The present research compared empathy for real people with empathy for fictional characters. 95 university students (53 men, 42 women) ages 18-22 years (M = 19.5, SD = 1.9) completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Fictional IRI. The IRI is a widely used measure of human empathy, and the Fictional IRI contains items from the original IRI that have been modified to investigate empathy for fictional characters. Empathy for characters in fictional stories was found to correlate statistically significantly with empathy for real people on all but a few factors. The results of the present study indicate that empathy for real people and empathy for fictional characters are similar, suggesting that the Fantasy subscale of the IRI, which is limited to fictional stories, should be reconsidered.

24 undergraduates performed a self-paced line tracing task. Fast music accelerated performance compared with slow music whereas the tempo of metronome tones did not affect performance.

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This study was designed to examine the effects of information conflict and complexity on voluntary visual exploration quantitatively. 31 adults viewed each of 16 slides of geometrical figures and places for as long as they wished. The stimuli had two values of information conflict and complexity which had been calculated by means of structural information theory. Free looking times indicated that only when information conflict was low, voluntary visual exploration was positively correlated with complexity. Furthermore, voluntary visual exploration correlated positively with information conflict when complexity was low.

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