The Influence Of Money Priming On The Sadness And Empathy Of College Students

People can be infected by others’ emotion and understand others’ inner feelings,and then the empathy happens.Empathy is a kind of important social emotional phenomenon.From the individual perspective,empathy is an alternative emotional experience,which plays an important role in individuals’ developing healthy personalities and emotions;From the social perspective,it is generally believed that empathy,which is closely related with the moral behavior and altruism behavior,is an important dynamic mechanism of pro-social behaviors.In the modern world,Money permeates every aspect of people’s life which can have a profound impact on people’s behavior and thinking styles,partly by changing people’s effective awareness of others’ feelings and emotional status.Empathy is an important ability to share others’ emotional status and understand others’ inner feelings.To explore the relationship between money and empathy has very important practical significance for the survival and human society’s development.This paper intends to study the effect of money priming on the empathy for sadness from the perspective of money psychological effect.Previous research from this perspective has the following problems: Firstly,researches focus on the empathy for pain.Ultimately,pain is a sense in essence rather than the true meaning of human emotions;Secondly,there is a lack of discussion about the moderating effect of different money status on empathy.That is,whether the psychological effect of different money conditions(such as the abundance of money,the lack of money,gain money or lost money)have a moderating effect on individuals empathy.This research focus on the following improvements to solve the above issues: In this research,we turn empathy research from the sensitive component of pain to the purely emotional component of sadness to break the limitations of empathy in essence and ignoring emotions.We choose the empathy for sadness as the object of our study by the means of picture perception paradigms to discuss the influence of money priming on the empathy for sadness and the moderating effect of different money conditions on the empathy for sadness.Specifically,study 1 investigated the effect of money concept priming on the empathy for sadness;Study 2was designed to explore the difference between rich money priming and poor money priming,thus to clear whether the abundance of money has a moderating effect on the empathy for sadness,including two sub-studies;Study 3 aimed to explore the effect of gain money priming and lost money priming on the empathy for sadness.Study 1 was to investigate the effect of money concept priming on the empathy for sadness.The results showed that: compared with the neutral concept priming,the money concept priming could reduce the individual’s empathy for sadness.We conducted study 2a to explore the moderating effect of conscious rich money priming and poor money priming on the empathy for sadness.The results showed that: compared with the neutral condition,rich money priming reduce people’s empathy for sadness;Poor money priming have no significant effect on individual’s empathy for sadness.In order to prevent the contents of priming picture to interfere experiment result in study1,we conducted an unconscious money priming paradigm of visual masking stimulus in study 2b to clear the moderating effect of rich money priming and poor money priming on the empathy for sadness.The results showed that: compared with the neutral condition,rich money priming reduces people’s empathy for sadness;Poor money priming raises people’s empathy for sadness.Study 3 investigated the difference of individual’s empathy for sadness under the condition between gain money priming and lost money priming.The results showed that: compared with the neutral condition,lost money priming reduce people’s empathy for sadness;Gain money priming have no significant effect on individual’s empathy for sadness.According to the research results,the conclusions of this study are as follows:⑴ Money concept priming reduces individual’s empathy for sadness;⑵ Rich and poor money priming have moderating effect on individual’s empathy for sadness;⑶ Under the conscious priming condition,compared with the neutral condition,rich money priming reduces people’s empathy for sadness,poor money priming have no significant effect on individual’s empathy for sadness;⑷ Under the unconscious priming condition,compared with the neutral condition,rich money priming reduces people’s empathy for sadness,poor money priming raises people’s empathy for sadness;⑸ Gain and lost money priming have moderating effect on individual’s empathy for sadness;⑹ Compared with the neutral condition,lost money priming reduces people’s empathy for sadness,gain money priming have no significant effect on individual’s empathy for sadness.