Abstract
Our research works on the prevention of violent behaviors in the school environment have brought us to investigate students' capacity to share and regulate emotions as possible indicators of the risk of developing violent behaviors. Unfortunately, the conceptual field concerning social emotions is rather unsettled and the concept of empathy remains to be consensually defined. For this reason, in a preceding critical and historical study, we carefully distinguished empathy from the related concepts of sympathy, emotional contagion andpersonal distress, from what we propose to call ―emotional cutoff .‖ We then developed and validated a CEC test with three components: emotional cutoff , empathy, and emotional contagion. The validation process took place in France, Switzerland, and Canada. After a presentation of the definitions of empathy, emotional contagion, and emotional cutoff , this chapter summarizes the validation results. A number of results show that the ―emotional cut-off‖ component is positively correlated with the scales that measure delinquency or the risk of uncontrolled aggressiveness. This component is also associated with many learning difficulties among pupils. Lastly, emotional cutoff is more marked among 9-15 year-old boys than among girls of the same age group.