Pilot Study on the Development and Validation of a Contextual Executive Function—Empathy Task

The traditional approach of assessing cognition involves isolating specific skills in a controlled environment. However, decontextualizing the skills involved in executive function and empathy potentially neglects the external influences that play a role in exercising these skills in real-life. This study first developed an 18-scenario Contextualized Executive Function—Empathy Task (CEFET) and validated its empathy-related constructs measured in the task, including affective empathy, cognitive empathy, empathic concern and prosocial behavior. These constructs were subsequently used to test a hierarchical model of empathy. Participants were 32 Hong Kong Cantonese-speaking adults, who were administered a set of standardized questionnaires and the CEFET through an online survey platform. Participants responded during the CEFET through multiple-choice selections, ratings and verbal responses were collected, with a novel coding scheme designed to score the latter category of responses. The items had good to excellent internal consistency, with the affective empathy construct demonstrating construct validity. Given that empathic concern was the only construct that did not correlate with others, subsequent hierarchical multiple regressions exclude this construct. Affective empathy and cognitive empathy were both found to contribute unique variance to prosocial behavior. These findings provide initial evidence for the potential reliability and validity of the CEFET in assessing empathy.