Olderbak Sally, Wilhelm Oliver
Institute for Psychology and Pedagogy, Ulm University.
Emotion. 2017 Oct;17(7):1092-1106. doi: 10.1037/emo0000308. Epub 2017 Mar 30.
Numerous theories posit a positive relation between perceiving emotion expressed in the face of a stranger (emotion perception) and feeling or cognitively understanding the emotion of that person (affective and cognitive empathy, respectively). However, when relating individual differences in emotion perception with individual differences in affective or cognitive empathy, effect sizes are contradictory, but often not significantly different from zero. Based on 4 studies (study range from 97 to 486 persons; = 958) that differ from one another on many design and sample characteristics, applying advanced modeling techniques to control for measurement error, we estimate relations between affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and emotion perception. Relations are tested separately for each of the 6 basic emotions (an emotion-specific model) as well as across all emotions (an emotion-general model). Reflecting the literature, effect sizes and statistical significance with an emotion-general model vary across the individual studies (rs range from -.001 to .24 for emotion perception with affective empathy and -.01 to .39 for emotion perception with cognitive empathy), with a meta-analysis of these results indicating emotion perception is weakly related with affective (r = .13, p = .003) and cognitive empathy (r = .13, p = .05). Relations are not strengthened in an emotion-specific model. We argue that the weak effect sizes and inconsistency across studies reflects a neglected distinction of measurement approach-specifically, empathy is assessed as typical behavior and emotion perception is assessed as maximal effort-and conclude with considerations regarding the measurement of each construct. (PsycINFO Database Record
众多理论假定，感知陌生人面部所表达的情绪（情绪感知）与感受或认知理解该人的情绪（分别为情感共情和认知共情）之间存在正相关关系。然而，当将情绪感知的个体差异与情感或认知共情的个体差异联系起来时，效应大小相互矛盾，但往往与零无显著差异。基于4项研究（研究对象人数从97人到486人不等；N = 958），这些研究在许多设计和样本特征上彼此不同，应用先进的建模技术来控制测量误差，我们估计了情感共情、认知共情和情绪感知之间的关系。针对6种基本情绪中的每一种分别测试关系（一种特定情绪模型）以及跨所有情绪测试关系（一种通用情绪模型）。反映文献情况的是，通用情绪模型的效应大小和统计显著性在各个研究中有所不同（情绪感知与情感共情的相关系数rs范围从-.001到.24，情绪感知与认知共情的相关系数rs范围从-.01到.39），对这些结果进行的元分析表明，情绪感知与情感共情（r =.13，p =.003）和认知共情（r =.13，p =.05）弱相关。在特定情绪模型中，这种关系并未得到加强。我们认为，效应大小较弱以及研究结果不一致反映了测量方法中一个被忽视的区别——具体而言，共情被评估为典型行为，而情绪感知被评估为最大努力——并以对每个构念测量的考量作为结论。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
