Abstract
Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to understand the other and to share others’ emotions, motivates prosocial behavior and underlies successful interpersonal relations. Dysfunctions in this ability may cause fundamental difficulties in social communication. Empathy has been measured in various ways, from self-report questionnaires to laboratory objective performance tests. Empathic accuracy (EA), i.e., the ability to accurately empathize, is measured using more complex and ecological paradigms, such as asking participants to infer filmed interactions, or having people narrate personal emotional stories then assessing the correspondence between the perceiver and the target of empathy as the criteria for empathic ability. This measure is particularly useful in the study of clinical populations, where deconstructing the multifaceted concept of empathy may contribute to a more complete understanding of specific clinical profiles. This paper presents a scoping review of the literature on EA in clinical populations, and on EA and clinical traits and states in nonclinical or high-risk populations. Following an exhaustive literature search, 34 studies were found eligible to be included in this review. The largest category was studies focused on EA in people with schizophrenia (31%; 11 papers), followed by studies focused on EA in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and autistic traits in a nonclinical population (22%; 8 papers). Studies were also found on EA and depression tendencies, psychopathy, social anxiety, behavior disorders, and personality disorders, and a few other clinical conditions. The included studies varied on research aims, designs, sample sizes, and male:female ratios. The overall synthesized results suggest that EA is reduced in schizophrenia and ASD. In other clinical populations, the number of studies was very limited. We urge researchers to further examine EA in these less-studied populations. The review reveals a general underrepresentation of female participants in studies on EA in clinical populations. We suggest that future research address understudied clinical populations, such as those diagnosed with psychopathy. Subject, target, and situational variables should also be considered, with special attention to gender differences (and similarities), the association between EA abilities and adaptive functioning, and the study of individuals with clinical conditions as targets, not just observers, in EA tasks.
Highlights
Every well-adjusted social interaction—for example, between parents and children, between peers or between partners— requires recognition, understanding and sometimes sharing each other’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions
The main objective of this review is to provide an overview of the existing literature on Empathic accuracy (EA) in clinical populations or high-risk subclinical populations, and on clinical states and traits measured in nonclinical samples
The original search conducted in July 2019 yielded 17 potentially relevant citations for EA and “autism”
Summary
Every well-adjusted social interaction—for example, between parents and children, between peers or between partners— requires recognition, understanding and sometimes sharing each other’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The multifaceted concept of empathy can be divided into cognitive empathy (or mentalizing)—the recognition and understanding of others’ mental states—and emotional empathy (or experience sharing) —in which the affective experience is similar to that of the other, or there is an emotional response to the mental state of the other [(5–7); for a review see: (2, 8)]
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