Situational assessment of empathy and compassion: Predicting prosociality using a video-based task.

ABSTRACT: Classical psychometric approaches in social science measure individuals' tendency to experience empathy and compassion. Using abstract questionnaire items, they place high demand on subjects' capacity to introspect, memorize, and generalize the corresponding emotions. We employed a Socio-affective Video Task (SoVT)-an alternative approach that measures situationally elicited emotions-and assessed its predictive power over prosocial behavior against classical questionnaires in a sample of Israeli university students. We characterized the conceptual embedding of the SoVT concerning other measures of prosocial affect and cognition, and tested group identification as an alternative precursor to prosocial behavior. Eighty participants rated their reactions to videos that presented the suffering

SUBMITTER: Gorska G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10703325 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature