Fig 1.
Structure of the elevation-idealism system.
Hypothesized psychological processes are shown in grey. Processes measured in our methods are depicted in rectangles; a posited process not directly measured here is depicted as an oval. The conventional model of elevation (solid arrows) is of an emotional response to prosocial scenarios which causes prosocial behavioral responses. Our novel addition (dotted arrows), based on the Attitude-Scenario-Emotion framework, is that adaptive deployment of emotion requires interpretation of scenarios, a processing step which depends on previous experiences encoded as attitudes. Thus, attitudes should moderate the relationship between scenarios and emotions. Specifically, elevation should be regulated by idealism, an attitudinal dimension summarizing the expectation that (relevant) others tend to be cooperative and trustworthy. Additional causal arrows deserve investigation (see the General Discussion).
Table 1.
Sample information.
Table 2.
Intraclass correlations for ratings of Performance and Friendliness.
Fig 2.
Emotion as a function of idealism and condition.
Emotion measures include general positive affect, elevation, and three elevation subscales. Data pooled from 13 relevant studies (total observations: Neutral = 5040, Athletic = 2454, Prosocial = 2619).
Fig 3.
Prosocial contagion: Exposure to a prosocial video is associated with more charitable behavior and intent than exposure to a similarly entertaining control video.
Figure pools data from all studies contrasting similar conditions (K = 11).
Table 3.
Prosocial contagion and mediation thereof.