How do people come to know others’ feelings? One idea is that affective processes (e.g., physiological responses) play an important role, leading to the prediction that linkage between one’s physiological responses and others’ emotion relates to one’s ability to know how others feel (i.e., empathic accuracy). Participants (N = 96, 48 female friend pairs) completed a stressful speech task and then provided continuous ratings of their own (as “targets”) and their friend’s (as “perceivers”) emotional experience for the video-taped speeches. We measured physiology-physiology linkage (linkage between perceivers’ and targets’ physiology), physiology-experience linkage (linkage between perceivers’ physiology and targets’ experience), and empathic accuracy (linkage between perceivers’ ratings of targets’ experience and targets’ ratings of their experience). Physiology-experience (but not physiology-physiology) linkage was associated with greater empathic accuracy even when controlling for key potential confounds (random linkage, targets’ and perceivers’ emotional reactivity, and relationship closeness). Results suggest that physiological responses play a role in empathic accuracy.

人是怎么知道别人的感受的？一种观点是情感过程（例如，生理反应）起着重要作用，从而导致预测一个人的生理反应和他人情绪之间的联系与一个人了解他人感受的能力（即移情准确性）有关。参与者（N = 96, 48 对女性朋友) 完成了一项有压力的演讲任务，然后对他们自己 (作为“目标”) 和他们朋友 (作为“感知者”) 的视频演讲的情感体验进行连续评分。我们测量了生理-生理联系（感知者和目标生理之间的联系）、生理-体验联系（感知者生理和目标体验之间的联系）和共情准确性（感知者对目标经验的评分和目标评分之间的联系）他们的经验）。即使在控制关键的潜在混淆（随机联系、目标和感知者的情绪反应以及关系密切度）时，生理-体验（但不是生理-生理）联系与更高的移情准确性相关。