Measuring empathy in schizophrenia: The Empathic Accuracy Task and its correlation with other empathy measures

Abstract

Introduction: Empathy is an interpersonal process thought to be impaired in schizophrenia. Past studies have mainly used questionnaires or performance-based tasks with static cues to measure empathy. We used an Empathic Accuracy Task (EAT) designed to capture the dynamic aspects of empathy by using video clips in which perceivers continuously judge emotionally charged stories. We compared individuals with schizophrenia to healthy controls and assessed correlations among the EAT and three other commonly used empathy measures. Methods: Patients (n=92) and healthy controls (n=42) matched for age, gender and education completed the EAT, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy and the Faux Pas task. Differences between groups were analyzed and correlations were calculated between empathy measurement instruments. Results: The groups differed in EAT performance, with controls outperforming patients. A moderating effect was found for emotional expressivity of the target: while both patients and controls scored low when judging targets with low expressivity, controls performed better than patients with more expressive targets. EAT performance did not correlate with questionnaire scores. Differences between patients and controls on general cognition was not significant. Conclusions: Individuals with schizophrenia benefit less from expressivity of other people which contributes to their impaired empathic accuracy. The lack of correlation between the EAT and the questionnaires suggests a distinction between self-report empathy and actual empathy performance. To explore empathic difficulties in real life, it is important to use instruments that take the interpersonal perspective into account.

Religiosity and Psychotic Ideation in Stable Schizophrenia: A Role for Empathic Perspective-Taking

“…Regarding empathy measures, these patients showed differences in the three components of the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI): Lower perspective-taking and emphatic concern, as well as more personal distress than the comparison group (Table 1), thus agreeing with previous findings using similar measures [21,22,27,28,42]. These findings, however, did not provide robust enough evidence to sustain the conjecture of a singular deficit in affective empathy in schizophrenia [24,26,44,45]. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have summarized the deficits in performance-based tasks of theory of mind in patients with schizophrenia [46][47][48].…”

Dynamic Interactive Social Cognition Training in Virtual Reality (DiSCoVR) for People With a Psychotic Disorder: Single-Group Feasibility and Acceptability Study

“…Empathic Accuracy Task (EAT [ 32 ]; Dutch version [ 33 ]) is a computerized video task measuring empathy, with clips of people speaking about emotionally charged autobiographical events with either a positive or a negative valence. Conforming to previous studies [ 34 , 35 ], a shortened version (4 videos; 2 positive and 2 negative) was used. Parallel versions were administered, using counterbalanced randomization.…”

Empathic Accuracy and Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Young Adults With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…CE, AE and EA were measured using a modified version of the EAT (Mackes et al, 2018;Zaki et al, 2009), which has previously been used to explore EA in people with schizophrenia (Lee et al, 2011;van Donkersgoed et al, 2019) and adolescents with conduct disorder (Martin-Key et al, 2017, 2020.…”