Jamil Zaki
Biographic Data
| ID | 197076 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jamil Zaki |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jamil |
| FAMILY NAME | Zaki |
| SIGNATURE | ZAKI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0664-2982 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 305 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Differences in perceived social connection help explain SES-based gaps in well-being
Balancing emotional scales
Does emotional information have a place in court, or does it bias legal decisions? We address this longstanding question using real-world national sentencing patterns and laboratory-based mock jury decisions. Archival analysis of 918,152 observations reveals that the introduction of Victim Impact Statements, in which victims express the effect of crimes on their lives, did not change sentencing outcomes for violent crimes (Study 1). We hypothesiz…
Bridging the empathy perception gap fosters social connection
This too shall pass, but when? Children's and adults' beliefs about the time duration of emotions, desires, and preferences
This research investigated children's and adults' understanding of the mind by assessing beliefs about the temporal features of mental states. English-speaking North American participants, varying in socioeconomic status (Study 1: N = 50 adults; Study 2: N = 112, 8- to 10-year-olds and adults; and Study 3: N = 116, 5- to 7-year-olds and adults; tested 2017–2022), estimated the duration (seconds to a lifetime) of emotions, desires (wanting), prefe…
Meaningful Peer Social Interactions and Momentary Well-Being in Context
Using three large-scale longitudinal datasets collected from a cohort of university students over the span of 3 years (total N = 2,896 participants; ecological momentary assessments = 129,414), we found that engagement in meaningful social interactions with peers was associated with lower momentary loneliness and greater affective well-being. We also examined the role of four contextual factors (interaction partners, communication channels, place…
Ironic effects of prosocial gossip in driving inaccurate social perceptions
Social microclimates and well-being
Emotional well-being has a known relationship with a person's direct social ties, including friendships; but do ambient social and emotional features of the local community also play a role? This work takes advantage of university students' assignment to different local networks-or "social microclimates"-to probe this question. Using Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression, we quantify the collective impact of individua…
Policy stringency and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic
BACKGROUND: To date, public health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have been evaluated on the basis of their ability to reduce transmission and minimise economic harm. We aimed to assess the association between COVID-19 policy restrictions and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: In this longitudinal analysis, we combined daily policy stringency data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker with psych…
Mental Health During the First Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic
COVID-19 has infected millions of people and upended the lives of most humans on the planet. Researchers from across the psychological sciences have sought to document and investigate the impact of COVID-19 in myriad ways, causing an explosion of research that is broad in scope, varied in methods, and challenging to consolidate. Because policy and practice aimed at helping people live healthier and happier lives requires insight from robust patte…
Amplification in the evaluation of multiple emotional expressions over time
Exploring the heart rate as a chronemic cue in virtual settings
While the heart rate has been used as a psychophysiological measure in media research, the perception of heart rates may have a considerable influence on individuals. Based on social information processing theory, this paper proposes the heart rate as a chronemic cue in virtual environments, with a varied heart rate accompanying a communicator’s emotional expressions leading to differing perceptions among observers as compared to a consistent one…
Beliefs About Self-Compassion
Self-compassion—treating oneself with care and understanding during difficult times—promotes adaptive coping and self-improvement. Nonetheless, many people are not self-compassionate. We examined a key barrier people face to treating themselves self-compassionately: their negative beliefs about self-compassion (i.e., that it leads to complacency, indulgence, or irresponsibility). Across three studies, the more people held these negative beliefs, …
Belief in Altruistic Motives Predicts Prosocial Actions and Inferences
Are humans ever truly altruistic? Or are all actions, however noble, ultimately motivated by self-interest? Psychologists and philosophers have long grappled with this question, but few have considered laypeople's beliefs about the nature of prosocial motives. Here we examine these beliefs and their social correlates across two experiments (N = 445). We find that people tend to believe humans can be, and frequently are, altruistically motivated-e…
Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on nav…
Integrating Empathy and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation
When individuals experience empathy , they often seek to bolster others’ well-being. But what do empathizers want others to feel? Though psychologists have studied empathy and prosociality for decades, this question has yet to be clearly addressed. This is because virtually all existing research focuses on cases in which improving others’ well-being also comprises heightening their positive affect or decreasing their negative affect and helping t…
Building empathy through motivation-based interventions
Empathy is associated with adaptive social and emotional outcomes; as such, a crucial outstanding question is whether it can be bolstered in ways that make practical differences in people's lives. Most empathy-building efforts address one's ability to empathize, increasing empathy by training skills like perspective taking. However, empathy is more than the ability to share and understand others' feelings; it also reflects underlying motives that…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing
People tend to believe that their perceptions are veridical representations of the world, but also commonly report perceiving what they want to see or hear. It remains unclear whether this reflects an actual change in what people perceive or merely a bias in their responding. Here we manipulated the percept that participants wanted to see as they performed a visual categorization task. Even though the reward-maximizing strategy was to perform the…
Building long-term empathy
Virtual Reality (VR) has been increasingly referred to as the "ultimate empathy machine" since it allows users to experience any situation from any point of view. However, empirical evidence supporting the claim that VR is a more effective method of eliciting empathy than traditional perspective-taking is limited. Two experiments were conducted in order to compare the short and long-term effects of a traditional perspective-taking task and a VR p…
Media usage diminishes memory for experiences
Interpersonal emotion regulation
People often recruit social resources to manage their emotions, a phenomenon known as interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). Despite its importance, IER's psychological structure remains poorly understood. We propose that two key dimensions describe IER: (a) individuals' tendency to pursue IER in response to emotional events, and (b) the efficacy with which they perceive IER improves their emotional lives. To probe these dimensions, we developed…
Happier than thou? A self-enhancement bias in emotion attribution
People tend to judge themselves as exhibiting above average levels of desirable traits-including competence, kindness, and life satisfaction-but does this self-enhancement extend to emotional responses? Here, we explore this question by having people attribute emotions to themselves and others following simple gambles. We demonstrate that people display an emotional self-enhancement bias that varies with the context of the emotion-eliciting situa…
Good deeds gone bad
The Emerging Study of Positive Empathy
Lay intuitions suggest that the ability to share, celebrate, and enjoy others' positive emotions – a phenomenon we term positive empathy – bolsters individual well‐being and relationship strength. However, it is unclear from the current literature whether (i) positive empathy is distinct from highly related constructs and (ii) whether positive empathy is associated with salutary social and personal outcomes. Here, we begin by examining basic evid…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Empathy
Empathy features a tension between automaticity and context dependency. On the one hand, people often take on each other's internal states reflexively and outside of awareness. On the other hand, empathy shifts with characteristics of empathizers and situations. These 2 characteristics of empathy can be reconciled by acknowledging the key role of motivation in driving people to avoid or approach engagement with others' emotions. In particular, at…
Interpersonal emotion regulation
People often recruit social resources to manage their emotions, a phenomenon known as interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). Despite its importance, IER's psychological structure remains poorly understood. We propose that two key dimensions describe IER: (a) individuals' tendency to pursue IER in response to emotional events, and (b) the efficacy with which they perceive IER improves their emotional lives. To probe these dimensions, we developed…
Addressing the empathy deficit
Empathy is often thought to occur automatically. Yet, empathy frequently breaks down when it is difficult or distressing to relate to people in need, suggesting that empathy is often not felt reflexively. Indeed, the United States as a whole is said to be displaying an empathy deficit. When and why does empathy break down, and what predicts whether people will exert effort to experience empathy in challenging contexts? Across 7 studies, we found …
Media usage diminishes memory for experiences
Good deeds gone bad
Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior
Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing
People tend to believe that their perceptions are veridical representations of the world, but also commonly report perceiving what they want to see or hear. It remains unclear whether this reflects an actual change in what people perceive or merely a bias in their responding. Here we manipulated the percept that participants wanted to see as they performed a visual categorization task. Even though the reward-maximizing strategy was to perform the…
Ironic effects of prosocial gossip in driving inaccurate social perceptions
It Takes Two
Although current theories suggest that affective empathy (perceivers' experience of social targets' emotions) should contribute to empathic accuracy (perceivers' ability to accurately assess targets' emotions), extant research has failed to consistently demonstrate a correspondence between them. We reasoned that prior null findings may be attributable to a failure to account for the fundamentally interpersonal nature of empathy, and tested the pr…
Unpacking the informational bases of empathic accuracy
Perceivers' ability to correctly identify the internal states of social targets-known as empathic accuracy (EA)-is critical to social interactions, but little work has examined the specific types of information that support EA. In the current study, social targets varying in trait emotional expressivity were videotaped while discussing emotional autobiographical events. Perceivers watched these videos and inferred targets' affect while having acc…
The neuroscience of empathy
Intuitive Prosociality
Prosocial behavior is a central feature of human life and a major focus of research across the natural and social sciences. Most theoretical models of prosociality share a common assumption: Humans are instinctively selfish, and prosocial behavior requires exerting reflective control over these basic instincts. However, findings from several scientific disciplines have recently contradicted this view. Rather than requiring control over instinctiv…
Interpersonal emotion regulation
Contemporary emotion regulation research emphasizes intrapersonal processes such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, but people experiencing affect commonly choose not to go it alone. Instead, individuals often turn to others for help in shaping their affective lives. How and under what circumstances does such interpersonal regulation modulate emotional experience? Although scientists have examined allied phenomena such as social…
Addressing the empathy deficit
Empathy is often thought to occur automatically. Yet, empathy frequently breaks down when it is difficult or distressing to relate to people in need, suggesting that empathy is often not felt reflexively. Indeed, the United States as a whole is said to be displaying an empathy deficit. When and why does empathy break down, and what predicts whether people will exert effort to experience empathy in challenging contexts? Across 7 studies, we found …
Empathy
Empathy features a tension between automaticity and context dependency. On the one hand, people often take on each other's internal states reflexively and outside of awareness. On the other hand, empathy shifts with characteristics of empathizers and situations. These 2 characteristics of empathy can be reconciled by acknowledging the key role of motivation in driving people to avoid or approach engagement with others' emotions. In particular, at…
The Emerging Study of Positive Empathy
Lay intuitions suggest that the ability to share, celebrate, and enjoy others' positive emotions – a phenomenon we term positive empathy – bolsters individual well‐being and relationship strength. However, it is unclear from the current literature whether (i) positive empathy is distinct from highly related constructs and (ii) whether positive empathy is associated with salutary social and personal outcomes. Here, we begin by examining basic evid…
A new look at emotion perception
Decades ago, the "New Look" movement challenged how scientists thought about vision by suggesting that conceptual processes shape visual perceptions. Currently, affective scientists are likewise debating the role of concepts in emotion perception. Here, we utilized a repetition-priming paradigm in conjunction with signal detection and individual difference analyses to examine how providing emotion labels-which correspond to discrete emotion conce…
Emotional and instrumental support provision interact to predict well-being
Individuals in close relationships help each other in many ways, from listening to each other's problems, to making each other feel understood, to providing practical support. However, it is unclear if these supportive behaviors track each other across days and as stable tendencies in close relationships. Further, although past work suggests that giving support improves providers' well-being, the specific features of support provision that improv…
Happier than thou? A self-enhancement bias in emotion attribution
People tend to judge themselves as exhibiting above average levels of desirable traits-including competence, kindness, and life satisfaction-but does this self-enhancement extend to emotional responses? Here, we explore this question by having people attribute emotions to themselves and others following simple gambles. We demonstrate that people display an emotional self-enhancement bias that varies with the context of the emotion-eliciting situa…
Good deeds gone bad
Building long-term empathy
Virtual Reality (VR) has been increasingly referred to as the "ultimate empathy machine" since it allows users to experience any situation from any point of view. However, empirical evidence supporting the claim that VR is a more effective method of eliciting empathy than traditional perspective-taking is limited. Two experiments were conducted in order to compare the short and long-term effects of a traditional perspective-taking task and a VR p…
Media usage diminishes memory for experiences
Interpersonal emotion regulation
People often recruit social resources to manage their emotions, a phenomenon known as interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). Despite its importance, IER's psychological structure remains poorly understood. We propose that two key dimensions describe IER: (a) individuals' tendency to pursue IER in response to emotional events, and (b) the efficacy with which they perceive IER improves their emotional lives. To probe these dimensions, we developed…
Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing
People tend to believe that their perceptions are veridical representations of the world, but also commonly report perceiving what they want to see or hear. It remains unclear whether this reflects an actual change in what people perceive or merely a bias in their responding. Here we manipulated the percept that participants wanted to see as they performed a visual categorization task. Even though the reward-maximizing strategy was to perform the…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on nav…
Integrating Empathy and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation
When individuals experience empathy , they often seek to bolster others’ well-being. But what do empathizers want others to feel? Though psychologists have studied empathy and prosociality for decades, this question has yet to be clearly addressed. This is because virtually all existing research focuses on cases in which improving others’ well-being also comprises heightening their positive affect or decreasing their negative affect and helping t…
Building empathy through motivation-based interventions
Empathy is associated with adaptive social and emotional outcomes; as such, a crucial outstanding question is whether it can be bolstered in ways that make practical differences in people's lives. Most empathy-building efforts address one's ability to empathize, increasing empathy by training skills like perspective taking. However, empathy is more than the ability to share and understand others' feelings; it also reflects underlying motives that…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Exploring the heart rate as a chronemic cue in virtual settings
While the heart rate has been used as a psychophysiological measure in media research, the perception of heart rates may have a considerable influence on individuals. Based on social information processing theory, this paper proposes the heart rate as a chronemic cue in virtual environments, with a varied heart rate accompanying a communicator’s emotional expressions leading to differing perceptions among observers as compared to a consistent one…
Beliefs About Self-Compassion
Self-compassion—treating oneself with care and understanding during difficult times—promotes adaptive coping and self-improvement. Nonetheless, many people are not self-compassionate. We examined a key barrier people face to treating themselves self-compassionately: their negative beliefs about self-compassion (i.e., that it leads to complacency, indulgence, or irresponsibility). Across three studies, the more people held these negative beliefs, …
Belief in Altruistic Motives Predicts Prosocial Actions and Inferences
Are humans ever truly altruistic? Or are all actions, however noble, ultimately motivated by self-interest? Psychologists and philosophers have long grappled with this question, but few have considered laypeople's beliefs about the nature of prosocial motives. Here we examine these beliefs and their social correlates across two experiments (N = 445). We find that people tend to believe humans can be, and frequently are, altruistically motivated-e…
Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior
Policy stringency and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic
BACKGROUND: To date, public health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have been evaluated on the basis of their ability to reduce transmission and minimise economic harm. We aimed to assess the association between COVID-19 policy restrictions and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: In this longitudinal analysis, we combined daily policy stringency data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker with psych…
Psychology (31 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Empathy (15 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Prosocial behavior (8 works) · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction (7 works) · Developmental psychology (6 works) · Media Influence and Health (6 works) · Perception (6 works)