title: Visuospatial transformations and personality: evidence of a relationship between visuospatial perspective taking and self-reported emotional empathy.
abstract: In the visuospatial domain, perspective taking is the ability to imagine how a visual scene appears from an external observer's viewpoint, and can be studied by asking subjects to encode object locations in a visual scene where another individual is present and then detecting their displacement when seeing the scene from the other's viewpoint. In the current study, we explored the relationship between visuospatial perspective taking and self-report measures of the cognitive and emotional components of empathy in young adults. To this aim, we employed a priming paradigm, in which the presence of an avatar allowed to anticipate the next perceived perspective on the visual scene. We found that the emotional dimension of empathy was positively correlated with the behavioral advantage provided by the presence of the avatar, relative to unprimed perspective changes. These data suggest a link between the tendency to vicariously experience the others' emotions and the ability to perform self-other spatial transformations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy, valentinasulpizio@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sulpizio
authors.forename: Giorgia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Committeri
authors.forename: Emilia
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Metta
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lambrey
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Berthoz
authors.forename: Gaspare
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Galati
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010551:Personality; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D057566:Self Report; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D065852:Spatial Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D055815:Young Adult