Nostalgia, Empathy and Emotional Face Categorisation Irem Ozdemir, Erich Graf, Tim Wildschut

❑Face Stimuli: ❑Mediation Analysis Background ▪ An example of the ❑Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the past, and it is a data summary for one Peripheral participant, for happy predominantly positive feeling which includes personal Responsivity emotion. experiences, memories shared with significant others, and social bonds [1, 2] . ▪ Threshold and slope measures were extracted from function .066** 1.606** ❑Empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of ▪ The examples of neutral, fitting to psychophysical performance data, to analyse the face Nostalgia Categorisation another” [3]. angry, happy and fearful data. Total (SNS) .261* (.155) Accuracy (Total) ▪ ▪ Cognitive empathy - I understand what you feel stimuli. Threshold: The emotion intensity in the stimulus at chance performance ▪ Affective empathy - I feel what you feel [4,5] ▪ Slope: Accuracy or reliability of the participant’s performance ▪ Indirect effect = .106, SE = .057, 95% CI = [.016, .239] ❑Facial expressions are crucial to maintaining interpersonal (discrimination ability & categorisation accuracy) ▪ * p < .05, ** p < .01 interaction and social functioning [6]. Empathy is a significant ❑Face Processing Task: factor in the comprehension of facial expressions. Peripheral Aim and Hypothesis Responsivity ❑Aim: To explore the overall connection between nostalgia, .083** 1.626** empathy, and emotional face processing, and to find the Nostalgia Categorisation potential mediating influence of empathy in the nostalgia— Total (PPS) .318* (.183) Accuracy (Total) emotional face processing link. ▪ After clicking the white cross, two facial expression stimuli were viewed for ❑Hypotheses: Nostalgia will be positively related with facial 500 ms, and then participants were instructed to choose which one of the ▪ Indirect effect = .183, SE = .071, 95% CI = [.022, .297] emotion recognition. The relation between nostalgia and facial stimuli expresses the emotion more. ▪ * p < .05, ** p < .01 emotion recognition will be mediated by empathy. ❑ Procedure Nostalgia Emotional Face SNS Face Categorisation Conclusion Empathy QCAE Proneness Processing PPS Task ❑ Results showed significant correlations between nostalgia proneness, empathy and emotional face processing ability. Methods Results ❑ The mediation analysis results indicate that the indirect effect ❑Participants: 142 participants (60 m, 82 f) aged between 18 ❑Correlation Analysis of nostalgia proneness on emotional face processing via and 53 years ( M = 24.49, SD = 5.11). affective empathy was significant. Nostalgia prone people ❑Measures: were more sensitive to small changes in the intensity of ▪ Nostalgia proneness – Southampton Nostalgia Scale (SNS) target’s emotional expressions. This association between Past Positive Scale (PPS) nostalgia proneness and emotion recognition was mediated by ▪ Empathy – The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy affective empathy. (QCAE, Subscales; Perspective Taking, Online Simulation, Emotion ❑ A follow-up study has been designed based on the results of Contagion, Proximal Responsivity, Peripheral Responsivity) this research in order to examine the relation between these ❑Face Categorisation Task: variables in detail. Data collection is currently ongoing. ▪ NimStim face set [6] ▪ Three emotional expressions: fear, happiness, anger References 1. Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 975. 2. Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Shi, K., & Feng, C. (2011). Nostalgia: The gift that keeps on giving. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(1), 39-50. ▪ Nine morph levels (%100 Neutral to %65/%35 for Anger and 3. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. (1998). (J. Pearsall, Ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 4. Reniers, R. L., Corcoran, R., Drake, R., Shryane, N. M., & Völlm, B. A. (2011). The QCAE: A questionnaire of cognitive and affective empathy. Journal of Personality Fear, and %60/%40 for Happiness) Assessment, 93(1), 84-95 5. Spreng, R. N., McKinnon, M. C., Mar, R. A., & Levine, B. (2009). The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire: Scale development and initial validation of a factor-analytic solution to multiple empathy measures. Journal of personality assessment, 91(1), 62-71. ▪ 432 trials: 2 (actors: male, female) × 3 (emotion: fearful, 6. Wolpert, D. M., Doya, K., & Kawato, M. (2003). A unifying computational framework for motor control and social interaction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal ▪ Correlations between nostalgia proneness, empathy and emotional face Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 358(1431), 593-602. 7. Tottenham, N., Tanaka, J. W., Leon, A. C., McCarry, T., Nurse, M., Hare, T. A., ... & Nelson, C. (2009).The NimStim set of facial expressions: judgments from untrained happy, angry) × 9 (morph levels) × 8 (repetitions) categorisation are presented in the table. Significant correlations are highlighted. research participants. Psychiatry research, 168(3), 242‐249. Contact details Email: [email protected] The 36th Annual Psypag Virtual Conference 2021