Empathy

The MET consists of 40 pictures of people in various emotional states, with 50% being positive and 50% negative (Dziobek et al. 2008). To assess cognitive empathy (CE), participants were asked to select the emotion word, out of four words, that matched the depicted emotion. To assess emotional empathy (EE), participants were asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 9 “how aroused does this picture make you feel” (implicit EE) and “how concerned do you feel for this person” (explicit EE). Implicit EE and explicit EE ratings per valence (positive and negative) were used as dependent variables. Previous validity and reliability analysis of the MET have shown to be in the good to highly satisfactory range (Dziobek et al. 2008), and previous studies have found it to be sensitive to the effects of psychedelics (Hysek et al. 2013; Kuypers et al. 2014; Kuypers et al. 2017a; Mason et al. 2019; Pokorny et al. 2017; Preller et al. 2015).