The Feshbach and Roe Affective Situation Test for Empathy revised and adapted for italian children.

In the past years empathy has been operationalized either in terms exclusively affective or in terms exclusively cognitive. on the contrary, many authors underline an integrate approach which takes into account both the affective response concordant with someone else’s emotion and the cognitive mediators that affect the empathic experience. The aim of the present study is to elaborate a picture-story index of empathy based on the integrated model above mentioned and addressed children from seven to eleven years old. Keeping the Feshbach and Roe as a prototype measure, we designed a series of story narratives in which the characters are described and portrayed in contexts that evoke sadness, happiness, fear, anger, pride, shame, jealousy. After reading each story a semi structured clinical interview is conducted. The data collected regards 100 children recruited from an elementary school of Palermo city. The scoring criterion in presented and the results are discussed.