Capitalizing on positive experiences: Receiving affective empathy fosters a better mood and prosocial waiting

Interpersonal responses to emotional disclosures have potent effects on immediate affective states, yet their capacity to shape subsequent prosocial behavior remains unclear. Across two experiments, we investigated how the perceived empathy conveyed by facial responses influences both emotional outcomes and downstream altruistic choices. In Experiment 1, participants shared imagined positive or negative life events and received either an empathic, nonresponsive, or counter-empathic facial response from ostensible partners. We observed a context-dependent affective modulation: empathic responses maximally enhanced positive affect following positive disclosures, whereas counter-empathic responses most severely worsened mood following negative disclosures. In Experiment 2, we coupled this paradigm with an experiential intertemporal choice task in which participants chose between different waiting durations for rewards benefiting themselves or a charitable cause. Empathic responses to positive disclosures selectively increased charity-benefiting decisions, indicating a greater willingness to incur personal time costs for others. Computational modeling of choice data characterized this prosocial enhancement as being accompanied by a reduction in the weight placed on waiting time relative to reward, that is, a lower subjective cost of waiting. These findings demonstrate that receiving affective empathy, particularly in the context of positive experiences, promotes downstream prosociality by recalibrating the cost–benefit computations underlying altruistic choice.