Psychometric properties of the questionnaire of cognitive and affective empathy in a Portuguese sample

Abstract

Empathy is an important concept in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Despite the controversy around its definition, most researchers would agree that empathy is a multidimensional phenomenon which involves a vicarious experience of another person’s affective state and an understanding of another person’s affective experience. Self-report measures of empathy constitute an important tool for both research and clinical practice. The main goal of this study was to adapt and study the psychometric properties of the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE), a worldwide used measure of empathy, in a Portuguese community sample (N = 562). Confirmatory factor analyses supported the factor structure of the original QCAE. Results show that the Portuguese version of the QCAE has sound psychometric properties, with good structural validity and internal consistency for both scales (i.e., affective and cognitive) and respective subscales of the instrument (i.e., Emotion Contagion, Proximal Responsivity, Peripheral Responsivity, Perspective Taking and Online Simulation). We tested both a five correlated factor structure (Model 1) and a second-order model that postulates the affective and cognitive dimensions (Model 2). Our results show that while both models present acceptable goodness of fit indices, Model 1 performs slightly better. In conclusion, the Portuguese version of the QCAE may prove a useful tool for future cross-cultural assessments of empathy in both research and clinical practice.

Validation and extension of the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy in the Chinese setting

“…Based on this finding, we also examined the gender differences on total QCAE scores and found that females showed higher scores than male participants. This is consistent with previous studies measured by the QCAE (Italian version: Di Girolamo et al, ; Portuguese version: Queirós et al, ; English version: Reniers et al, ), as well as measured by the EQ (Auyeung et al, ), BES (Geng et al, ), and IRI (Wölfer et al, ). However, our results further revealed that the observed gender difference occurred only in affective empathy, but not in cognitive empathy.…”

“…The psychometric properties and construct validity of the QCAE have been widely reported in healthy (Myszkowski et al, 2017;Reniers et al, 2011) and clinical populations (Horan et al, 2015;Michaels et al, 2014). The QCAE has also been adapted and validated in French (Myszkowski et al, 2017), Portuguese (Queirós et al, 2018), Italian (Di Girolamo, Giromini, Winters, Serie, & de Ruiter, 2017), and Korean (Lee et al, 2016). Despite differences in their age and ethnicity, the five-factor model remains valid.…”

Confirmation of a Two-Factor Solution to the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy in a French Population of Patients With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

“…The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) gathers relevant items from other tools, including the IRI, and provides measures of both cognitive (i.e., perspective taking and online simulation ) and affective (i.e., emotion contagion , proximal responsivity , and peripheral responsivity ) components (4). Psychometric evaluations of the English (4), Portuguese (5), Chinese (6), Italian (7), and French (8) versions of the QCAE in healthy populations suggest a five-factor structure. However, confirmatory factor analysis in patients with schizophrenia failed to replicate this finding and showed that only a two-factor structure achieved a correct fit after a comprehensive reorganization of item parcels (9).…”

Measurement of Empathy among Health Professionals During Syrian Crisis using the Syrian Empathy Scale

“…Accordingly, this questionnaire can be considered as reliable for measuring empathy among Syrian health professionals. Anonymous questionnaires to a su cient sample size was considered in order to further validate and improve the designed scale [13].…”

“…To measure empathy, it is important to have a consensus de nition of it as a multidimensional construct and to understand its cognitive and emotional components [12]. Emotional empathy with its three subdivisions "emotion contagion, proximal and peripheral responsivity" [13], is the reaction to the response of others [14], experience their feelings, emotions, and sharing their emotional experiences [12]. Cognitive empathy with its subdivisions "perspective taking, and online simulation" is the process of understanding the perspective of another person, the capacity to judge, understand the intentions of others and consequently help them [12,15].…”