Do liberals and conservatives differ in their empathy toward others? This question has been difficult to resolve due to methodological constraints and common use of ideologically biased targets. To more adequately address this question, we examined how much empathy liberals and conservatives want to feel, how much empathy they actually feel, and how willing they are to help others. We used targets that are equivalent in the degree to which liberals and conservatives identify with, by setting either liberals, conservatives, or ideologically neutral members as social targets. To support the generalizability of our findings, we conducted the study in the United States, Israel, and Germany. We found that, on average and across samples, liberals wanted to feel more empathy and experienced more empathy than conservatives did. Liberals were also more willing to help others than conservatives were, in the United States and Germany, but not in Israel. In addition, across samples, both liberals and conservatives wanted to feel less empathy toward outgroup members than toward ingroup members or members of a nonpolitical group.

Emotion regulation involves activating an emotion goal (e.g., decrease negative emotions) and using an emotion regulation strategy (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) to pursue it. We propose that activating emotion goals and implementing means can independently affect emotion regulation. People are not always motivated to regulate emotions or to regulate them in a prohedonic manner. Therefore, activating prohedonic emotion goals is consequential. Furthermore, merely activating an emotion goal may trigger accessible means, leading to emotional changes. We tested these ideas by disentangling effects of pursuing prohedonic emotion goals and implementing cognitive reappraisal. First, we show that individuals perceive measures and manipulations of cognitive reappraisal as signaling the activation of specific emotion goals (i.e., decrease unpleasant or increase pleasant emotions) and the implementation of specific means (i.e., think differently about emotion-eliciting events). Second, we decomposed a classic measure of cognitive reappraisal to show that previously documented benefits of reappraisal might be because of the frequency of either pursuing prohedonic goals or using cognitive reappraisal. Third, in 2 empirical studies, we separately manipulated prohedonic goals (without specifying the means), cognitive reappraisal (without specifying the goal), and gave classic reappraisal instructions (specifying both the goal and the means). In both studies, activating prohedonic goals was as effective in decreasing negative emotions as was activating prohedonic goals with reappraisal instructions. Thus, activating emotion goals is essential, and sometimes even sufficient, for successful regulation. Finally, we demonstrate that the confound between goals and means is pervasive in the cognitive reappraisal literature, and offer recommendations for avoiding it.

Emotion regulation strategies have been typically studied independently of the specific emotions people try to change by using them. However, to the extent that negative emotions are inherently different from one another, people may choose different means to change them. Focusing on fear and sadness, we first mapped emotion-related content to theoretically matched reappraisal tactics. We then tested how frequently people choose such reappraisal tactics when regulating fear and sadness (Studies 1, 2, and 4a). As predicted, people were most likely to select reappraisal tactics that targeted content that was particularly relevant to the specific emotion they tried to regulate. Next, we tested whether such choices were driven by differences in the efficacy (Study 3), perceived efficacy (Study 4b), and anticipated effort (Study 4c) of regulation. Our findings demonstrate that the means people select to regulate their emotions depend on which emotions they try to regulate.

Perspective-taking is essential for improving intergroup relations. However, it is difficult to implement, especially in violent conflicts. Given that immersive virtual reality (VR) can simulate various points of view (POV), we examined whether it can lead to beneficial outcomes by promoting outgroup perspective-taking, even in armed conflicts. In two studies, Jewish-Israelis watched a 360° VR scene depicting an Israeli-Palestinian confrontation from different POVs–outgroup’s, ingroup’s while imagining outgroup perspective or ingroup’s without imagined perspective-taking. Participants immersed in the outgroup’s POV, but not those who imagined the outgroup’s perspective, perceived the Palestinians more positively than those immersed in the ingroup’s POV. Moreover, participants in the outgroup’s POV perceived the Palestinian population in general more favorably and judged a real-life ingroup transgression more strictly than those in the ingroup’s POV, even five months after VR intervention. Results suggest that VR can promote conflict resolution by enabling effective perspective-taking.