Empathic Concern
A 7-item scale measuring other-oriented feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others, from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983).
At a glance
Detailed write-up pending
A full, citation-backed scientific write-up for this scale — overview, clinical use, and psychometrics in the voice of a dissertation "Measures" section — has not yet been authored. To honor the platform's no-fabricated-sources rule, this page currently shows only the verified registry facts above (item count, structure, scoring, and any published norms). No validity coefficients, reliability figures, or citations are shown here that cannot be traced to a named source; the authored write-up will be added once its sources have been read and recorded in the plan-integrity file.
Example item
“I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”
Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.
Scoring & interpretation
Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.
Psychometrics & norms
| Scale | M | SD | N | α | Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Empathic Concern | 27.36 | 4.23 | 1161 | 0.68 | summed raw |
Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126 — U.S. college student validation sample (N = 1,161; 579 male, 582 female), verbatim 7-item Empathic Concern subscale. Published sex-stratified figures: males M = 19.04, SD = 4.21; females M = 21.67, SD = 3.83 (0–4 response coding, sum 0–28). This site administers the identical items and anchors coded 1–5 (sum 7–35), so the reference mean is shifted by exactly +7; an additive shift leaves the SD unchanged. The combined reference values are pooled exactly from the published sex-stratified figures (M = 27.36, SD = 4.23 on the 7–35 metric). The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from the published per-subscale standardized Cronbach’s α (Davis, 1980; males .68, females .73 — the lower bound is used for the widest, most conservative range).
Source & citation
Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. Items hosted at ipip.ori.org.