Social Emotions and Mental Labor

Interpersonal emotional processes like empathy and compassion often motivate and predict cooperative tendencies. According to motivated emotions perspectives, people increase and decrease these responses depending on whether they perceive rewards or costs with their experiences. However, a critical consideration in decisions to have these responses is whether people attribute mental effort with them. As people debate which response may better guide prosocial behavior, I will discuss work in which I applied effort-based decision-making models to examine people’s decisions to approach or avoid empathic and compassionate experiences. Next, I will cover ongoing research where I use neurological models to investigate the neural substrates that contribute to these decisions. I will conclude by presenting research in which I examine a dyadic healthcare context with important implications for how these interpersonal processes are used: in caregivers of loved ones with neurodegenerative diseases.