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Child Psychiatry Hum Dev (2012) 43:499510
DOI 10.1007/s10578-011-0278-6
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Yaoguo Geng Dan Xia Beibei Qin
Published online: 6 January 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the Basic Empathy Scale (BES). The Chinese version of BES was administered to a sample (n = 1,524) aged 918 and 65 males with conduct disorder aged 1318. The result of conrmatory factor analysis showed a two-factor structure with four items deleted to be the most adequate model (cognitive empathy, affective empathy). Empathy was positively correlated with a measure of prosocial behaviour and a measure of emotional problems. Boys with conduct disorder scored signicantly lower than matched participants on cognitive empathy. Moreover, in line with previous researches, girls were found to score signicantly higher on empathy than boys and the scores on both cognitive and affective empathy increased with age. The Chinese revision exhibited satisfactory internal consistency and moderate testretest reliability.
Keywords Empathy Validation Chinese adolescents
Introduction
Empathy is a notoriously elusive psychological construct. This is because empathy is often very broadly dened [1] and as such is often not clearly separated from overlapping concepts that are related to, but separate from empathy. A very useful denition of empathy is that provided by Cohen and Strayer [2] who suggest that empathy is the understanding and sharing in anothers emotional state or context. This denition has a number of benets. First it acknowledges the separation of the cognitive element of empathy (i.e., the ability to understand anothers emotions) from the affective element of empathy (i.e., the sharing of anothers emotional state). This is an important recent development in empathy research which has helped to clarify some counterintuitive ndings noted when comparing empathy to certain behaviours [36]. Second, this denition helps to separate the psychological construct of empathy from the related processes
Y. Geng (&) D. Xia B. Qin
Department of Education, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, Henan, China e-mail: [email protected]
The Basic Empathy Scale: A Chinese Validation of a Measure of Empathy in Adolescents
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that might result in an empathic response. For the purposes of measuring empathy and understanding its relationships it is useful to...