Social cognition

ability to vicariously experience and/or understand the affect of others

describes a person’s emotional reaction to another’s emotional state, i.e., the ability to feel what another person feels

refers to the ability to take another person’s perspective and the understanding of another person’s mental state, without necessarily being in the same affective state.

captures both, emotional and cognitive empathy. Participants are asked to rate emotional pictures on induced emotional concern and arousal (emotional empathy). Furthermore, participants are asked to identify the mental state the person depicted is in (cognitive empathy).

for the assessment of emotional empathy we adopted in addition to the explicit (i.e., rating of empathic concern: “how concerned are you for that person”) an implicit type of questioning (i.e., arousal ratings as proxy for empathic concern: “how calm/aroused does this picture make you feel”).

cognitive empathy has been assessed using tasks such as the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET), as well as different versions of the Facial Emotion Recognition Task (FERT).