Are self-report cognitive empathy ratings valid proxies for cognitive empathy ability? Negligible meta-analytic relations with behavioral task performance.

Abstract

Empathy is widely regarded as relevant to a diverse range of psychopathological constructs, such as autism spectrum disorder, psychopathy, and borderline personality disorder. Cognitive empathy (CE) is the ability to accurately recognize or infer the thoughts and feelings of others. Although behavioral task paradigms are frequently used to assess such abilities, a large proportion of published studies reporting on CE use self-report questionnaires. For decades, however, a number of theorists have cautioned that individuals may not possess the metacognitive insight needed to validly gauge their own mindreading abilities. To investigate this possibility, we examined the aggregate relations between behavioral CE task performance and self-report CE scale scores, as well as with self-report affective empathy scale scores for comparison. Meta-analytic results, based on random effects models, from 85 studies (total N ϭ 14,327) indicate that self-report CE scores account for only approximately 1% of the variance in behavioral cognitive empathy assessments and that, perhaps equally importantly, this relation is not significantly different from that demonstrated by affective empathy scores. Effect sizes were not moderated by self-report empathy domain, gender composition, unisensory versus multisensory behavioral stimuli presentation, child versus adult samples, or by normative versus clinical/forensic samples. Effect size estimates were not markedly affected by publication bias. These results raise serious concerns regarding the widespread use of self-report CE scores as proxies for CE ability, as well as the extensive theoretical conclusions that have been based on their use in past studies. Public Significance StatementThe accumulated evidence indicates that self-report questionnaires are not a trustworthy method for assessing an individual's cognitive empathy abilities. Researchers and clinicians should avoid relying upon them, until and unless adequate evidence is produced demonstrating their validity when used for this purpose.

Impaired empathy but no theory of mind deficits in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

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Exploring Cognitive Empathy: Further Validation of the Empathic Counselor Response Scale and Application to Practice

“…Self-report scales based on aspects of personality can be limited, however, in that they do not assess actual empathic behaviors (Gerdes et al, 2010) but rather are based on the assumption that personal qualities of empathy will naturally extend into effective empathic behaviors in a clinical setting. Self-report scales also assume people can accurately assess their own empathic abilities, which has been called into question by recent findings that self-report cognitive empathy scales account for only 1% of the variance in behavioral cognitive empathy scores (Murphy & Lilienfeld, 2019).…”

Why Are Self-Report and Behavioral Measures Weakly Correlated?

“…However, across a series of domains, recent meta-analyses and large-scale investigations have consistently found self-report and behavioral measures of the same construct were weakly correlated. For example, the average correlation between self-report and behavioral measures of self-control [1], emotional intelligence [2], empathy [3], risk preference [4], and creativity [5] ranged from 0 to 0.20, indicating a weak association between these two types of measures of the presumed 'same' construct.…”

“…behavioral measures have good reliability yet are still poorly associated with selfreport measures[2,3]; furthermore, correcting for low reliability does not always improve correlations between self-report and behavioral measures[1,4]. An alternative explanation, therefore, is that self-report and behavioral measures are distinct because they are designed to measure very different response processes.…”