Caring Too Much or Too Little? Relations Among Motivations for Social Withdrawal, Empathy, and Prosociality in Emerging Adulthood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Most previous work examining relations between social withdrawal and social cognition has focused primarily on empathy‐related behaviors in shy children. However, there are different underlying reasons to withdraw from social interactions, which may be differentially related to aspects of social cognition throughout the lifespan. The present study investigated relations among the different motivations for social withdrawal (i.e., shyness, avoidance, and unsociability) and indices of social cognition, including cognitive (i.e., perspective taking) and affective (i.e., empathic concern and personal distress) empathy, and prosocial behavior during emerging adulthood. Participants included 588 Canadian undergraduate students ( M age = 18.91 years; 80% female), who completed self‐report questionnaires assessing social withdrawal and empathy, and participated in the Dictator Game to assess sharing behavior. A series of multiple linear regressions revealed that the different motivations for social withdrawal were differentially associated with the three components of empathy and prosocial behavior. Shyness was positively associated with empathic concern and personal distress, whereas avoidance was negatively associated with empathic concern, perspective taking, and prosocial behavior. Unsociability was positively associated with perspective taking and negatively associated with personal distress. These findings have implications for our understanding of the different motivations for social withdrawal, and how each motivation influences how individuals connect with, relate to, and understand others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".