Listening to someone recount their visit to an amusement park can feel like being on an emotional rollercoaster yourself. Even if the listeners have never set foot in the park, they can still empathise with the other person’s feelings: the deep disappointment when it turns out that their favourite 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.

Feeling with and thinking about others

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 the 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, PhD researcher in her lab.

Methodological innovation for real-life research

“In psychological research, valid instruments are crucial to reliably measure human experiences,” explains Anne 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 Eva Landmann. The instrument uses naturalistic video narratives in which people recount brief autobiographical experiences that differ in their emotional orientation:

• Neutral: accounts of everyday routines, hobbies or work-related activities.
• Negative: accounts of distressing events such as illness or loss.
• Positive: stories about successes, joyful family events or social connectedness.
• Embarrassing: accounts of social mishaps or embarrassing situations in public.

How we empathise with others

In accompanying studies involving a total of over 170 participants, the researchers were able to demonstrate the validity of the expanded instrument. The key findings show:

• Successful induction of empathy: Participants displayed clear emotional reactions. They felt happier when watching positive videos and specifically ‘embarrassed’ when viewing embarrassing content.
• Generalisation of empathy: A strong correlation was found between positive and negative empathy. The tendency to empathise with others thus appears to be an overarching individual trait that remains relatively consistent across different emotional states.
• Independence of cognitive performance: Whilst empathy varied greatly, cognitive perspective-taking (theory of mind) operated largely independently of emotional tendencies. Understanding what a person is thinking is therefore not necessarily linked to empathy.
• Differentiated prosocial behaviour: Positive and embarrassing scenarios led to a greater willingness to help than neutral content, but fell short of the response to negative events.

The researchers provide theoretical explanations for this pattern: “In positive contexts, people may help in order to maintain their own sense of well-being,” says Eva Landmann. When someone is embarrassed, on the other hand, they signal a fundamental recognition of social norms. This encourages social rapprochement and support from the other person.

A more precise understanding for clinical practice and everyday life

According to the two researchers, the strategic significance of this extension of an existing tool lies in its greater ‘ecological validity’ – the research thus brings us closer to the complexity of real life. For clinical psychology, the instrument offers the opportunity to capture inter-individual differences more precisely. It is now possible to investigate whether certain mental disorders are associated with ‘selective deficits’. For example, a patient might be able to share another’s pain, whilst their empathy for others’ joy is impaired.