Using Human Acting Skill to Measure Empathic Ability in Heterogeneous Characters

This paper presents a method for evaluating the relative empathic ability of different characters. The method is based on the premise that human actors are able to give more compelling performances when acting opposite a more empathic acting partner. The method involves causing one or more human actors to engage in a short interaction with each character, videotaping these performances, showing the recordings to skilled acting instructors and asking these instructors to evaluate the quality of each performance. By controlling for the effects of order of presentation and other potentially confounding variables, we expect to be able to determine which of the characters are the most effective elicitors of high-quality performances from the human actors, and thereby to demonstrate the relative empathic ability of the various characters.