Employing a Novel Paradigm and Sets of Stimuli to Examine Emotional Intensity Recognition and Its Modulation by Empathy for Pain

Abstract

Over the last two decades, research has devoted increasing attention to the examination of empathy. Yet research examining empathic accuracy, defined as how well we judge the emotional intensity felt by another, has grown more modestly. This asymmetry may be due to the complexity of paradigms used to study empathic accuracy, as well as to the fact that the stimuli used so far are dependent upon linguistic and cultural factors. To circumvent these issues, here we present a novel paradigm that examines the ability to assess empathic accuracy in a simple and implicit manner by using stimuli that are not dependent on language and culture. To this end, we devised two sets of stimuli: (1) a painful scenario set consisting of empathy-evoking still images; and (2) a facial expression set comprising morphed intensities of emotional facial expressions. Together, these sets can be used to study the effect of the empathic experience on an individual's ability to make accurate judgments of others' emotional facial intensity, a sub-process of empathic accuracy. We contend that adopting these sets may facilitate the replicability of findings across countries and populations, which in turn will increase the number of investigations of empathic accuracy.