Southampton Test of Empathy for Preschoolers (STEP)

In STEP, the role of affective and cognitive perspective taking in empathy is considered. Assesses a child’s ability to understand and share in the experience of another person across a number of hierarchically organized, emotion judgment contexts linked to facial expression, situational cues, verbal cues, and desires. STEP incorporates computer–presented, videotaped vignettes of children in emotional scenarios that focus on four emotional outcomes (angry, happy sad, fearful). It asks children to indicate their reactions to vignettes by selecting a picture of the relevant facial expression. The test incorporated 8 video vignettes of children in emotional scenarios, assessing a child’s ability to understand (STEP‐UND) and share (STEP‐SHA) in the emotional experience of a story protagonist. Each vignette included 4 emotions (angry, happy, fearful, sad) that reflected emotion judgments based on the protagonist’s facial expression, situation, verbal cues, and desire. The test incorporates eight video vignettes of children in emotionally evocative scenarios to assess a child’s ability to understand (STEP‐UND) and share (STEP‐SHA) in the emotional experience of a story protagonist. Each child watched one practice story and eight test stories. The videos used continuous movement and child actors. Four stories had a male protagonist, and four had a female protagonist. Each story was made up of seven consecutive parts. In Parts 1, 2, 4, and 6 children were asked to judge how the protagonist (STEP‐UND) and they themselves (STEP‐SHA) would feel, on the basis of the protagonist’s facial expression, a situation cue, a verbal cue, and the protagonist’s desire. Each story part related to one of four emotional outcomes (angry, happy, sad and fearful), such that emotion judgments (related to facial expression, situation cues, verbal cues, and desire) were linked twice with each outcome.

Desires were represented by a thought bubble (Wellman, Hollander, & Schult, 1996). Two further story parts (3 and 5) contained check questions that were designed to assess concentration and understanding. The story ending made up the final part (see Table 1). Each story was accompanied by an 85–90 word narrative and lasted approximately 120 s. Children indicated their emotion judgments by clicking on one of five schematic emotion faces (happy, sad, angry, fearful, OK/neutral) displayed at the bottom of the computer screen. After the children watched the practice story, a computer screen appeared, featuring the eight story protagonists waving. Children had to click on successive characters in order to hear each story, and stickers were given between stories. This process was repeated until children had completed all eight vignettes, and a goodbye screen was presented.

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