Research On Perceived Similarity Affecting Empathy And Altruistic Behavior For High School Students

In a social interaction context, empathic accuracy can be defined as the degree to which one interaction is able to accurately infer the specific content of another interaction's thoughts and feelings. Previous findings have confirmed that the intersubjective meaning context which was affected by Immediate contextual knowledge and intersubjective relationship has effect on empathic accuracy. It has been confirmed that the trait emotional expressivity of social targets may affected the empathic accuracy of observers by providing variable verbal and nonverbal information. Mutual knowledge make friends perform better than strangers on inferring the thoughts and felling of the targets. It has been found that relationship quality can also affect empathic accuracy. The article take two studies to explore how die the factors about Immediate contextual knowledge and intersubjective relationship affect empathic accuracy from the perspective of meaning context.Participants in the first study interacted with each other on the topic of movies. The interaction was videotaped by a video equipment and then be watched by the two interactions for collecting the data of empathic accuracy. Five trained raters compared the inference of the observer and the real thoughts and feelings of the target. The more similar the content was the higher empathic accuracy was. The study presumed would perform better when the targets' emotional expressivity was high. But the results did not support the assumption.In the second study, more variables which might affect empathic accuracy were tested. Participants inferred each other's thoughts and feelings in the replay task. One aim of the study was to explore whether there was an interaction between emotional expressivity and intersubjective relationship on the effect of empathic accuracy and whether the stranger-interaction partner performed better than the stranger-observer. The result indicated that the empathic accuracy of the stranger-interaction partner was higher than stranger-observer and there was an interaction between emotional expressivity and intersubjective relationship. When the target's emotional expressivity was low, mutual knowledge of friends might help them to understand each other better.