This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Listening to someone recount their visit to an amusement park can feel like being on an emotional roller coaster yourself. Even if the listeners have never set foot in the park, they can still empathize with the other person's feelings: the deep disappointment when it turns out that their favorite ride is closed.
The joy—at having the best ice cream of their life. And the embarrassment—after that ice cream abruptly left their stomach on the Freefall Tower. Put simply: whatever the other person is feeling, we feel it with them.
Social understanding is a fundamental prerequisite for successful social interaction. In psychology, a distinction is made between two key processes: empathy describes an affective resonance—that is, the sharing of others' feelings, as in the case described above. This is distinct from theory of mind (ToM), the cognitive process of taking another's perspective, through which people logically infer the thoughts, intentions or beliefs of the person they are interacting with.
Until now, research into these mechanisms has focused predominantly on negative scenarios such as pain or suffering. However, social understanding in everyday life just as frequently occurs in positive or socially ambivalent situations. To bridge this gap, two psychologists at the University of Würzburg have developed new, validated measurement tools: Anne Böckler-Raettig, professor of research methods and social cognition at the Institute of Psychology, and Eva Landmann, a doctoral researcher in her lab.
The findings are published in the journal Behavior Research Methods. "In psychological research, valid instruments are crucial to reliably measure human experiences," explains Böckler-Raettig. To this end, in 2015 she and her colleagues developed and validated a task designed to measure empathy and cognitive perspective-taking: the EmpaToM Task.
The researchers are now presenting two extensions: EmpaToM-pos and EmpaToM-embarrass. "This allows us to measure affective and cognitive processes simultaneously yet independently of one another across four contexts," explains Landmann. The instrument uses naturalistic video narratives in which people recount brief autobiographical experiences that differ in their emotional orientation: In accompanying studies involving a total of over 170 participants, the researchers were able to demonstrate the validity of the expanded instrument.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
