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. 2020 Jan 24;10(2):41.
doi: 10.3390/bs10020041.

A Short Empathy Paradigm to Assess Empathic Deficits in Schizophrenia

Foteini Peveretou  1 , Sina Radke  1   2 , Birgit Derntl  3 , Ute Habel  1   2
Affiliations

A Short Empathy Paradigm to Assess Empathic Deficits in Schizophrenia

Foteini Peveretou et al. Behav Sci (Basel). .

Abstract

Empathy is important for successful social interaction and maintaining relationships. Several studies detected impairments in empathic abilities in schizophrenia, with some even indicating a broader deficit in several components, including emotion recognition, perspective taking, and affective responsiveness. The aim of our study was to validate a short version of the previous empathy paradigm as a reliable and easily applicable method to assess empathic deficits in patients with schizophrenia potentially within clinical routine. To do so, we applied the short version to 30 patients (14 females) diagnosed with schizophrenia meeting the DSM-5 criteria and 30 well matched healthy controls (14 females). The data analysis indicates a significant empathic deficit in patients due to worse performance in all three domains. We managed to replicate most of the findings of our previous study. In contrary to the previous study, significant correlations between performance in the empathy tasks and psychopathology occurred: the severity of negative symptoms was negatively associated with performance in the emotion recognition task and the affective responsiveness task. Gender did not significantly affect performance in the empathy tasks. Regarding the results, our short empathy paradigm appears to be a valid method in assessing empathic impairments in schizophrenia that may be useful in clinical routine.

Keywords: affective responsiveness; emotion recognition; empathy; perspective taking; psychopathology; schizophrenia.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Illustration of the three tasks, measuring (a) emotion recognition, (b) emotional perspective taking, and (c) affective responsiveness as core components of the empathic ability. Task instructions are listed next to the example stimuli. Image adapted from [10].
Figure 1
Figure 1
Illustration of the three tasks, measuring (a) emotion recognition, (b) emotional perspective taking, and (c) affective responsiveness as core components of the empathic ability. Task instructions are listed next to the example stimuli. Image adapted from [10].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Performance (% correct and a line indicating mean group performance) in emotion recognition, emotional perspective taking, and affective responsiveness in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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