| Empathy has been conceptualized in myriad ways in the literature, but an established understanding of empathy, as a construct, remains elusive. Several different measures of general empathy deficits have been used with child molesters, but the results have been equivocal and sometimes contradictory. In reaction to the inconclusive literature, Marshall et al. (1995) conceptualized empathy based on a social information processing framework involving four distinct stages: (a) emotion recognition, (b) perspective-taking, (c) emotion replication, and (d) response decision. The present study examined three of the four stages of the empathy model proposed by Marshall et al. (1995) including emotion recognition, perspective taking, and emotion replication. Participants included 51 males aged 18 years and older, consisting of 26 child molesters with an extrafamilial child victim 14 years of age or younger and 25 non-offenders that were recruited from the local community. Results indicated that no significant differences were found between the two groups in terms of emotion recognition skills, perspective-taking skills, or emotion replication skills. |
