An Exploration of the Cognitive and Affective Components of an Empathy Assessment to Inform Intervention

Abstract

While empathy is widely understood as a multifaceted construct and an important component of prosocial behavior, its role is less certain with regard to aggressive and bullying behavior in schools. In an effort to further the bully-prevention-and-intervention initiative, the validity of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)--a self-report assessment that aims to evaluate both cognitive and affective components of empathy--was examined to determine its potential effectiveness as a screener to inform intervention for school-age youth. It is hypothesized that the IRI may insufficiently assess students' true empathic capacity due to the social desirability bias inherent in self-report scales, particularly with a youth population. The present study uses a correlational design to separately examine the strengths of the relationships between individuals' self-reports of cognitive and affective empathy on the IRI and respective criterion measures, social cognitive processing tasks and physiological responses to emotion-eliciting stimuli. Reliability analyses were also conducted to determine whether the IRI measures cognitive and affective empathy as separate constructs with a school-age population. It was hypothesized that individuals' self-reports of cognitive empathy would be strongly, positively related to performance on social cognitive processing tasks, and that students' self-report of affective empathy would yield weaker correlations with physiological responses to emotion-eliciting stimuli due to the social desirability bias inherent to the scale. Children in grades three though eight (n= 37) participated in the current study. Youth were recruited from an afterschool program and a summer camp from a parochial elementary school in a city in Pennsylvania. Students were asked to complete the IRI self-report scale. Two social cognitive processing tasks from the NEPSY-II were administered as a criterion measure for self-report of cognitive empathy. Change in fingertip temperature was measured during the viewing of two video vignettes to observe physiological response to emotion-eliciting stimuli as a criterion measure for affective empathy. While some strong, positive correlations were observed between male students' responses within the cognitive and affective empathy subscales of the IRI and performance on criterion measures, no positive correlations were observed between female students' self-reports of empathy and performance on criterion measures. Reliability analyses yielded no sufficient distinction between self-reports of affective and cognitive empathy.