Observer descriptions of the empathic person: a look at the Davis IRI and Hogan empathy scales

ABSTRACT

We report the different personality profiles associated with five different empathy scales assessed by the face valid Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the empirically derived Hogan Empathy Scale. Participants arranged in groups of 5–7 worked and socialized together for nine weeks before evaluating each other using Ten-Item Personality Inventory. We also recruited the friends and family members of participants to complete Q-Set descriptions of them. As hypothesized, Empathic Concern from the IRI was associated with a target’s apparent Agreeableness, a trait that includes the sub-trait of being altruistic. Hogan Empathy, however, was associated more strongly with judgments of a target’s Extraversion and Openness, which are traits more aligned with the notion of an empathic counselor as opposed to a bystander intervener. These results make it clear that different empathy scales not only assess theoretically distinct empathy facets but also qualitatively different interpersonal behavior (i.e., perceptions made by family, friends, and colleagues of a target’s behavioral and interaction tendencies).

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• observer ratings
• Hogan empathy
• Davis IRI

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ge8bx/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/ge8bx/.

Notes

1. This method does impose a sort of “scaling” on the cards (Ozer, 1993). Because of this, the averaged distributions from the two informants do not necessarily represent a normally distributed Q-Sort as intended by Block (1961). It does, however, better represent two close informants’ perceptions of target personality because of the Q-Sort methodology than what might be gleaned from other (potentially biased) methods.

2. Sex differences are well established for both empathy (e.g., on average, females score higher than males on Empathic Concern) and the five factor model traits (e.g., on average, females score higher than males on neuroticism). Therefore, the correlation of empathy with any trait will be confounded with the effect of sex (third variable). The correlations reported in Tables 2 and 3 control for target sex to avoid this issue. Raw correlations are available by request to those who wish to examine these effects disregarding the theoretical impact of sex on empathy or personality.

3. Readers may refer to the supplementary materials the view all 100 Q-set effects.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Amber A. Fultz

Amber A. Fultz is a PhD candidate at Oregon State University. Her research interests include group processes, nonverbal behavior, synchrony, and interpersonal sensitivity.

Frank J. Bernieri

Frank J. Bernieri is a Professor at Oregon State University. His research interests include all facets and applications of interpersonal behavior, including person perception, nonverbal behavior, rapport, and interactional synchrony.