Confirmatory factor analysis of the Brief Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET-10) in three large samples reveals strong evidence of unidimensionality

Abstract

The 36-item Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) is an extensively administered behavioral measure of cognitive empathy (and emotion perception in particular). Numerous brief forms of the RMET have been developed in attempts to both improve its psychometric properties and reduce testing burden. Notably, little systematic validation work exists in the literature for one of the most promising brief forms proposed: the abbreviated 10-item RMET scale developed by Olderbak et al. (2015; which we refer to as the RMET-10). To this end, we present Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) of the RMET-10 in three independent samples of American adults (total N = 3,121). CFAs in each sample consistently indicated that the RMET-10 exhibits excellent factorial validity and moderate levels of internal consistency despite its substantially reduced length. Overall, our results support the use of the RMET-10 as a brief but effective (if narrow) measure of cognitive empathy.