Author(s)

Ioanna Zioga^1,2*, George Kosteletos^2,3,4, Evangelos D. Protopapadakis^3,4, Christos Papageorgiou⁵, Konstantinos Kontoangelos^2,5, Charalabos Papageorgiou⁵

¹Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
²First Department of Psychiatry, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Medical School, Eginition Hospital, Athens, Greece.
³National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Applied Philosophy Research Laboratory, Athens, Greece.
⁴Open University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus.
⁵University Mental Health, Neurosciences and Precision Medicine Research Institute “COSTAS STEFANIS” (UMHRI), Athens, Greece.

Empathy is essential in story comprehension as it requires understanding of the emotions and intentions of the characters. We evaluated the sensitivity of an emotional perspective-taking task using Aesop’s Fables in relation to empathy. Participants (N = 301) were presented with 15 short fables and were asked to rate the intensity of the emotions they would feel (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, joy, trust, and anticipation) by adopting the perspective of one of the characters (offender, victim) or the observer’s perspective. A data-driven approach revealed that participants’ responses were aligned with the characters’ intentions, suggesting successful emotional perspective-taking. Participants sympathized with the victim rather than the offender, demonstrating affective sharing processes. Further, participants with higher empathy scores exhibited stronger negative emotions from the victim’s perspective, independently of their level of distress. Our task was not influenced by gender effects. We suggest that the Aesop’s Fables task could provide an indirect instrument to study empathy.

Aesop’s Fables, Empathy, Perspective-Taking, Emotions, Toronto Empathy Questionnaire, Interpersonal Reactivity Index

Zioga, I. , Kosteletos, G. , Protopapadakis, E. , Papageorgiou, C. , Kontoangelos, K. and Papageorgiou, C. (2022) The Fox and the Lion: Investigating Associations between Empathy and Emotion Perspective-Taking in Aesop’s Fables. Psychology, 13, 482-513. doi: 10.4236/psych.2022.134033.