Abstract
Objectives
Understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings is important for successful relationships. The current study examined potential benefits and pitfalls of experience similarity and mindful awareness in relation to accurate interpersonal understanding.
Methods
Participants (n = 77) watched a video of a speaker sharing a real-life story, rated the speaker’s emotions throughout the story, and recalled factual details of the story. Measures of accuracy included factual accuracy when recalling facts about the story and empathic accuracy in understanding the speaker’s feelings. Participants also indicated whether they did or did not have experiences in the past that were similar to the ones from the speaker’s video, and self-reported their levels of mindful attention and awareness.
Results
Having, compared to not having, a similar past life experience was associated with lower factual and empathic accuracy. Individuals with higher mindful attention and awareness were more likely to show higher empathic accuracy, being able to more accurately infer the speaker’s emotions throughout the story. This relationship was driven most strongly by individuals who did not have similar past experience as the speaker, such that mindfulness was associated with higher empathic accuracy only among individuals with no similar past experiences.
Conclusions
Experience similarity may diminish the benefit of mindfulness on the ability to accurately infer the target’s mental states. Considering potential pitfalls and biases that may hinder accurate interpersonal understanding can help provide skillful support that is most suited to the needs of specific individuals.
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Data Availability
Study protocols, survey measures, data, analysis scripts, and output statistics reported in this manuscript are available in https://github.com/cnlab/accuracy/. Please see [SI4] for a positionality statement.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Golnoosh Mahdavi, José Carreras-Tartak, Kamilla Yunusova, Ana Acevedo, and Olivia Diong for research assistance. This work was supported by Mind and Life Institute (to Y.K.) and Hopelab (to Y.K. and E.B.F.). E.B.F. also acknowledges support from ARO W911NF1810244. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the views of the funding agencies.
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YK: designed and executed the study, analyzed data, wrote the paper, and oversaw the project. MEC: executed the study and edited the paper. KS: designed and executed the study and analyzed data. MBO: designed the study and analyzed data. EBF: designed the study, wrote the paper, and oversaw the project.
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Ethics Statement
This study was approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board.
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All participants provided informed consent.
Conflict of Interest
Emily Falk, Ph.D., is on the scientific advisory board for Kumanu, a digital well-being company, and has consulted for Google in the past year. The rest of the authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
Citation Diversity Statement
Recent work in several fields has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field (Dion et al., 2018; Mitchell et al., 2013). Here we sought to consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, and other factors. We obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman (Zhou et al., 2020). By this measure (and excluding self-citations to the first and last authors of our current paper), our references contain 29.83% woman (first)/woman (last), 7.65% man/woman, 25.23% woman/man, and 37.29% man/man. This method is limited in that (a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the databases may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and (b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people.
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Kang, Y., Cakar, M.E., Shumaker, K. et al. Experience Similarity, Mindful Awareness, and Accurate Interpersonal Understanding. Mindfulness 14, 2443–2453 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01859-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01859-x