Introduction
Social relationships are crucial for humans. So far, studies investigating ways to enhance relationships have mainly focused on romantic couplesTo date, theoretical as well as empirical work increasingly emphasizes that emotions are central to all meaningful interactions as they can influence behaviors and thus social relationshipsIn light of the relevant implications of emotions for social interactions, emotion-based interventions have been developed to promote better relationships. Previous studies tested the effects of emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal training (i.e., reinterpreting a situation that triggered an emotion in order to modify the emotional impact) in conflicts (for instance in couple conflicts, see Ben-Naim et al.In line with this body of research, a theoretical review has pointed out another emotion regulation strategyConsistent with this idea, cultivating compassion has been suggested to benefit social relationshipsPromising evidence comes from a study, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the only study that tested the effect of compassion meditation toward a negative target, a transgressorTherefore, it would be important to test whether compassion training can also have beneficial transfer effects in an actual, ongoing, and tense relationship with a disliked person. In other words: can compassion training change emotions and attitudes when they are directed to a disliked person? Among the emotions that arise from dislike, researchers have identified schadenfreude