The Fox and the Lion: Investigating Associations between Empathy and Emotion Perspective-Taking in Aesop's Fables

Abstract

Empathy is essential in story comprehension as it requires understanding of the emotions and intentions of the characters. Our study aimed to evaluate the sensitivity of an emotional perspective-taking task using Aesop’s Fables in relation to empathy. Participants ( N = 301) were presented with 15 short fables and were asked to rate on a Likert scale the intensity of the emotions they would feel adopting the perspective of one of the characters (offender, victim) or the observer’s perspective. The given emotions were anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, joy, trust, and anticipation. A data-driven approach revealed that participants’ responses were related to the content of each fable, i.e. whether the offender tricked/hurt the victim or whether the victim managed to avoid the offender’s plot, suggesting successful emotional perspective-taking. Participants also seemed to sympathize with the victim rather than the offender, demonstrating affective sharing processes. Further, participants with high empathy scores exhibited stronger negative emotions from the victim’s perspective compared to those with low empathy, independently of their level of distress. As observers, subjects with both high empathy and distress experienced the strongest negative emotions compared to subjects with low empathy and/or distress. Finally, our task seemed to not be influenced by gender effects. We might therefore suggest that the Aesop’s Fables could be employed in an emotional perspective-task to tap onto different empathy components, thus providing an indirect instrument to study empathy.