Empathie und Medienempathie

Empathy is the capacity and tendency of a person to recognize, understand, and be sensitive to other people’s emotions. The roots of this construct go back to the psychology of emotions and personality psychology. Communication science frequently makes use of it to describe the experiences and emotions during media reception. However, the question can be asked whether empathy and media empathy are two different constructs requiring different measuring instruments. To begin with, this question will be discussed theoretically with important arguments being presented both in favor of and against the thesis of congruent constructs. Subsequently, a measuring instrument for media empathy will be introduced which is constructed following precisely the tried-and-tested operationalization of empathy. It was employed in two studies, and their findings will be compared with one another. The results display both similarities and marked differences, especially with regard to reception variables. Since communication science uses media empathy to explain the effects of reception, different references to reception variables represent a particularly apt argument for the broad independence of the construct and thus for a separate measuring instrument. The present measuring instrument, developed in the context of a pilot study, will be suggested as a provisionally valid operationalization.