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Comment: Towards a More Ecologically Valid Assessment of Empathy

Isabel Dziobek
Emotion Review 2012 4: 18
DOI: 10.1177/1754073911421390
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EMR4110.1177/1754073911421390DziobekEmotion Review

Comment

Towards a More Ecologically Valid Assessment

of Empathy

Emotion Review
Vol. 4, No. 1 (January 2012) 1819
The Author(s) 2012
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073911421390
er.sagepub.com

Isabel Dziobek

Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion, Freie Universitt Berlin, Germany

Abstract
The multifaceted nature of empathy requires a comprehensive
conceptualization of core and related emotional and mindreading
processes. Here I argue that new paradigms are needed that allow
for a more ecologically valid and parametric assessment of empathy
subprocesses and their neuronal correlates. Towards that goal, cognitive
neuroscience studies should make use of audiovisual stimuli that more
closely approximate real-life settings and include online social interaction
paradigms.

Keywords
ecological validity, empathy, neuroimaging, online social interaction,
second-person perspective, theory of mind

In his review, Walter (2012) provides a comprehensive and

intelligible overview of the social cognitive neuroscience of
empathy, including an important conceptualization of core
and related emotional and mindreading processes. Clearly,
paradigms are needed that allow for a separate, and ideally
parametric, assessment of empathy subprocesses and their
neuronal correlates. An excellent example for such paradigm
is the cartoon task developed by Walter et al. (2011) that
allows disentagling affective theory of mind (ToM; i.e., cognitive
empathy or the understanding of others emotions) from cognitive theory of mind (the understanding of others thoughts
and intentions) on the behavioral and neuronal level.
In real life, however, empathy unfolds over time and cognitive and emotional empathic processes will mix and affect each
other. In fact, it is in complex everyday-life settings that
problems with cognitive and emotional empathy are most pronounced in individuals with autism, whereas they often remain
unremarkable in laboratory settings that focus on isolated empathy subprocesses. Here I argue that in order to fully understand
subprocesses of empathy and their interactions, a promising
direction for future research will be to increase ecological

validity in cognitive neuroscience studies by (a) making use

of audiovisual stimuli that more closely approximate real-life
settings and (b) including online social interaction paradigms.
While psychological research has traditionally been individualcentered, online settings provide for true interactions between
partners rather than relying on contexts in which participants
are requested to passively observe others. This has been
refered to as adopting a second-person perspective (Wilms
et al., 2010).
For the assessement of cognitive empathy, few tasks exist
that approximate real-life settings by using film stimuli such
as the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC)
(Dziobek et al., 2006) or the reading the mind in films task
(Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, & Golan, 2006), where audio and
visual social information such as facial expressions, body language, and emotional prosodies are imbedded in a rich social
context and change in milisecond intervals. Moreover, those
tests allow for the parametric quantification of accuracy with
which emotions of others are inferred and have been successfully applied in neuroimaging contexts (Wolf, Dziobek, &
Heekeren, 2010). However, those tests measure cognitive
empathy off-line rather than online. Online tasks, often making use of economic game paradigms, are still the exception in
social cognitive neuroscience studies. Although such interactive paradigms have been applied in social decision-making
and cognitive ToM contexts (Sanfey, 2007), they were not
applied in the context of affective ToM (i.e., cognitive empathy). Moreover, they do not involve naturalistic stimuli or
allow for perfomance scores. A paradigm from social psychology that would involve those features is the empathic
accuracy paradigm (Ickes, Stinson, Bissonnette, & Garcia,
1990). In this paradigm, people make inferences about the
naturalistically occurring feelings of stimulus persons that
they have interacted with, and these inferences are scored for
accuracy against the stimulus persons self-reported feelings.
As such, it involves real interactions and provides parametric

Corresponding author: Isabel Dziobek, Junior Research Group Understanding Interaffectivity, Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion, Freie Universitt Berlin,
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany. Email: isabel.dziobek@fu-berlin.de

Downloaded from emr.sagepub.com by ancuta anca on October 25, 2014

Dziobek Assessment of Empathy 19

perfomance scores of cognitive empathy, and its implementation

in a neuroimaging context could thus be a fruitful endeavor
(for a noninteractional functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
[fMRI] adaptation, cf. Zaki, Weber, Bolger, & Ochsner, 2009).
Furthermore, although the original taks was not designed to
that end, the empathic accuracy paradigm could provide
information on emotional empathy by analyzing those parts of
the actual social encounter in which emotions had matched in
the interaction partners.
To date, studies on affective empathy, that is, the sharing of
emotions, do not realize both the implementation of naturalistic
stimulus material and of a second-person perspective. While
many off-line studies on empathy for pain involved the viewing of picture or video stimuli of others body parts or faces
(see Fan, Duncan, de Greck, & Northoff, 2011, for a review),
research involving the imagination of another persons pain
involved interactive charcteristics but lacked real-life audiovisual
stimuli (for an exception, see Singer et al., 2006). Moreover, to
assess emotional matching, both interaction partners will have
to be tracked and compared with respect to emotional reactions, including subjective feeling. Of note, and as pointed out
by Walter, in previous studies isomorphism of emotion was
not found between psychological states but rather between
neuronal correlates.
In summary, in an effort to better understand the complex
nature of empathy, ecologically valid online social paradigms
are needed. Identifications of the neuronal underpinnings of
interactions between empathy subprocesses will greatly benefit
from the development of new imaging techniques such as
hyperscan fMRI, which allows people to be scanned simultaneously while interacting over the Internet.

References
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