Zaki Jamil, Bolger Niall, Ochsner Kevin
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2008 Apr;19(4):399-404. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02099.x.
Although current theories suggest that affective empathy (perceivers' experience of social targets' emotions) should contribute to empathic accuracy (perceivers' ability to accurately assess targets' emotions), extant research has failed to consistently demonstrate a correspondence between them. We reasoned that prior null findings may be attributable to a failure to account for the fundamentally interpersonal nature of empathy, and tested the prediction that empathic accuracy may depend on both targets' tendency to express emotion and perceivers' tendency to empathically share that emotion. Using a continuous affect-rating paradigm, we found that perceivers' trait affective empathy was unrelated to empathic accuracy unless targets' trait expressivity was taken into account: Perceivers' trait affective empathy predicted accuracy only for expressive targets. These data suggest that perceivers' self-reported affective empathy can indeed predict their empathic accuracy, but only when targets' expressivity allows their thoughts and feelings to be read.
尽管当前理论认为情感共情（感知者对社会目标情绪的体验）应有助于共情准确性（感知者准确评估目标情绪的能力），但现有研究未能始终如一地证明它们之间的对应关系。我们推断，先前的零结果可能归因于未能考虑到共情本质上的人际性质，并测试了共情准确性可能取决于目标表达情绪的倾向和感知者共情分享该情绪的倾向这一预测。使用连续情感评分范式，我们发现，除非考虑目标的特质表达性，否则感知者的特质情感共情与共情准确性无关：感知者的特质情感共情仅对表达性目标的准确性有预测作用。这些数据表明，感知者自我报告的情感共情确实可以预测他们的共情准确性，但前提是目标的表达性能够让其思想和感受得以展现。
