Empathic Concern

Empathic Concern is one of the four subscales of Davis's (1983) Interpersonal Reactivity Index, measuring other-oriented feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others — the warm, compassionate side of empathy. The seven items administered here are the verbatim subscale as hosted in the public-domain IPIP catalog.

This platform codes responses 1–5 (the published figures used 0–4 coding), so the reference mean shown in the norms section is shifted by exactly +7 — an additive shift that leaves the standard deviation unchanged, as documented in the norms note.

“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.

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.

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).

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.