Interpersonal Reactivity Index Battery
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index Battery administers Davis’s four-subscale empathy instrument as one 28-item session: Perspective-Taking, Empathic Concern, Personal Distress, and Fantasy. Each subscale is scored separately on a 7–35 raw range (1–5 anchors). There is no total IRI score — Davis designed the IRI as a multidimensional profile, not a single empathy sum. College-student norms use the published Davis (1983) figures with the +7 mean shift for 1–5 coding.
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.
Subscales
Perspective-Taking 7 items
how readily you adopt the psychological viewpoint of others in daily life
Empathic Concern 7 items
how strongly you feel other-oriented sympathy and concern for people in difficulty
Personal Distress 7 items
how much you experience self-focused anxiety and distress when witnessing others in need
Fantasy 7 items
how readily you imaginatively enter the emotional world of fictional characters and scenarios
Example item
“I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the "other guy's" point of view.”
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perspective-Taking | 24.37 | 4.82 | 1161 | 0.71 | summed raw |
| Empathic Concern | 27.36 | 4.23 | 1161 | 0.68 | summed raw |
| Personal Distress | 17.87 | 4.99 | 1161 | 0.75 | summed raw |
| Fantasy | 24.24 | 5.59 | 1161 | 0.78 | 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 Perspective-Taking subscale. Published sex-stratified figures: males M = 16.78, SD = 4.72; females M = 17.96, SD = 4.85 (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 = 24.37, SD = 4.82 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 .71, females .75 — 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.