Technical report: Development and validation of Dutch film stimuli to assess empathy in the work context

Empathy predicts a number of important work outcomes and is best assessed in vivo, for instance, by using controlled multi-modal, dynamic stimuli. In past work (Wieck, Scheibe, & Kunzmann, 2022; Behavior Research Methods), we introduced a newly developed set of 26 emotion-eliciting German-language film clips that can be used to assess both cognitive (emotion perception) and affective (emotional congruence and sympathy) facets of empathy. Here, we report the development of 25 Dutch-language film clips using the same methodology as in Wieck et al. (2022). Based on the relived emotions paradigm, protagonists thought-aloud about a past positive or negative work event in the laboratory and subsequently provided ratings of their emotional experience during retelling. In a validation study, N = 178 Dutch employed participants watched the film clips and provided ratings of the protagonists’ and their own emotional experience while viewing the clips. These ratings were used to calculate indices of emotional potency, empathic accuracy, emotional congruence, and sympathy. With these films, we provide Dutch dynamic, multimodal stimuli to assess empathy in vivo in (organizational) psychological research.