Situational assessment of empathy and compassion: Predicting prosociality using a video-based task.

Classical psychometric approaches in social science measure individuals' tendency to experience empathy and compassion. Using abstract questionnaire items, they place high demand on subjects' capacity to introspect, memorize, and generalize the corresponding emotions. We employed a Socio-affective Video Task (SoVT)-an alternative approach that measures situationally elicited emotions-and assessed its predictive power over prosocial behavior against classical questionnaires in a sample of Israeli university students. We characterized the conceptual embedding of the SoVT concerning other measures of prosocial affect and cognition, and tested group identification as an alternative precursor to prosocial behavior. Eighty participants rated their reactions to videos that presented the suffering of others or everyday scenes on scales of negative affect (providing a proxy for elicited empathy) and compassion. We then administered classical questionnaires that target empathy (the Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and compassion (the Compassionate Love Scale), as well as measures of hypothetical and real-life helping and prosocial attitudes-including conflict attitudes and intergroup bias. While compassion ratings in the SoVT failed to predict prosociality more accurately than classical questionnaires, the SoVT empathy index succeeded and correlated strongly with other precursors of prosociality. These results support video-based situational assessment as an implicit and robust alternative in the measurement of empathy-related processes.

Massive Transfusion Increases Serum Magnesium Concentration.

(1) Background: The massive transfusion of packed red blood cells (RBCs) is a lifesaving procedure, but it is associated with complications, e.g., dysmagnesemia. Since magnesium is an intracellular ion, the transfused RBCs can significantly influence the magnesium concentration in the recipient's blood. (2) Methods: A retrospective study was performed among 49 patients hospitalized in the Central Clinical Hospital of the Medical University of Warsaw who received a massive blood transfusion (≥4 units/h). Data on laboratory results and patient history were collected from the hospital database. The intracellular RBCs magnesium concentration was measured in 231 samples using the colorimetric method. (3) Results: There were statistically significant changes in the mean serum magnesium concentration preoperatively and 24 h postoperatively (0.87 ± 0.13 vs. 1.03 ± 0.14, p < 0.00001) and 48 h postoperatively (0.87 ± 0.13 vs. 1.06 ± 0.15, p < 0.00001). Patients who died had significantly higher serum magnesium concentrations (p < 0.05). The median intracellular magnesium concentration in RBCs was 0.91 (0.55-1.8) mmol/L, which is below the reference values of 1.65-2.65 mmol/L. (4) Conclusions: Transfused RBCs significantly increased the serum magnesium concentration 24 h and 48 h postoperatively. It could be a result of mild hemolysis, as the median intracellular magnesium concentration in RBCs was below the reference values.