Gregory J. Depow
Understanding how we understand the emotions of others
Hello! My name is Greg Depow, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management, working with Dr. Chris Oveis in the Empathy and Emotion Lab. I am also working with Dr. Amit Goldenberg who runs the Digital Emotions Lab at Harvard Business School. I research empathy, prosocial acts, and subjective well-being–employing a range of tools from lab-based experimental approaches to repeatedly sampling experiences in everyday life. My work is supported by Social Sciences Human Research Council, and the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. I’m also a Rechter Fellow at the Center for Positive Leadership. I received my PhD in psychology from the University of Toronto, with Dr. Michael Inzlicht in the Work and Play Lab.
Research
In my research, I examine empathy (understanding, sharing, and caring about the emotions of others), prosocial behaviour (acts done to help others), and subjective well-being (happiness and sense of purpose in life). I use a range of methodological approaches to address these topics from different angles and in different contexts. I am also interested in the practice of science itself and the promotion of practices which encourage transparency and openness including, but not limited to, preregistration, replication, multi-lab studies, and open sharing of data, code, and materials wherever possible. Browse the figures below, click on research, or go to my publications below to learn more.
Sankey-flow network diagram 
Venn-Francis diagram showing the proportion of cases where emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion co-occured or not in each combination. 
Rates of prosocial behaviour and levels of momentary well-being during negative, mixed, positive, and no empathy opportunities. 
Valence of empathy opportunities across the lifespan. 
Rates of prosocial behaviour and empathy across time of day for morning birds and night owls. 
Avoidance of mental effort as effort increases to earn reward for self and charity. 
Correlation between prosocial effort for a target and decoding accuracy for a classifier trained on multivariate behavioural data. Prosocial effort is related to self-other representational overlap. 
Proportion mental effort expended by reward for self, charity, and other. 
Proportion mental effort expended by effort level for self, charity, and other. 
Empathy opportunities and happiness for morning birds and night owls across the day. 
Word clouds of open-ended responses describing failed and successful empathy cues. 
Within and between person effects of being high for regular cannabis users. 
Subjective well-being across the adult lifespan. 
Rates of prosocial behaviour and empathy opportunities across the adult lifepsan.
Publications and Media
In the spirit of open science and the service of science communication, I provide access to versions of all of my published work here on my website. You can also find popular press articles discussing my work, podcast and radio interviews I have done, and other related media.
Teaching and Mentoring
I really enjoy teaching and serving as a mentor for others. I have had the benefit of excellent mentors, collaborators, and lab-mates, and I try to pass on what knowledge I have gained whenever possible. See more about my experience here.
Explore Data
Do people differ in how much they share emotions, take perspective, and feel compassion across different types of emotions? On the explore data page you can view the distribution of different empathy components for different types of emotions. Data is from the Experience of Empathy in Everyday Life (Depow et al., 2021). You can also upload your own data and choose a scale to examine it’s psychometric properties, or try out Response Surface Analysis to see how different pairings of two predictor variables may relate to an outcome variable.
