Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research aimed to study the impact of context on the status of empathy in terms of emotion judgment towardsothers. Specifically, how empathy would be mediated by different conditions was further investigated. Descriptions ofmoral/unmoral conditions were designed and hypothesized to influence the status of empathy accordingly. Study partic-ipants were instructed to rate pictures using TAPS (Taiwan Affective Picture System) for judging the emotion valenceand arousal of human facial expression. As a result, low-level empathy group was found to show an alternation for theiremotion judgments on both valence and arousal as the picture context changed, especially in the moral situation. Onthe contrary, high-level group only show an alternation for their emotion judgments on valence, in the unmoral situationthe most. The findings indicated that different status of empathy might be determined the emotion judgments under thecontexts where other social cues are presented.