Roujia Feng showed research participants a simple photograph: someone with a neutral expression, looking straight at the camera. Then she showed them the same person frowning—not out of rudeness or contempt, but in genuine sadness as they listened to another person's misfortune. Something shifted. That frown made them more attractive.
This counterintuitive finding comes from Feng's doctoral research at Leiden University, which she defended in May. Across fifteen experiments involving around 2,300 participants from the United Kingdom, the psychology researcher investigated how we perceive people who respond to others with emotional authenticity. The question feels simple but cuts to something deeper: does being empathic—genuinely happy for someone's good news, genuinely sad about their suffering—actually help us connect with others?
The research design was elegantly grounded in real life. Participants read scenarios like a waitress overhearing a customer's story about an abusive childhood and responding with sadness, or a shoe sales assistant smiling at a customer who could finally walk again after leg surgery. Feng asked people to rate not just whether these emotional responses seemed appropriate, but whether they found the person expressing them trustworthy and attractive.
The results revealed what Feng calls a "positivity bias." When someone responded empathically—smiling at another's happiness or frowning at their pain—they were rated as significantly more attractive by observers. This was true even when the empathic expression wasn't conventionally attractive. A genuine frown of sympathy boosted attractiveness more than a neutral expression ever could. "If someone smiled out of schadenfreude or frowned out of glückschmerz, that person was not found to be any less attractive than with the neutral expression," Feng explains. In other words, taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune didn't make them seem worse—but showing real empathy made them seem better.
The research also revealed gender differences in how harshly empathy was judged. Women rated both empathic and counter-empathic reactions more extremely than men did—praising genuine empathy more enthusiastically, but also condemning schadenfreude and glückschmerz (the untranslatable German term for displeasure at someone else's happiness) more severely. Yet interestingly, the gender of the person expressing emotion, or receiving it, didn't create robust effects in how harshly they were judged overall.
Context mattered significantly too. A sympathetic response to major surgery was judged far more appropriate than the same response to someone missing a bus. The scale of the event shaped whether empathy seemed warranted.
What makes this research hopeful is its core insight: the world rewards genuine feeling. Being truly attuned to others—celebrating their wins, mourning their losses—doesn't just make us better people; it makes us more attractive in the eyes of others. In a time when many worry about authenticity and connection, Feng's work suggests that empathy isn't a vulnerability. It's magnetic.
Feng hopes to expand the research to examine how relationships between people affect empathic judgments, and whether deserved versus undeserved good or bad fortune changes how we evaluate emotional responses. There's still much to learn about how our capacity for feeling makes us more human—and more attractive—to one another.