Enhancing Empathic Accuracy: Penalized Functional Alignment Method to Correct Temporal Misalignment in Real-Time Emotional Perception.

ABSTRACT: Empathic accuracy (EA) is the ability to accurately understand another person's thoughts and feelings, which is crucial for social and psychological interactions. Traditionally, EA is assessed by comparing a perceiver's moment-to-moment ratings of a target's emotional state with the target's own self-reported ratings at corresponding time points. However, misalignments between these two sequences are common due to the complexity of emotional interpretation and individual differences in behavioral responses. Conventional methods often ignore or oversimplify these misalignments, for instance by assuming a fixed time lag, which can introduce bias into EA estimates. To address this, we propose a novel alignment approach that captures a wide range of misalignment patterns. Our method leverages

SUBMITTER: Nghiem LH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12660001 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature