Department of Psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Nov 4;16(11):e0259522. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259522. eCollection 2021.
Despite substantial literature on the effect of empathy on parenting, empathy research has historically suffered from definitional and methodological limitations. Parental empathy can be characterized as parents' ability to recognize, take the perspective of, and appropriately react to children's emotions. Current parental empathy assessment largely relies on self-report measures of dispositional empathy, but many argue parental empathy is distinct from dispositional empathy. Despite efforts to measure parental empathy implicitly, such analog approaches are labor intensive. The current report describes the preliminary development of the Empathy Measure for Parents Analog Task (EMPAT), two novel analog measures of parental empathy: one EMPAT analog uses audio stimuli and a second version uses written evocative scripts. After piloting with a sample of undergraduate students (Study 1), the measures were then administered to a sample of 212 parents (Study 2). For each study, the accuracy of the audio and script stimuli were first confirmed by examination of frequency distributions, then exploratory factor analyses were conducted to determine factor structure for each emotion subscale (i.e., Happy, Mad, Sad, Scared), and finally the composition of each emotion subscale was confirmed with scale reliability analyses. Correlations between each EMPAT version and measures of dispositional empathy, parental empathy, and positive parenting indicators were examined to assess the initial validity of the EMPAT measures. The new analog tasks demonstrated good reliability as well as preliminary evidence of validity, with potential utility in assessing cognitive elements of empathy in particular. With continued efforts to examine measure validity, the implications of these studies suggest the EMPAT tasks show promise in providing improved implicit, efficient assessments of child-directed empathy, which may be important for understanding positive and problematic parenting.
尽管有大量关于同理心对育儿影响的文献，但同理心研究在历史上一直受到定义和方法学的限制。父母同理心可以被描述为父母识别、站在孩子的角度看待和适当回应孩子情绪的能力。目前，父母同理心的评估主要依赖于对特质同理心的自我报告测量，但许多人认为父母同理心与特质同理心不同。尽管人们努力通过类比方法来隐含地测量父母同理心，但这种方法非常繁琐。本报告描述了父母同理心模拟任务的同理心测量(EMPAT)的初步发展，这是两种新的父母同理心模拟测量方法：一种 EMPAT 模拟使用音频刺激，另一种版本使用书面情感脚本。在对一组本科生进行试点研究(研究 1)之后，然后对 212 名家长进行了测试(研究 2)。对于每项研究，首先通过检查频率分布来确认音频和脚本刺激的准确性，然后进行探索性因素分析，以确定每个情绪子量表的因素结构(即快乐、生气、悲伤、恐惧)，最后通过量表可靠性分析来确认每个情绪子量表的组成。检验了每个 EMPAT 版本与特质同理心、父母同理心和积极育儿指标之间的相关性，以评估 EMPAT 测量的初步有效性。新的模拟任务表现出良好的可靠性和初步的有效性证据，特别是在评估同理心的认知成分方面具有潜在的效用。随着进一步努力检验测量的有效性，这些研究的意义表明，EMPAT 任务有望提供对儿童导向同理心的改进的、有效的、内隐评估，这对于理解积极和有问题的育儿可能很重要。
