What Elicits Empathetic Performance in Discourse Practices among Undergraduate Students? A Multidisciplinary Pilot Study

In the last few years scholars have started to study the process of operationalizing empathy in professional contexts such as investigative interviewing, medical schools, public administration and engineering. Since empathy is crucial also for politicians, political consultants, journalists and public relations representatives, the present research is meant as a pilot study to assess the empathetic performance of bachelor students at University of Napoli Federico II in Italy. On the basis of survey data collected to investigate respondents’ behaviour faced to hypothetic scenarios, a statistical and linguistic study is pursued with Halliday’s Transitivity Model and with the analysis of preference rankings to disclose discriminant elements in the elicitation of empathy in different scenarios.