and they have a powerful effect on helping behavior (for a 11 review see Batson, 1991; Batson, 2011). 12Focusing on both their usual misidentification and their impact on helping behavior, 13 researchers have warned that empathy and personal distress are two emotions with very different 14 natures. For example, Batson and collaborators claim that empathy is an other-oriented emotion 15 that evokes the altruistic motivation to reduce the other's need, whereas personal distress is a 16 self-oriented emotion that evokes the egoistic motivation to reduce one's own aversive arousal 17 (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981; Batson, O'Quin, Fultz, Vanderpla...

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Previous research on children's and adolescents' happiness has mainly focused on the different variables that may contribute to it. However, very few studies have investigated the beliefs that children and adolescents hold about happiness. It is important to study developmental differences in the conceptions of happiness as beliefs affect people's emotions and behaviors, and they may help explain how children and adolescents strive for their own (and potentially others') happiness. To that aim, we asked 162 children and adolescents to define - in their own words - what happiness meant for them. Their responses were coded according to two different systems derived from previous finding with adults and children. Overall, results showed that hedonic conceptualization of happiness were mainly present in late childhood; whereas eudaimonic conceptualizations were mainly present in adolescence