Other-oriented empathy: taking their perspective, and caring about their state. Personal distress is reported beside the score, not inside it.
About this test
Mark Davis's Interpersonal Reactivity Index split empathy into perspective taking, empathic concern, personal distress, and fantasy. The important distinction is between other-oriented responses (I see their situation, I care) and self-oriented distress (their pain floods me until I have to escape). Batson's empathy-altruism research makes a similar cut: feeling for someone is not the same as feeling as them in a way that makes you the emergency. These items are original. The headline uses perspective taking and empathic concern. Personal distress is a separate cluster.
Question 1 of 11
What this test asks
Before I answer in a disagreement, I try to state their view in a form they would recognize.
I find it hard to imagine how the same moment looks from inside their concerns.
In an argument I can usually find the interest they are protecting, not only the sentence they used.
When someone near me is hurting, I feel moved on their behalf, not only awkward about what to do.
I can be glad at someone else's good news even when it does not benefit me.
Once a person is out of sight, their trouble leaves my mind completely.
I will change a small plan when I can see that someone is at their limit.
Other people's distress floods me until I cannot think about them, only about relief.
I leave hard conversations because the feeling in my body gets too loud.
Stories and characters can absorb me until their feelings are briefly mine.
I can care about a stranger's situation without needing to have lived the same event.
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