Published in the research literature as Empathic Concern.
How far does your concern for other people reach?
How readily your concern extends past the people you know. Several of these questions ask about strangers in difficulty, so this one picks up your views about responsibility as much as your feelings.
Empathic Concern is about how far a person's concern extends past the people they know. It reaches further than feeling, into what somebody thinks is owed.
Concern for the people close to somebody is close to universal. What varies, and what this scale is about, is what happens at the edges: a stranger in difficulty, somebody whose situation was partly of their own making, somebody a long way away.
That makes it the least purely emotional of the seven. Where the other six ask what somebody feels or does with a feeling, this one also picks up a view about responsibility, and the two are genuinely hard to separate in a person.
It is the scale most likely to be read as a moral score, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not one. A person can believe firmly in self-reliance and be extremely generous to the people in front of them, and the questions here will not see the second part.
Curious where you land on the seven? Take the free assessment and find out.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
Start your free assessmentEvery one of the seven runs between two named ends, and neither end is the one to aim for. Each buys something and each costs something, which is why both of them have a name here.
Concern is real and it comes with conditions. Somebody at this end tends to ask how a situation came about before deciding what is owed, and to believe that help which removes the need to act is not always kindness. What it buys is judgment that does not collapse under a sad story, and follow-through with people they have decided to back. What it costs is arriving late to somebody whose situation was nobody's fault.
Concern reaches out by default and asks questions afterwards. Somebody at this end is moved by a stranger's difficulty without needing to know how it started, and treats the need itself as the thing that settles it. What it buys is help that arrives quickly and without an examination attached. What it costs is a finite amount of concern spread across an infinite amount of need, and no built-in way to stop.
The middle usually means concern with a shape to it. Sympathy arrives readily and is not unlimited, and where it stops depends on the case rather than on a rule. That is where a lot of people sit and it is not a failure to have decided.
A result names one of five positions along this scale. They run from one end to the other, and no figure sits beside them: there is no reference sample for these scales, so nothing here can say how many people land where.
This gets read as measuring how good a person is, which it cannot do. It measures where somebody's concern for people they will never meet runs out, on a particular set of questions, and a great deal of ordinary decency happens well inside that boundary.
Six of the ten questions behind this scale name a specific group in difficulty: people in prison, people without homes, people out of work. That means it picks up somebody's views about responsibility as much as how much they feel for a stranger. The two are hard to separate here, and saying so is more honest than reporting the result as pure fellow-feeling.
Both are about other people's difficulty. Responsive Distress is about how strongly it lands on a person; Empathic Concern is about how far their concern reaches in the first place.
Both can look like warmth. Positive Expressivity is about how much good feeling somebody shows; Empathic Concern is about who their concern extends to, whether or not any of it shows.
A scale describes a tendency, not an ability. There is no good end of any of the seven, and where somebody sits says nothing about how well they handle what they feel.
It also says nothing about where they stand next to anybody. No reference sample exists for these scales, so a result describes how one person answered and stops there.
Or start with what emotional intelligence means.
Sixty-eight questions, about eight minutes. You get a plain read on all seven scales, free, with both ends of every one of them named rather than scored.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
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