Overly Optimistic People Have More Trouble Empathizing, According To Science

Seth Doyle

People with highly positive and optimistic attitudes consider themselves especially good at empathizing with others, but the exact opposite is true, according to a new study published in PLOS One.

In a study of 120 adults between the ages of 18 to 47, with a mean age of 20, participants were asked to score themselves on the frequency of their own positive emotions like compassion, awe, contentment, gratitude, interest and love. Subjects then completed an exercise to induce both a positive memory and a neutral memory and were asked to write these events down.

For the experiment, subjects were shown videos of strangers sharing personal stories, two positive and two negative, with high and low intensity. Each person was asked to describe how they felt watching the videos, ranging from extremely negative to extremely positive, and then to rate, second by second, how they thought the subject of each video felt on that same scale (“How did this person feel while talking?”). Topics covered in the videos included a woman talking about receiving a ballet scholarship and another person describing the death of a parent.

Michael Discenza

Michael Discenza

As it turned out, those who were more positive had trouble gauging the feelings of others.

“Participants with a more upbeat personality believed their accuracy on this task to be higher than others,” said Alex Fredera, an author at the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. “However, the speakers had conducted an identical rating process on their own videos, and it turns out the happier participants were no closer to the true feelings than the more downbeat participants. In fact, happy participants found it harder to judge the emotional tone of a highly negative monologue, in which a participant described the death of a parent.”

One possible reason for this, the team suggested, is that highly positive people have trouble “processing and identifying a target’s emotions when it is highly incongruent with their own trait affect.” In other words, upbeat people may have difficulty understanding a feeling that they have rarely experienced personally.

Conversely, prior research has found an interesting benefit for those suffering from depression: depressive people tend to have a better grasp on reality than the non-depressed.