Exploring Empathy and Compassion Using Digital Narratives

Participants (intervention- group 1) will watch digital stories, short videos describing the experience of recovering from mental illness created as part of this project. Participants in the control group (group 2) will watch social marketing and/or fundraising campaigns on similar topics and complete a few questionnaires. The following standardized scales will be used: The Level of Familiarity Scale (LOF) (which will be used only before exposure to movies); Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (16 items; internal consistency coefficient .79; test-retest reliability coefficient .73), Compassionate Love Scale (21 items; Cronbach's alpha: .95; item-to-total correlations ranging from .46 to .81), Dispositional Positive Emotions Scale (DPES) (5 items; Cronbach's alpha for the compassion subscale: .80; inter-scale correlations: .44), Self-Stigma of Mental Illness Scale-Short Form (SSMIS-SF) (20 items; Cronbach's alpha: 0.91); Difference and Disdain Scales for Public Stigma (DDSPS) (9 items).

Participants will be randomly assigned to the social marketing/fundraising group (n = 40 participants; 20 Anglophone and 20 Francophone; ages 18-35). Participants will be asked to watch twenty-six social marketing/fundraising videos which will be assessed using a between-subjects design.