Personal Distress

Personal Distress is the subscale of Davis's (1983) Interpersonal Reactivity Index measuring self-oriented feelings of anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings — empathy's costly side, where another's distress becomes one's own discomfort. The seven items administered here are the verbatim subscale as hosted in the public-domain IPIP catalog.

Responses are coded 1–5 on this platform versus the published 0–4 coding, so the reference mean in the norms section is shifted by exactly +7 with the standard deviation unchanged, per the norms note.

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

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 Personal Distress subscale. Published sex-stratified figures: males M = 9.46, SD = 4.55; females M = 12.28, SD = 5.01 (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 = 17.87, SD = 4.99 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 .77, females .75 — 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.