Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Strangers Who Love Fiction: Fantasy Component Of Interpersonal Reactivity Associated With Empathic Accuracy (#728)

Shushi Namba 1 2 , Russell S Kabir 1 , Kiyoaki Matsuda 1 , Yuka Noguchi 1 , Kouhei Kambara 1 , Ryota Kobayashi 1 , Jun Shigematsu 1 , Makoto Miyatani 1 , Takashi Nakao 1
  1. Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima, JAPAN
  2. Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, UK

Congruence between individual differences in empathic traits and behavioral indicators of empathic ability remain an understudied area. Comparing which traits are associated with performance on tasks that require inferences about the internal states of others, also known as empathic accuracy, could reveal more about underlying empathic processes or their characteristics. Two studies were conducted to investigate possible relationships between self-reported constructs of interpersonal reactivity and an experimental paradigm that measures empathic accuracy. The first experiment investigated these relationships between participants engaging in everyday conversations, and the second experiment examined the same variables in a context designed to emulate a counseling setting. In both cases, trait-level scores on the Fantasy scale correlated with empathic accuracy scores. This finding indicates that a plausible “repertoire of representations” of human emotional circumstances might be a factor in the ability to accurately infer the internal state of others. Implications for such a hypothesis and the state of the generalizability of this research from Japan are discussed.