Ricerc@Sapienza

A shared consensus among researchers deals with the positive association between the ability to effectively regulate and manage one's emotion and the engagement in empathic behavior and morally desirable actions. This study was designed to investigate how dispositional reliance on suppression and reappraisal differently impacted on the cognitive and affective components of empathy and on social conduct, distinguishing among prosocial, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors.

Allogeneic umbilical cord blood (UCB) donation is a prosocial behavior directed to strangers at some cost for the donor. Although the promotion of such behavior is an important goal of many countries’ health systems, little is known regarding the motivations beyond it. Here, we explored how altruism and trust were modulated by social distance in a sample of newmothers (N=168) who might or not have donated the UCB. Participants played hypothetical Dictator and Trust games with others that could be socially close (e.g. parents) or distant (e.g. strangers) from them.