Self-report measure

Personal Distress

Personal Distress uses 7 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Personal Distress.

You learn how much other people's distress unsettles you.

For anyone who feels overwhelmed when others are in distress.

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Pay $4 before you start. The full report and PDF are included.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from empathy research on self-focused upset in tense situations.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. Personal Distress uses 7 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Personal Distress.

The measure

The Personal Distress was developed by Davis (1983). It has 7 items, each answered on a 5-point (Does Not Describe Me Well … Describes Me Very Well) scale.

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.

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Does Not Describe Me Well … Describes Me Very Well)

Est. time

~1 min

Access

Pay before you start · $4, or $2 to repeat · full report and PDF included

What it measures

Seven statements describe self-oriented discomfort in the face of others' distress: feeling apprehensive and ill at ease in emotional situations, tending to lose control during emergencies, feeling helpless in the middle of a very emotional situation, and going to pieces when seeing someone who badly needs help.

Davis (1983) distinguished personal distress from empathic concern as the self-oriented emotional component of empathy. Where empathic concern is a feeling for another person, personal distress is one's own anxiety in response to their situation, and the two can lead in opposite directions, toward helping or toward escape. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and parallel Davis's scale.

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe stronger anxiety and a sense of being overwhelmed when others are in distress; lower scores describe greater composure. High personal distress is related to general emotional reactivity and can make it harder to help in emergencies.

The scale is used in research on empathy, helping and emotional reactivity. On this site, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) Battery measures all four components of empathy, the Empathic Concern scale describes other-oriented compassion, and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) describes strategies for managing strong emotion.

Example item

“In emergency situations, I feel apprehensive and ill-at-ease.”

Does Not Describe Me WellSlightly Describes MeSomewhat Describes MeMostly Describes MeDescribes Me Very Well

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.

References

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126.
International Personality Item Pool. A Scientific Collaboratory for the Development of Advanced Measures of Personality Traits and Other Individual Differences. https://ipip.ori.org/

Sample report preview

The report shows your total score and where it falls across the range of possible scores, followed by a plain-language explanation of what scores in that region describe. Where the instrument has published interpretive bands, the report names the band and what it means. It closes with notes on how to read the result and on when a conversation with a qualified professional may be useful.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Score	Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key.
Comparisons	How your scores compare with a published comparison group.

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