how connection developsAn unfamiliar face can become the focus of a kind wish before there has been any conversation. In a 2008 laboratory experiment, Cendri Hutcherson, Emma Seppala, and James Gross examined whether deliberately directing goodwill toward a stranger's photograph changed how participants responded to that person.
The researchers tested a short loving-kindness exercise. Participants spent about seven minutes imagining care from loved ones and directing wishes for wellbeing toward an unfamiliar person. Compared with a neutral visualization, the exercise produced more positive responses toward that person. Some changes also extended to other unfamiliar faces.
The study offers a specific possibility to understand. Our immediate response to an unfamiliar person can be influenced by how we direct attention toward them. The different measures reveal both the reach and the limits of that change.
Comparing two forms of attention
The participants were randomly assigned to loving-kindness meditation or a neutral imagery task. Both began with instructions to close their eyes, relax, and take deep breaths. Both involved imagining people, then opening their eyes and attending to an unfamiliar face. This gave the researchers a comparison that shared several features with meditation without the same emotional content.
In the loving-kindness condition, participants first imagined two loved ones beside them, sending love. They then directed those feelings toward the person in the photograph and repeated wishes for that person's health, happiness, and wellbeing.
In the comparison condition, participants imagined two acquaintances toward whom they had no strong feelings. They attended to those people's physical appearance and then to visual details of the unfamiliar face. The comparison helped distinguish directing goodwill from simply relaxing and spending time looking at someone.
The sequence began with people the participant already cared about. Only then did attention turn toward someone unknown. The exercise gave the unfamiliar face a place within an already recognizable experience of care, without supplying a life story or asking the stranger to do anything in return. Whether that starting point was essential was not tested separately.
The 93 participants generally had little meditation experience. The exercise was therefore a test of a brief introduction, rather than a comparison between experienced meditators and people unfamiliar with the practice.
What participants said they felt
Before and after the exercise, participants rated photographs of themselves, a close person, unfamiliar people, and an object. They reported how connected, similar, and positive they felt toward the subjects of the photographs. The researchers combined these ratings into a measure of explicit positive response.
These ratings brought together a sense of connection, perceived similarity, and liking. A higher score could reflect a change in that combined response. It did not establish that the participant knew the person better, trusted them more, or had formed a relationship with them.
Both groups became more positive toward the particular stranger they had attended to. The increase was greater in the loving-kindness group. Participants in that group also became more positive toward unfamiliar people who had not been the focus of the meditation.
There was a broader change in their responses as well. Their ratings of the object, a lamp, became more positive. This suggested that the exercise affected general positivity as well as responses to people. Yet the changes toward unfamiliar faces remained when the researchers accounted statistically for the change toward the lamp. The results were not fully explained by an equivalent improvement in ratings of everything shown.
Explicit responses toward the self and the close other did not change significantly. The pattern was therefore selective. A brief exercise could shift responses to people outside the participant's existing circle without producing a measurable increase across every familiar relationship or self-evaluation.
A second measure of response
The study also used a task designed to assess more automatic evaluations. A photograph briefly appeared before a positive or negative word. Participants identified the word's emotional meaning as quickly as possible. Differences in response speed provided an indirect indication of how positively they reacted to the preceding face.
On this measure, loving-kindness produced a more positive response toward the stranger who had been the focus of the exercise. The same clear effect did not extend to the other unfamiliar people. Conscious ratings generalized more widely than the reaction-time result.
A kind wish might leave the world looking a little friendlier while also changing the response to one particular face. The conscious ratings and the reaction-time task suggest different reaches for those changes. Neither tells us how the participant would greet that person, respond to a request, or behave during a conversation. Those possibilities interested the researchers, but they remained questions for another study.
The analysis also found a difference between the groups in changes toward the self, but changes within each individual group did not reach conventional statistical significance. That is weaker evidence than the clearer effect toward the meditation target. The paper does not warrant describing a firmly demonstrated increase in automatic self-acceptance.
Mood and directed goodwill
The loving-kindness group experienced an increase in positive mood relative to the comparison group. Changes in mood were related to changes in consciously reported responses toward unfamiliar people. The statistical evidence that mood explained part of the change was clearer for the person pictured during the exercise than for the other unfamiliar faces.
The reaction-time effect toward the target was different. It was not explained by the measured changes in mood. The authors therefore considered several possible ingredients, including the repeated thoughts, emotional engagement, and perspective involved in the exercise. The study did not isolate which ingredient produced the result.
The comparison was deliberately similar in some respects, yet a kind wish contains more than visual attention. Understanding the exact contribution of each element would require additional experiments.
A change in response before a relationship begins
The unfamiliar faces were selected to resemble participants in characteristics such as age, gender, and ethnicity. The researchers did not test the same exercise with disliked people or across every kind of group difference. They also measured immediate responses in one laboratory session, rather than the development of relationships over time.
There is room here to distinguish goodwill from an expectation of closeness. Wishing an unfamiliar person well asks something of our own attention. Getting to know them also involves their interest, circumstances, and choices. The experiment helps explain the first movement toward a more welcoming response, while leaving the shared experience of a relationship open.
Within that scope, the findings show something useful about attention. Participants did not need to learn a stranger's story or receive kindness from them for their own response to become more positive. Deliberately wishing the person well was part of an exercise that changed how the face was received. What followed in an actual encounter remained a separate question, involving the other person as well.
Sources
Hutcherson, C. A., Seppala, E. M., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness. Emotion, 8(5), 720–724. Read the full paper.