SPATIAL AND EMPATHIC PERSPECTIVE-TAKING CORRELATE ON A DISPOSITIONAL LEVEL

Empathic perspective-taking is inevitably described using spatial locatives ("understanding a point of view") and involves a metaphorical "merging of the self and other." Visuo-spatial perspective-taking involves an actual embodied merging of the self and other. Yet, the two kinds of perspective-taking are treated as independent of each other. Four studies found that these two kinds of perspective-taking are related on a dispositional level. Individuals with high levels of empathic perspective-taking were betterat imagining different views of the same object (Studies 1-3). This correlation could not be explained by general intelligence (Study 2) and was nominally stronger among participants who explicitly reported that they engaged in spatial perspective-taking (Study 3). Study 4 showed a correlation between empathic perspective-taking and performance on another spatial perspective-taking task. These relations can be explained by a shared mechanism of embodied self-rotation during all kinds of perspective-taking.