Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women's advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men's and women's performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

This study tested the prediction that introspecting about the reasons far one's preferences would reduce satisfaction with a consu¥merchoice Subjects evaluated two types ofposters and then chose one to take home. Those instruefed to think about their reasons chose a different type of poster than control subjects and, when contacted 3 weeks later, were less sattsfied with their choice. When People think about reasons, they appear to focus on attributes of thestimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem like plausible reasons but may not beimpartant causes of their initial evaluatwns. When these attributes imply a new evaluation of the stimulus, people change their attitudes and base their choices on these new attitudes. Over time, however, people's initial evaluation of the stimulus seems to return, and they come to r e p t choices based on the new attitudes.-He who deliberates lengthily will not always choose the best.

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Two studies explored the extent to which prior affective expectations shape people's evaluations of experiences and decisions about repeating those experiences. Study 1 found that students' prior expectations about an upcoming vacation accounted for a significant portion of the variance in their post-vacation evaluations, as did students' recall of specific experiences. In Study 2, both prior expectations and actual experiences of watching a movie were manipulated in a 2 x 2 design. People's affective expectations made more of a difference than the objective experience when assessing people's willingness to participate in the study again. A reinterpretation hypothesis-that people discount or reweigh memories of expectation-inconsistent events-accounted for the results of these studies better than a selective memory or initial effects hypothesis. Jared Diamond, the author and physiologist, frequently travels to New Guinea to study its birds. On a recent trip he was finally able to visit an extremely remote area, the Lakes Plain. Because he had always wanted to visit this part of New Guinea, Diamond expected to experience tremendous enjoyment and fulfillment at finally being able to do so. His experiences, however, were soon at great odds with his expectations: The weather was so hot and humid that I felt myself overheating w i t h every step. I longed to go shirtless for comfort but didn't dare because of the clouds of mosquitoes. Spiders were crawling through my hair, stinging ants had gotten inside m y underwear, and the itching of chigger bites on my private parts was

This study examined how having had a similar experience to a target person's experience affected three facets of empathy: empathic concern, empathic accuracy, and perceived empathy. Women who had never been mothers, who were pregnant with their first child, or who had just given birth to their first child (20 in each group) served as perceivers, watching videotapes of new-mother targets (N = 20) and providing measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. When perceivers had experienced the same life events as the targets, they expressed greater empathic concern and reported greater understanding of targets. However, experience had a much smaller effect on empathic accuracy, limited to comparisons between new-mother and never-pregnant perceivers and only for accuracy at guessing stereotypic attitudes, not individual thoughts. Perceived empathy, in contrast, appeared to be influenced by targets' knowledge of whether perceivers had experienced similar events.