So far, dozens of self-report measures of empathy have been developed. Research on empathy has been a hot topic in the field of psychology for a long time, which is largely due to the continuous development of the psychometric tools of empathy, especially self-report measures. It has a great influence on the psychology and behavior of both the empathizers and their target persons. Relatively speaking, better scoring approaches of the IRI include summing empathic concern (EC) and perspective taking (PT) as the total score of the IRI and reporting the score of PT as cognitive empathy.Įmpathy is usually defined as the ability to experience and understand the emotions of others, which plays a very important role in people’s social life and emotional communication ( Villadangos et al., 2016). The results show that most of these models do not fit well, indicating that the scoring approaches of the IRI corresponding to these models may be problematic. We make the first effort to summarize these measurement models and to evaluate rationality of the common scoring methods of the IRI by confirmatory factor analysis, focusing on model fitting, factor loading, and model-based reliability simultaneously. Many commonly used IRI scoring approaches and their corresponding measurement models are unverified, which may make the conclusions of subsequent variable relation studies controversial and even misleading. 5Center for Mental Health Education, Hainan University, Haikou, ChinaĪs the most frequently used tool for measuring empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is often scored by researchers arbitrarily and casually.4School of Education, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing, China.3Guangzhou Rehabilitation and Research Center for Children with Autism, Guangzhou Cana School, Guangzhou, China.2School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.1School of Public Administration, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China.Yang Wang 1* Yun Li 2 Wanting Xiao 3 Yuanshu Fu 4* Jing Jie 5

Interpersonal reactivity index test