Empathy plays a fundamental role in successful social interactions. However, most tasks currently available for measuring empathy have limited ecological validity and therefore may not elicit true emotional responses in observers. To address this gap, we developed the Empathic Measure of True Emotion (EMOTE), the first emotion stimuli set to include footage of genuine positive and negative emotions unfolding in naturalistic contexts. We validated the EMOTE in a sample of 216 participants. The EMOTE demonstrated acceptable internal consistency, construct validity, and alternate forms reliability for both cognitive and affective empathy. We also found that, relative to conventional empathy measures, the EMOTE elicited stronger affective empathy ratings in observers, and the stimuli were rated higher in both genuineness and emotional intensity. Together, these findings demonstrate that the EMOTE is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive and affective empathy with enhanced ecological validity, providing a valuable new tool for measuring empathy in both clinical and research settings.
Keywords: Empathy; assessment; ecological validity; emotion.