Development of an Empathy Rating Scale for Young Children
| Autor: | Eva R. Kimonis, Bryan Neo, Georgette E. Fleming, Natasha Jain, Nancy Briggs |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Parents Socioemotional selectivity theory media_common.quotation_subject Emotions Scale development Empathy medicine.disease Developmental psychology Clinical Psychology Prosocial behavior Conduct disorder Rating scale Child Preschool medicine Humans Female Child Psychology Applied Psychology media_common |
| Zdroj: | Assessment. 30:37-50 |
| ISSN: | 1552-3489 1073-1911 |
| Popis: | Empathy is critical to young children’s socioemotional development and deficient levels characterize a severe and pervasive type of Conduct Disorder (i.e., with limited prosocial emotions). With the emergence of novel, targeted early interventions to treat this psychopathology, the critical limitations of existing parent-report empathy measures reveal their unsuitability for assessing empathy levels and outcomes in young children. The present study aimed to develop a reliable and comprehensive parent-rated empathy scale for young children. This was accomplished by first generating a large list of empathy items sourced from both preexisting empathy measures and from statements made by parents during a clinical interview about their young child’s empathy. Second, this item set was refined using exploratory factor analysis of item scores from parents of children aged 2 to 8 years (56.6% male), recruited online using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. A five-factor solution provided the best fit to the data: Attention to Others’ Emotions, Personal Distress (i.e., Emotional Contagion/Affective Empathy), Personal Distress–Fictional Characters, Prosocial Behavior, and Sympathy. Total and subscale scores on the new “Measure of Empathy in Early Childhood” (MEEC) were internally consistent. Finally, this five-factor structure was tested using confirmatory factor analysis and model fit was adequate. With further research into the validity of MEEC scores, this new rater-based empathy measure for young children may hold promise for assessing empathy in early childhood and advancing research into the origins of empathy and empathy-related disorders. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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