Can we predict how well--or how poorly--two strangers will get along? According to social psychologist William Ickes, the answer is yes. Drawing upon relevant research findings from his 30-year career, Ickes explains how initial interactions are shaped by gender, race, birth order, physical attractiveness, androgyny, the Big Five dimensions, shyness, and self-monitoring.
Ickes's work offers unprecedented insights on the links between personality and social behavior that have not previously been compiled in a single source: how sibling relationships during childhood affect our interactions with opposite-sex strangers years later; why Latinos have a social advantage in initial interactions; how men react to the physical attractiveness of a female stranger in a relatively direct and obvious way while women react to the attractiveness of a male stranger in a more indirect and subtle way; and how personality similarity is related to satisfaction in married couples.
This relatively short, highly accessible work serves as an ideal supplementary text for undergraduate and graduate-level courses in personality and social psychology. It will also appeal to scholars working in the fields of personality and social psychology and to laypersons who are interested in learning what researchers have discovered about the links between personality and social behavior.

Are women really better than men at reading other people's minds? Are longer-married couples better than newlyweds at anticipating their partners' thoughts and feelings? Do we all possess a dormant "sixth sense" that, if fully utilized, could allow us to intuit with great accuracy what other people are thinking? Internationally recognized psychologist William Ickes answers these and many other questions in this fascinating examination of the mind's potential for "everyday mind reading." After developing an innovative video-based procedure for measuring the accuracy of people's empathic inferences, Ickes and his colleagues used this procedure to study different aspects of everyday mind reading in research conducted over the past 15 years. Among the issues they have explored are the validity of the belief in women's intuition, how long it takes strangers to "get to know" each other, why friendships promote mutual understanding, why twins tend to have similar thoughts and feelings, how people's frames of reference can both help and hinder their communication, and the neurological basis for our ability to empathize with others. Ickes also extends his inquiry to broader social questions. For example, are there ways of detecting when someone has a hidden agenda? Are there circumstances in which accurately "reading" an intimate partner's thoughts and feelings actually harms, rather than helps, the relationship? How can the results of the research on everyday mind reading be applied to improve parenting skills, the effectiveness of counseling, even sales and marketing? Finally, what does the scientific evidence say about the widely debated notion of ESP?

Cross-disciplinary, cutting-edge work on human empathy from the perspectives of social, cognitive, developmental and clinical psychology and cognitive/affective neuroscience. In recent decades, empathy research has blossomed into a vibrant and multidisciplinary field of study. The social neuroscience approach to the subject is premised on the idea that studying empathy at multiple levels (biological, cognitive, and social) will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of how other people's thoughts and feelings can affect our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In these cutting-edge contributions, leading advocates of the multilevel approach view empathy from the perspectives of social, cognitive, developmental and clinical psychology and cognitive/affective neuroscience. Chapters include a critical examination of the various definitions of the empathy construct; surveys of major research traditions based on these differing views (including empathy as emotional contagion, as the projection of one's own thoughts and feelings, and as a fundamental aspect of social development); clinical and applied perspectives, including psychotherapy and the study of empathy for other people's pain; various neuroscience perspectives; and discussions of empathy's evolutionary and neuroanatomical histories, with a special focus on neuroanatomical continuities and differences across the phylogenetic spectrum. The new discipline of social neuroscience bridges disciplines and levels of analysis. In this volume, the contributors' state-of-the-art investigations of empathy from a social neuroscience perspective vividly illustrate the potential benefits of such cross-disciplinary integration. Contributors C. Daniel Batson, James Blair, Karina Blair, Jerold D. Bozarth, Anne Buysse, Susan F. Butler, Michael Carlin, C. Sue Carter, Kenneth D. Craig, Mirella Dapretto, Jean Decety, Mathias Dekeyser, Ap Dijksterhuis, Robert Elliott, Natalie D. Eggum, Nancy Eisenberg, Norma Deitch Feshbach, Seymour Feshbach, Liesbet Goubert, Leslie S. Greenberg, Elaine Hatfield, James Harris, William Ickes, Claus Lamm, Yen-Chi Le, Mia Leijssen, Abigail Marsh, Raymond S. Nickerson, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, Stephen W. Porges, Richard L. Rapson, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, Rick B. van Baaren, Matthijs L. van Leeuwen, Andries van der Leij, Jeanne C. Watson

Winner of the 2012 International Association for Relationship Research Book Award Can we predict how well -- or how poorly -- two strangers will get along? According to social psychologist William Ickes, the answer is yes. Drawing upon relevant research findings from his 30-year career, Ickes explains how initial interactions are shaped by gender, race, birth order, physical attractiveness, androgyny, the Big Five dimensions, shyness, and self-monitoring. Ickes's work offers unprecedented insights on the links between personality and social behavior that have not previously been compiled in a single source: how sibling relationships during childhood affect our interactions with opposite-sex strangers years later; why Latinos have a social advantage in initial interactions; how men react to the physical attractiveness of a female stranger in a relatively direct and obvious way while women react to the attractiveness of a male stranger in a more indirect and subtle way; and how personality similarity is related to satisfaction in married couples.

Findings from the past two decades of interpersonal sensitivity research presented a big surprise to the researchers who were working in this area. These findings, at first suggestive and then unmistakably clear, showed that scores on various interpersonal sensitivity measures were not as stable as scores on other measures of cognitive ability (for example, IQ scores) seemed to be. The accumulating data further suggested that differences in situationally-evoked motivational states were the most probable cause of these variations in interpersonal sensitivity. This book examines this discovery and how it has completely changed the research agenda for those working in this field of study.

Empathic inference, or "everyday mind reading," is a form of complex psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the subjective experience of others. This comprehensive volume addresses the question of how accurate our "readings" of the thoughts and feelings of others actually are, introducing two innovative methods for objectively measuring this key dimension of social intelligence. Presenting cutting-edge research in this emerging area, the volume offers essential insights into how and why people sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail, in their attempts to understand each other. Leading experts cover such topics as the evolutionary and social-developmental origins of empathic accuracy; physiological aspects of empathic accuracy; gender and other individual difference variables; empathic accuracy and processes of mental control; the dynamic role of empathic accuracy in personal and psychotherapeutic relationships; and the relation of empathic accuracy to applied domains in psychology.