Moving beyond the lab: investigating empathy through the Empirical 5E approach.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2023 Alejandro Troncoso, Vicente Soto, Antoni Gomila et al. 31 citations
Empathy, crucial for social interaction, is often studied in controlled lab settings that miss its real-world complexity. This article proposes an integrative framework called the Empirical 5E (E5E) approach, which combines embodied, embedded, enacted, emotional, and extended perspectives of empathy. The authors argue for studying empathy as an active interaction between embodied agents in a shared environment. They illustrate how a multimodal method—mobile brain and body imaging (MoBi) paired with phenomenological techniques and natural interactive paradigms—can capture both neural and bodily processes alongside subjective experience. This framework aims to bridge brain, body, and phenomenological attributes to better reflect how empathy actually occurs in everyday life.