14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators recently established a very interesting correlation between the way in which a person is capable of handling social situations and their ability to exhibit excellent, above-average spatial skills.
The research team explains that individuals who are more capable of understanding and empathizing with others tend to display spatial skills that put to shame those exhibited by their peers. Experts have very few clues as to what underlies this connection.
Details of the new investigation were published in the latest online issue of the esteemed medical Journal of Experimental Psychology. The work show empathic people to be highly-capable of taking on another person's perspective on the world.
The research team that conducted the investigation, led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), says that it did not expect these results when it ran its experiments. The work was coordinated by study leader Amy Shelton, PhD.
“The results were striking: There was a profound difference in this ability among people with better social skills and those with weaker ones,” adds the researcher, quoted by PsychCentral. She reveals that the new data could have practical, real-world applications.
People known for their lack of social awareness and skills, such as for example individuals suffering from conditions in the autism spectrum, could benefit from the effects of new health strategies, that would be based on these discoveries, and would compensate for their other weaknesses.
“Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this research is that it emphasizes a ‘whole person’ approach. We tend to think of ourselves as being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at certain skills, but these results suggest that different skills really do interact and have an impact on each other,” Shelton says.
“For instance, I might be good at giving directions to another person because I have good spatial skills, but I might be even better at it if I can also empathize or embody the other person’s perspective,” the expert goes on to say.
In the new investigation, Shelton determined that people are more capable of taking on a different perspective than they normally do when this “involves a person, or a potential person, rather than just an object.”
“Perhaps the human figures [used in the experimetns] allowed the study subjects to more readily embody the other person and take that ‘person’s’ perspective in this task,” the scientist adds.
“The current thinking on this is that this ‘embodiment’ should be universally helpful, because it’s what we do as social beings: We put ourselves in another person’s place. Yet our results indicate that this embodiment is only helpful if one is actually socially savvy to begin with,” she concludes.