Criterion/Predictive
Nummenmaa et al. (2008) showed that emotional pictures depicting an attack scene increase experience of
fear, anger and disgust while decreasing experience of pleasure in participants. Affective empathy stimuli
resulted in increased activity in the thalamus (involved in emotional processing), left fusiform gyrus (face percep-
tion), right brain stem and networks associated with mirroring (inferior parietal lobule). Furthermore, the thala-
mus, primary somatosensory and motor cortices showed augmented functional coupling in relation to emotional
empathy ( Nummenmaa et al., 2008 ).
Location
Nummenmaa, L., Hirvonen, J., Parkkola, R., & Hietanen, J.K. (2008). Is emotional contagion special? An fMRI
study on neural systems for affective and cognitive empathy. NeuroImage, 43 ,5 7 1/C0580.
Results and Comments
The PSS has not been used extensively in research into empathy. The psychometric properties of the picture
story approach, including test /C0retest reliability, internal consistency, as well as convergent and discriminant
validity remain to be determined.
Kids’ Empathetic Development Scale (KEDS)
(Reid et al., 2012 ).
Variable
Cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of empathy are examined using emotion recognition, picture
based scenarios, and behavioral self-report techniques.
Description
The KEDS is ‘a measure of complex emotion and mental state comprehension as well as a behavioral measure
of empathy’ ( Reid et al., 2012 , p. 11). It is a multidimensional measure of empathy for school-aged children, com-
prising 12 ‘faceless’ pictographic stimuli that are scenarios of events or multiple characters. The figures are ‘face-
less’ to ensure the measurement of affective inference as opposed to emotion recognition. Emotional
identification response cards consist of faces used to match up with the figures in scenes. Faces incorporate both
simple (happy, sad, angry) and complex (relaxed, surprised, afraid) emotions. Prior to administration, children
are shown the emotional identification response cards and identify the sex, mental, and emotional states.
Children ascribe one of six emotions presented to a person/s in each of the scenes by pointing to the picture or
by verbally labeling the emotion. Following each stimulus presentation, children are prompted with questions
pertaining to inferred affective empathy (e.g., ‘How do you think this boy/girl/man feels?’), cognitive empathy
(e.g., ‘Can you tell me why this boy/girl/man feels ...?’ and ‘Please tell me more about what is happening’), as
well as behavioral elements of empathy (‘What would you do, if you were that boy/girl/man?’). In six scenarios,
two characters have blank faces and children are asked the same questions for each. The number of males and
females presented in each scene are counterbalanced.
Sample
The initial developmental sample comprised 220 children, aged from 7 to almost 11 years ( Reid et al., 2012 ).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Reid et al. (2012) reported a Cronbach alpha coefficient for all 17 character scenarios of .84, for affective (.63),
for cognitive (.82), and for the behavioral scales (.84).
Test/C0Retest
Test/C0retest reliability coefficients are not currently available.275 OVERVIEW OF THE MEASURES
III. EMOTION REGULATION