Tracking emotions in the brain - Revisiting the Empathic Accuracy Task.

ABSTRACT: Many empathy tasks lack ecological validity due to their use of simplistic stimuli and static analytical approaches. Empathic accuracy tasks overcome these limitations by using autobiographical emotional video clips. Usually, a single measure of empathic accuracy is computed by correlating the participants' continuous ratings of the narrator's emotional state with the narrator's own ratings. In this study, we validated a modified empathic accuracy task. A valence-independent rating of the narrator's emotional intensity was added to provide comparability between videos portraying different primary emotions and to explore changes in neural activity related to variations in emotional intensity over time. We also added a new neutral control condition to investigate general emotional processing

SUBMITTER: Mackes NK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6057276 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature