YOUNG CHILDREN'S EMPATHY MEASURE (YCEM)
The Young Children's Empathy Measure: reliability, validity and effects of companion animal bonding.
"The Young Children's Empathy Measure is a brief measure of young children's cognitive and affective perspective taking developed to assess preschool children's empathy. The Cronbach alpha coefficient of internal reliability for the empathy score was acceptable and interrater reliability across four rates was very high. The children's empathy scores were correlated with their ages and social development, but not with their IQs. Empathy toward children was correlated with empathy for pets, and children with a strong pet bond had higher scores on empathy for children than young children without pets."
Instruments
"The Young Children's Empathy Measure utilized a definition of empathy that included cognitive and affective response measures. Four verbally presented vignettes created for this measure probed the child's ability to identify sadness, fear, anger, and happiness in a very short story. For each of the four vignettes, an interviewer elicited and wrote down the child's responses on the two aspects of empathy by asking the child "How does the child feel?" (cognitive perspective taking) and "How do you feel about this?" (affective perspective taking). The accuracy ratings for the perspective taking responses were: 4 = exact match to the intended emotion; 3 = sirmlar emotion; 2 = some emotion; 1 = nonemotional response; and, 0 = no response. Empathy scores were calculated by averaging the eight accuracy scores for each child.
The empathy vignettes are:
1. Sadness-"A child has just lost its best friend."
2. Fear-"A child is chased by a big, nasty monster."
3. Anger-"A child really wants to go out but is not allowed."
4. Happiness-"A child is going to its most favorite park to play." "
THE YOUNG CHILDREN'S EMPATHY MEASURE: RELIABILITY, VALIDITY AND EFFECTS OF COMPANION ANIMAL BONDING.
ROBERT H. PORESKY (1990)
Psychological Reports: Volume 66, Issue , pp. 931-936.