Abigail A Marsh

Georgetown University | GU · Department of Psychology

Social connectedness is fundamental to health and life satisfaction. Empathic capacities that support social connections are commonly impaired following damage to the brain’s right hemisphere, but how these acquired socio-emotional deficits correspond to real-world social outcomes remains unclear. Using anatomical brain imaging and behavioral data...

Human challenge trials (HCTs) may accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines, and deliver novel insights into the course and consequences of infection. However, HCTs are contentious because they involve purposely exposing volunteers to infection. Consultation with the public and other stakeholders is essential for understanding how HCTs...

Impartial altruism is often considered a moral ideal but is rare in practice. Instead, generosity typically decreases as social distance increases, a phenomenon termed social discounting. Most people prefer this partiality in their close relationships and view impartial altruists as poorer relationship partners. This suggests real-world impartial a...

From 2016 – 2020, utilizing multiple cohorts during two U.S. presidential elections, we investigated whether political ideology predicts generosity, as well as beliefs about generosity of out-groups who hold an opposing ideology. Using the social discounting paradigm, we found that generosity toward distant others did not vary as a function of poli...

Impartial altruism is often considered a moral ideal but is rare in practice. Instead, generosity typically decreases as social distance increases, a phenomenon termed social discounting. Most people prefer this partiality in their close relationships and view impartial altruists as poorer relationship partners. This suggests real-world impartial a...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Social discounting––defined as hyperbolic reductions in generosity as social distance increases––is becoming more widely used in psychological research as an indicator of prosocial behavior and is most commonly measured by the Social Discounting Task (SDT). However, while robust, the SDT requires subjects to make 63 dichotomous decisions, which can...

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Accurate meta-evaluations of the self—or accurately understanding how other people perceive us—are crucial for successful interpersonal interactions and relationships. In general, people can make accurate meta-evaluations across many social contexts and for many attributes, such as personality traits, abilities, and preferences. Yet it is still poo...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

Background: Human challenge trials (HCTs) may accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines, and deliver novel insights into the course and consequences of infection. However, HCTs are contentious because they involve purposely exposing volunteers to infection. Consultation with the public and other stakeholders is essential for understandi...

Does empathy necessarily impede equity in altruism? Emerging findings from cognitive and affective science suggest that rationality and empathy are mutually compatible, contradicting some earlier, prominent arguments that empathy impedes equitable giving. We propose alternative conceptualizations of relationships among empathy, rationality, and equ...

Most people are much less generous toward strangers than close others, a bias termed social discounting. But people who engage in extraordinary real-world altruism, like altruistic kidney donors, show dramatically reduced social discounting. Why they do so is unclear. Some prior research suggests reduced social discounting requires effortfully over...

Humans are not only fearful apes, but we also communicate our fear using social cues. Social fear displays typically elicit care and assistance in the real world and the lab. But in the psychology and neuroscience literature fearful expressions are commonly interpreted as "threat cues." The fearful ape hypothesis suggests that fearful expressions s...

Acts of extraordinary, costly altruism, in which significant risks or costs are assumed to benefit strangers, have long represented a motivational puzzle. But the features that consistently distinguish individuals who engage in such acts have not been identified. We assess six groups of real-world extraordinary altruists who had performed costly or...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies consistently indicate differences in emotion processing in youth with conduct problems. However, no prior meta-analysis has investigated emotion-specific responses associated with conduct problems. This meta-analysis aimed to generate an up-to-date assessment of socio-affective neural responding...

Most prosocial and antisocial behaviors affect ourselves and others simultaneously. To know whether to repeat choices that help or harm, we must learn from their outcomes. But the neurocomputational processes supporting such simultaneous learning remain poorly understood. In this pre-registered study, two independent samples (N=89) learned to make...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

Donating a kidney to a stranger is a rare act of extraordinary altruism that appears to reflect a moral commitment to helping others. Yet little is known about patterns of moral cognition associated with extraordinary altruism. In this preregistered study, we compared the moral foundations, values, and patterns of utilitarian moral judgments in alt...

Prior laboratory research has suggested that humans may become more prosocial in stressful or threatening situations, but it is unknown whether the link between prosociality and defense generalizes to real-life. Here, we examined the association between defensive responses to a real-world threat (the COVID-19 pandemic) and everyday altruism. Four i...

In human challenge trials (HCTs), volunteers are deliberately infected with an infectious agent. Such trials can be used to accelerate vaccine development and answer important scientific questions. Starting early in the COVID-19 pandemic, ethical concerns were raised about using HCTs to accelerate development and approval of a vaccine. Some of thos...

Using a rare sample of altruistic kidney donors (n = 56, each of whom had donated a kidney to a stranger) and demographically similar controls (n = 75), we investigated how beliefs about human nature correspond to extraordinary altruism. Extraordinary altruists were less likely than controls to believe that humans can be truly evil. Results persist...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on s...

Acts of extraordinary, costly altruism in which significant risks or costs are assumed to benefit strangers have long represented a motivational puzzle. But the features that consistently distinguish individuals who engage in such acts have not been identified. We conducted the first assessment of six groups of real-world extraordinary altruists wh...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies consistently indicate emotion processing deficits in youth with conduct problems. However, no prior meta-analysis has investigated emotion-specific responses associated with conduct problems. This meta-analysis aimed to generate an up-to-date assessment of socio-affective neural responding among...

People typically sacrifice fewer resources for socially distant others than close others, a bias termed social discounting. But people who engage in extraordinary real-world altruism, such as altruistic kidney donors, show dramatically reduced social discounting. Why they do so is unclear. Some prior research suggests generosity toward strangers re...

Donating a kidney to a stranger is a rare act of extraordinary altruism that appears to reflect a moral commitment to helping others. Yet little is known about patterns of moral cognition associated with extraordinary altruism. In this preregistered study, we compared the moral foundations, values, and patterns of utilitarian moral reasoning in alt...

Empathy is a construct that is notoriously difficult to define. Murphy and colleagues argue for leaning into the construct's inherent fuzziness and reverting to what they term a classical definition informed by the observations of philosophers and clinicians: as a dynamic, “unfolding process of imaginatively experiencing the subjective consciousnes...

Recent advances in computational behavioral modeling can help rigorously quantify differences in how individuals learn behaviors that affect both themselves and others. But social learning remains understudied in the context of understanding individual variation in social phenomena like aggression, which is defined by persistent engagement in behav...

Psychopathic traits vary continuously within the general population and are characterized by bold, callous, and disinhibited personality features. Research in psychopathy primarily focuses on associations with various negatively-valenced social and affective constructs, but less work has investigated the relationship between psychopathy and positiv...

Empathic experiences shape social behaviors and display considerable individual variation. Recent advances in computational behavioral modeling can help rigorously quantify individual differences, but remain understudied in the context of empathy and antisocial behavior. We adapted a go/no-go reinforcement learning task across social and non-social...

The geographic prevalence of various altruistic behaviors (nonreciprocal acts that improve other people’s welfare) is not uniformly distributed, but whether this reflects variation in a superordinate construct linked to national-level outcomes or cultural values is unknown. We compiled data on seven altruistic behaviors across 48 to 152 nations and...

Tasks that measure correlates of prosocial decision-making share one common feature: agents can make choices that increase the welfare of a beneficiary. However, prosocial decisions vary widely as a function of other task features. The diverse ways that prosociality is defined and the heterogeneity of prosocial decisions have created challenges for...

The geographic prevalence of various altruistic behaviors (non-reciprocal acts that improve others' welfare) is non-uniformly distributed. But whether this reflects variation in a superordinate construct linked to national-level outcomes or cultural values is unknown. We compiled data on seven altruistic behaviors across 48-152 nations, and found e...

In human challenge trials, volunteers are deliberately infected with a pathogen to accelerate vaccine development and answer key scientific questions. In the U.S., preparations for challenge trials with the novel coronavirus are complete, and in the U.K., challenge trials have recently begun. However, ethical concerns have been raised about the pot...

In human challenge trials, volunteers are deliberately infected with a pathogen to accelerate vaccine development and answer key scientific questions. In the U.S., preparations for challenge trials with the novel coronavirus are complete, and in the U.K., challenge trials have recently begun. However, ethical concerns have been raised about the pot...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

Accurately recognizing and responding to the emotions of others is essential for proper social communication and helps bind strong relationships that are particularly important for stroke survivors. Emotion recognition typically engages cortical areas that are predominantly right-lateralized including superior temporal and inferior frontal gyri - r...

The amygdala is a subcortical structure implicated in both the expression of conditioned fear and social fear recognition. Social fear recognition deficits following amygdala lesions are often interpreted as reflecting perceptual deficits, or the amygdala's role in coordinating responses to threats. But these explanations fail to capture why amygda...

Antisocial behaviors cause harm, directly or indirectly, to others’ welfare. The novel coronavirus pandemic has increased the urgency of understanding a specific form of antisociality: behaviors that increase risk of disease transmission. Because disease transmission-linked behaviors tend to be interpreted and responded to differently than other an...

Tasks that measure correlates of prosocial decision-making share one common feature: agents can make choices that increase the welfare of a beneficiary. However, prosocial decisions vary widely as a function of other task features. The diverse ways that prosociality is defined and the heterogeneity of prosocial decisions have created challenges for...

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are early-emerging personality features characterized by deficits in empathy, concern for others, and remorse following social transgressions. One of the interpersonal deficits most consistently associated with CU traits is impaired behavioral and neurophysiological responsiveness to fearful facial expressions. Howev...

The centrality of a fearless temperament as it relates to the construct of psychopathy remains an area of controversy, with some researchers arguing that the relationship between fearless temperament and psychopathy (and associated antisocial behavior) can be explained by shared associations with other core affective and interpersonal traits of psy...

Humans are an unusually prosocial species, who engage in social behaviors that include altruism-whereby an individual engages in costly or risky acts to improve the welfare of another person-care, and cooperation. Current perspectives on the neurobiology of human prosociality suggest that it is deeply rooted in the neuroendocrine architecture of th...

We examined how a real-world threat, the COVID-19 pandemic, affected population and individual levels of everyday altruism. Six hundred US residents were recruited online at 4 timepoints (n=150 each) during March/April, and self-report measures of perceived COVID-19 threat and everyday altruism were collected. Additionally, we assessed defensive em...

Emotions evoked in response to others’ distress are important for motivating concerned prosocial responses. But how emotion regulation shapes prosocial responding is not yet well understood. We tested the role of empathic emotion regulation in promoting prosocial motivation and costly donations across two studies, first in a community sample and th...

Antisocial behaviors cause harm, directly or indirectly, to others’ welfare. The novel coronavirus pandemic has increased the urgency of understanding a specific form of antisociality: behaviors that increase risk of disease transmission. Because disease transmission-linked behaviors tend to be interpreted and responded to differently than other an...

Psychopathy is a personality construct characterized by interpersonal callousness, boldness, and disinhibition, traits that vary continuously across the population and are linked to impaired empathic responding to others' distress and suffering. Following suggestions that empathy reflects neural self-other mapping-for example, the similarity of neu...

Everyday prosociality includes helping behaviors such as holding doors or giving directions that are spontaneous and low-cost and are performed frequently by the average person. Such behaviors promote a wide array of positive outcomes that include increased well-being, trust, and social capital, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support...

Objective: The decision to become an unrelated allogeneic bone marrow or hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) donor is a consequential and complex one. Although new registry members pledge to donate if asked in the future, significant proportions ultimately reconsider when they are notified as a potential match for a patient and are asked to undergo conf...

Empathy—affective resonance with others’ sensory or emotional experiences—is hypothesized to be an important precursor to altruism. However, it is not known whether real-world altruists’ heightened empathy reflects true self-other mapping of multi-voxel neural response patterns. We investigated this relationship in adults who had engaged in extraor...

The emotions evoked in response to others’ distress are important for motivating concerned prosocial responses. But how various forms of emotional regulation shape prosocial responding is not yet well understood. When does regulation of empathy lead to prosocial motivation versus personal distress or apathy? We tested the role of empathic emotion r...

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Every year, approximately 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke. Supportive social environments are recognized as an important factor contributing to successful stroke recovery, yet, stroke lesions can affect brain areas important for socioemotional functioning, which could impair a patient’s ability to maintain their social r...

Implicit in the longstanding disagreements about whether humans' fundamental nature is predominantly caring or callous is an assumption of uniformity. This article reviews evidence that instead supports inherent variation in caring motivation and behavior. The continuum between prosocial and antisocial extremes reflects variation in the structure a...

The facial feedback effect refers to the influence of unobtrusive manipulations of facial behavior on emotional outcomes. That manipulations inducing or inhibiting smiling can shape positive affect and evaluations is a staple of undergraduate psychology curricula and supports theories of embodied emotion. Thus, the results of a Registered Replicati...

Background The emergence of callous unemotional (CU) traits, and associated externalizing behaviors, is believed to reflect underlying dysfunction in the amygdala. Studies of adults with CU traits or psychopathy have linked characteristic patterns of amygdala dysfunction to reduced amygdala volume, but studies in youths have not thus far found evid...

Shared neural representations during experienced and observed distress are hypothesized to reflect empathic neural simulation, which may support altruism. But the correspondence between real-world altruism and shared neural representations has not been directly tested, and empathy’s role in promoting altruism toward strangers has been questioned. H...

Shared neural representations during experienced and observed distress are hypothesized to reflect empathic neural simulation, which may support altruism. But the correspondence between real-world altruism and shared neural representations has not been directly tested, and empathy’s role in promoting altruism toward strangers has been questioned. H...

In the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a Limited Prosocial Emotions specifier was added to the conduct disorder diagnostic criteria to designate a subgroup of children who exhibit callous unemotional (CU) traits. The Inventory of Callous Unemotional Traits (ICU) is the only dedicated measure of CU traits...

Costly altruism benefitting a stranger is a rare but evolutionarily conserved phenomenon. This behaviour may be supported by limbic and midbrain circuitry that supports mammalian caregiving. In rodents, reciprocal connections between the amygdala and the midbrain periaqueductal grey (PAG) are critical for generating protective responses toward vuln...

Externalizing behavior severity in youths with callous–unemotional traits corresponds to patterns of amygdala activity and connectivity during judgments of causing fear—CORRIGENDUM - Elise M. Cardinale, Andrew L. Breeden, Emily L. Robertson, Leah M. Lozier, John W. Vanmeter, Abigail A. Marsh

Callous–unemotional (CU) traits characterize a subgroup of youths with conduct problems who exhibit low empathy, fearlessness, and elevated externalizing behaviors. The current study examines the role of aberrant amygdala activity and functional connectivity during a socioemotional judgment task in youths with CU traits, and links these deficits to...

In explaining variation in violent aggression across populations, the age structures of those populations must be considered. Adolescents between the ages of 15 and 25 are disproportionately responsible for violent aggression in every society, and increases in violence tend to follow population “youth bulges.” Large numbers of adolescents in equato...

Extraordinary acts of altruism towards strangers represent puzzling phenomena not easily explained by dominant biological models of altruism, such as kin selection and reciprocity1, 2, 3. These theories stipulate that genetically or socially close others should be the beneficiaries of costly generosity4,5. Extraordinary altruists exhibit increased...

In social interactions, humans are expected to regulate interpersonal distance in response to the emotion displayed by others. Yet, the neural mechanisms implicated in approach-avoidance tendencies to distinct emotional expressions have not been fully described. Here, we investigated the neural systems implicated in regulating the distance to diffe...