Factor structure and psychometric properties of the croatian short version of the empathy quotient

Abstract

The Empathy Quotient (EQ, Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004) measures empathy as an ability to identify what someone else is thinking and feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. Although the questionnaire was developed in order to be sensitive to empathy deficits as a part of psychopathology, it is often used in other areas of psychological research as well. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the short version of the translated Empathy Quotient (EQ-28) that has psychometric superiority over the original version (Lawrence et al., 2004). Data was collected on-line on a convenient sample (N = 115; 81 female and 34 male) with a mean age of 31.30 (SD = 7.49), within a larger study. The results of the principal component analysis showed a clear three-factor solution consistent with the structure proposed by Lawrence et al. (2004). Cronbach's alpha coefficients indicated high internal consistency of the Cognitive Empathy and the Emotional Reactivity subscales, unlike the Social Skills subscale. The correlations of the EQ-28 subscales and the relevant subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983) provided information about the convergent validity of the Cognitive Empathy and the Emotional Reactivity subscales, while the correlations with measures of altruism (measured by HEXACO-PI-R, Lee & Ashton, 2004) and the Dark Triad (Jones & Paulhus, 2014) showed the theoretically expected relationships between the given constructs. On the basis of the results of this preliminary study it can be concluded that the Croatian version of the EQ-28 has satisfactory metric characteristics and represents a good measure of cognitive and affective empathy, but these results should be replicated on a larger and more gender balanced sample.