Batson State Empathy Scale (BSES)

Abstract

The Batson State Empathy Scale (BSES) is one of the most widely utilized self-report psychological instruments designed to assess situation-specific, other-oriented emotional responses. Developed through the seminal empirical programs of C. Daniel Batson and colleagues during the formulation and rigorous testing of the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis, the instrument operationalizes momentary affective empathy—frequently termed empathic concern or sympathy. Unlike trait instruments that measure an individual’s chronic dispositional capacity for empathy (e.g., the Interpersonal Reactivity Index), the BSES captures the acute, vicarious affective state elicited when an observer perceives a target individual or group experiencing distress, vulnerability, or acute need. The validated short form featured in modern social psychological and consumer behavior research consists of six canonical emotional adjectives: sympathetic, moved, compassionate, tender, warm, and softhearted. Participants rate the degree to which they experience each emotional state using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 7 (Extremely). Psychometric investigations across diverse laboratory paradigms, philanthropic experiments, and field settings consistently confirm a robust unidimensional latent structure, high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging from .82 to .94; McDonald’s omega > .85), strong convergent validity with trait empathic concern and observed helping behavior, and sharp discriminant validity against egoistic personal distress emotions (such as being alarmed, grieved, upset, or troubled). This article provides a comprehensive psychometric and theoretical review of the BSES, delineating its historical emergence, foundational construct definitions, theoretical underpinnings, empirical validation evidence, factor structure, scoring algorithms, and full item inventory.

Keywords

Batson State Empathy Scale, state empathy, empathic concern, altruism, empathy-altruism hypothesis, sympathy, prosocial behavior, vicarious affective arousal, emotional response, psychometrics, consumer behavior

Authors

The theoretical conceptualization and empirical operationalization of the state empathy adjective checklist were originated by C. Daniel Batson and his collaborative research teams at the University of Kansas (Department of Psychology). Across several decades, Batson—alongside key collaborators including Jay S. Coke, Kathryn C. Oleson, Michelle R. Lishner, Jim Fultz, Patricia A. Schoenrade, and Laura L. Shaw—systematically isolated, tested, and refined batteries of emotional adjectives to distinguish other-oriented empathic concern from self-oriented personal distress.

In subsequent decades, the scale was adapted and standardized across diverse research domains, including behavioral economics and marketing scholarship. Notably, scholars such as Saeer Lee, Karen Page Winterich, and William T. Ross Jr. (2014) operationalized and consolidated the robust six-item variant within consumer research paradigms examining charitable contributions, moral identity, and justice perceptions. Inquiries regarding original experimental paradigms are rooted in the experimental archives of the University of Kansas Department of Psychology, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Batson State Empathy Scale (BSES) is to provide an empirically rigorous, sensitive, and theoretically grounded measurement of an observer’s acute, situation-evoked, other-oriented emotional reaction toward a target individual in distress or need. While developmental and personality psychology had historically emphasized empathy as a stable global personality trait or cognitive capacity for perspective taking, experimental social psychologists required a nimble, state-dependent instrument capable of registering momentary fluctuations in affect following experimental manipulations, such as perspective-taking instructions (e.g., “imagine how the target feels” versus “remain objective and detached”), vividness of distress depictions, or shared group membership.

A critical scientific impetus for designing the BSES was the urgent theoretical necessity to empirically disentangle two distinct emotional states that frequently co-occur when witnessing another person suffer: empathic concern (an other-oriented emotional state characterized by feelings of compassion, warmth, and benevolence congruent with the perceived welfare of the person in need) and personal distress (a self-oriented, aversive emotional reaction characterized by feeling alarmed, upset, anxious, or uncomfortable). According to Batson’s conceptualization, failing to measure these states independently obfuscates the motivational engine driving prosocial actions. Personal distress evokes egoistic motivation directed toward relieving one’s own internal discomfort (which can often be achieved by physically or psychologically escaping the situation), whereas true empathic concern evokes altruistic motivation specifically directed toward terminating or alleviating the victim’s suffering, even when escape without helping is effortless.

In clinical, counseling, and experimental environments, the BSES enables researchers to assess immediate interventions aimed at fostering compassion, reducing intergroup prejudice, and heightening therapeutic alliance. In organizational behavior and consumer psychology, the instrument is widely deployed to evaluate how narrative advertising, philanthropic appeals, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives elicit authentic compassionate responses that subsequently translate into charitable donations, pro-environmental commitments, and volunteer service.

Psychological Construct

The construct measured by the BSES is state empathic concern—also frequently designated in psychological literature as sympathy, compassion, or other-oriented affective empathy. Conceptually, this construct is defined as an emotional reaction characterized by feelings of warmth, compassion, softness, tenderness, and benevolence that are congruent with the perceived plight or vulnerability of another entity. It is fundamentally distinct from pure cognitive empathy (the intellectual capacity to decode another’s mental state, often operationalized as Theory of Mind) and from emotional contagion (the unmediated mimicry or automatic matching of another’s emotional state, such as feeling terrified when someone else displays fear).

State empathic concern represents an affective response that is congruent with—rather than identical to—the target’s state. If a target is experiencing debilitating sorrow or despair, the observer experiencing empathic concern does not necessarily experience despair; rather, the observer experiences compassionate sorrow, sympathy, and tender concern for the target. The construct is comprised of several interconnected affective facets captured across the six core items:

• Sympathetic: Denotes an explicit recognition of and sorrowful resonance with another person’s misfortune, accompanied by an authentic wish for their relief and well-being.
• Moved: Reflects a profound, poignant emotional engagement that disrupts psychological detachment and shifts the observer’s attentional and motivational resources toward the target.
• Compassionate: Embodies deep benevolence, active caring, and the moral awareness of the other person’s suffering coupled with the innate inclination to offer assistance.
• Tender: Captures a gentle, nurturing, and affectionate orientation, often linked neurobiologically to mammalian caregiving and attachment systems.
• Warm: Signifies an affective state of emotional openness, positive valence toward the other, and the dissolution of psychological distance between self and other.
• Softhearted: Reflects psychological susceptibility to the appeals of those who are vulnerable, defenseless, or marginalized, characterized by an absence of cynicism or punitive judgment.

Together, these six affective markers form a coherent, unidimensional construct reflecting the intensity of situational empathic arousal. Because the construct is strictly state-based, baseline scores prior to exposure to a distress stimulus hover near the floor of the scale (1.00 to 1.50), rising systematically in response to empathic primes, narrative transport, or acute distress portrayals.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical bedrock of the BSES is the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis (EAH), articulated and exhaustively tested by C. Daniel Batson (1981, 1987, 1991, 2011). For decades, psychological and evolutionary paradigms operated under the assumption of universal psychological egoism—the doctrine that all human actions, regardless of how noble or self-sacrificing they appear, are ultimately motivated by the self-interested desire to maximize internal rewards or minimize internal penalties. Prominent models such as Robert Cialdini‘s Negative State Relief model posited that individuals only help victims to alleviate their own vicarious distress or avoid the social and self-reproach associated with failing to help.

Batson challenged this paradigm by proposing that feeling other-oriented empathic emotion toward a person in need evokes a genuinely altruistic motivation to have that need relieved. The EAH specifies a precise causal sequence:

1. Perception of the Target’s Need: The observer recognizes a discrepancy between the target’s current state and their ideal or expected state of well-being.
2. Adoption of the Target’s Perspective: The observer imagines how the target is affected by their circumstances (an “imagine-other” perspective) or attaches intrinsic value to the target’s welfare.
3. Evocation of Empathic Concern: The cognitive act of perspective taking, coupled with valuing, triggers an immediate affective reaction characterized by warmth, compassion, tenderness, and sympathy. This specific emotional reaction is precisely what the BSES quantifies.
4. Generation of Altruistic Motivation: Empathic emotion directly drives an altruistic motivational state where the ultimate goal is increasing the target’s welfare. Alleviating one’s own sadness or avoiding guilt are merely unintended side effects, not the underlying motivational goal.

Crucial to the validation of the EAH was establishing that empathic concern could be dissociated from personal distress. Batson and colleagues conducted dozens of classic laboratory experiments utilizing the “escape paradigm.” Participants were exposed to a target in distress (such as “Elaine,” who was purportedly receiving uncomfortable electric shocks) and were given either an easy or difficult opportunity to escape observing the victim’s suffering. When participants experienced high personal distress (self-oriented upset), they fled when escape was easy, confirming an egoistic motive. However, when the BSES demonstrated that participants experienced high empathic concern, they chose to help the victim (e.g., offering to take the remaining shocks themselves) regardless of whether escape was easy or difficult. Hence, the BSES provided the definitive psychometric vehicle through which the existence of true altruistic motivation in human behavior was empirically substantiated.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Batson State Empathy Scale has been established across hundreds of published studies spanning social psychology, neuropsychology, and consumer behavior.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s predictable sensitivity to experimental manipulation. Across classic studies (e.g., Batson et al., 1981, 1987; Toi & Batson, 1982), participants instructed to focus on the feelings and experiences of a suffering protagonist (“imagine-other” condition) systematically score significantly higher on the BSES items (mean scores typically between 4.8 and 6.1 on a 7-point scale) than participants instructed to attend objectively to technical features or speech patterns (“objective” condition; mean scores typically between 2.1 and 3.4, $p < .001$, Cohen’s $d > 1.00$).

Convergent Validity

The BSES exhibits robust positive correlations with validated measures of dispositional empathy. In multiple validation cohorts, scores on the BSES correlate positively with the Empathic Concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) ($r = .38$ to $.54, p < .001$), demonstrating that individuals possessing a chronic trait proclivity toward sympathy experience more intense state empathic concern when confronted with specific situational cues. Additionally, the BSES correlates strongly with physiological correlates of vicarious caring, such as decelerated heart rate (indicative of outward sensory orientation and sympathy) and facial electromyographic (EMG) activity in the frontalis and corrugator supercilii muscle regions associated with concerned emotional expression.

Discriminant Validity

A critical test of the BSES is its ability to diverge from related but distinct affective and cognitive constructs. Factor analytic and correlational studies consistently establish that the BSES is psychometrically distinct from situational personal distress items (e.g., alarmed, grieved, upset, worried, disturbed, distressed). While BSES items load cleanly onto a single empathic concern factor, personal distress items form an independent, often orthogonal or weakly correlated factor ($r = .15$ to $.30$). Crucially, during experimental manipulations of psychological escape, high scores on the BSES predict helping behavior under both easy and difficult escape conditions, whereas high scores on the personal distress index predict helping only under difficult escape conditions, providing behavioral confirmation of discriminant validity.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The predictive utility of the BSES is exceptionally strong across charitable and prosocial domains. In consumer research, Lee, Winterich, and Ross (2014) established that the six-item BSES directly predicts monetary donations to both in-group and out-group charitable causes. The BSES successfully mediated the interaction between moral identity internalization and justice perceptions on final donation amounts ($R^2$ increments ranging from 12% to 28%). Similarly, in public health messaging experiments, BSES scores predict willingness to engage in preventive behaviors (e.g., mask-wearing, vaccination) designed to shield vulnerable populations from communicable diseases, over and above personal risk perceptions.

Reliability

The reliability of the Batson State Empathy Scale has been rigorously documented across four decades of empirical research. Given that the BSES is a state measure designed to register momentary affective fluctuations in response to immediate stimuli, traditional long-term test-retest reliability is theoretically inapplicable, as true variance in environmental stimuli and cognitive focus naturally induces variance in state scores. However, short-term immediate stability and internal consistency metrics demonstrate exceptional reliability:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): Across published experimental studies, the six-item composite routinely demonstrates Cronbach’s alpha values exceeding .85. In the seminal works of Batson et al. (1987, 1991), internal consistency coefficients for the state empathy adjective cluster ranged from $\alpha = .82$ to $\alpha = .91$. In contemporary consumer behavior investigations, such as Lee, Winterich, and Ross (2014), the six-item BSES achieved internal consistency coefficients of $\alpha = .89$ and $\alpha = .92$ across separate experimental cohorts.
• Composite Reliability and McDonald’s Omega: In structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analytic frameworks, McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) consistently surpasses .88, and composite reliability (CR) indices reliably range between .87 and .93, well above the recommended .70 threshold for psychological measurement tools.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): Modern psychometric assessments indicate that the BSES typically yields AVE values between .58 and .72, indicating that the latent construct accounts for the majority of variance across its constituent indicator items relative to measurement error.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Batson State Empathy Scale has been thoroughly evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In early psychometric calibrations (e.g., Batson, Fultz, & Schoenrade, 1987), adjective checklists containing both other-oriented and self-oriented emotional descriptors were subjected to principal components and principal axis factoring with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations. Across multiple participant samples, eigenvalues consistently revealed two dominant latent dimensions accounting for over 60% of the total variance:

• Factor 1: Empathic Concern / State Empathy: Dominated by high, clean primary loadings (> .65) from sympathetic, moved, compassionate, tender, warm, and softhearted, with cross-loadings onto the personal distress factor remaining strictly below .25.
• Factor 2: Personal Distress: Characterized by substantial loadings (> .60) from items such as alarmed, grieved, troubled, upset, and distressed.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Modern structural equation modeling confirms that a unidimensional, single-factor model provides an excellent fit for the six-item BSES when administered following exposure to a distress stimulus. Representative CFA fit statistics across diverse datasets demonstrate robust psychometric health:

• Model Fit Indices: $\chi^2 / df < 2.50$, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) $ge .97$, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) $ge .96$, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) $le .055$ (90% CI [.031, .078]), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) $le .032$.
• Standardized Factor Loadings: Standardized parameter estimates ($lambda$) for the six items routinely exceed .70, typically distributed as follows:
  • Sympathetic: $lambda = .81 – .89$
  • Compassionate: $lambda = .84 – .92$
  • Moved: $lambda = .73 – .82$
  • Softhearted: $lambda = .75 – .84$
  • Warm: $lambda = .70 – .79$
  • Tender: $lambda = .72 – .81$

Measurement invariance testing across gender cohorts has confirmed configural, metric, and scalar invariance, demonstrating that the BSES functions equivalently across male and female respondents, although mean latent state empathy is frequently higher among female participants in response to vulnerable targets.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report state psychological inventory / emotional adjective checklist.
• Construct Assessed: Momentary, situation-evoked other-oriented affective empathy (empathic concern).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-based laboratory interfaces, or online survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, REDCap).
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically aged 14 and older); applicable across general, student, organizational, and consumer populations.
• Item Count: 6 items (standard validated form; experimental versions in literature range between 5 and 8 items).
• Standard Instruction Stem: “Please indicate the degree to which you experienced each of the following emotions while reading about / observing the situation of [Target Individual / Group]:”
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Not at all
  • 2 = Very slightly
  • 3 = Somewhat
  • 4 = Moderately
  • 5 = Fairly strongly
  • 6 = Strongly
  • 7 = Extremely
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All items are keyed in the positive direction; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • A composite score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of the six items (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00) or by summing item responses (ranging from 6 to 42).
  • Higher scores unequivocally indicate greater levels of situational, other-oriented empathic concern.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The state empathy adjective paradigm was introduced in published laboratory studies by C. Daniel Batson and colleagues beginning in 1978 and 1981, with the refined multi-adjective batteries codified in 1987 and 1991. The standardized six-item configuration was further highlighted in consumer psychology literature by Lee, Winterich, and Ross in 2014. The instrument was developed within academic research contexts supported by university and federal grants and has been placed in the scholarly public domain for empirical, non-commercial educational and scientific research. No licensing fees, commercial royalties, or formal administrative permissions are required to administer the scale for academic, clinical non-profit, or psychological research purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited in resulting publications. Commercial entities or organizations deploying the tool for proprietary market testing or commercial human resource assessments should adhere to standard fair-use copyright practices and institutional review board ethical guidelines.

References

• Batson, C. D. (1987). Prosocial motivation: Is it ever truly altruistic? In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 20, pp. 65–122). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60412-8
• Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341065.001.0001
• Batson, C. D., Duncan, B. D., Ackerman, P., Buckley, T., & Birch, K. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(2), 290–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.40.2.290
• Batson, C. D., Fultz, J., & Schoenrade, P. A. (1987). Distress and empathy: Two qualitatively distinct vicarious emotions with different motivational consequences. Journal of Personality, 55(1), 19–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1987.tb00426.x
• Cialdini, R. B., Schaller, M., Houlihan, D., Arps, K., Fultz, J., & Beaman, A. L. (1987). Empathy-based helping: Is it selflessly or selfishly motivated? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(4), 749–758. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.4.749
• Coke, J. S., Batson, C. D., & McDavis, K. (1978). Empathic mediation of helping: A two-stage model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(7), 752–766. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.7.752
• Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
• Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R. A. (1990). Empathy: Conceptualization, measurement, and relation to prosocial behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 14(2), 131–149. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00991640
• Lee, S., Winterich, K. P., & Ross, W. T., Jr. (2014). I’m moral, but I won’t help you: The distinct roles of empathy and justice in donations. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(3), 678–696. https://doi.org/10.1086/677226
• Toi, M., & Batson, C. D. (1982). More evidence that empathy is a source of altruistic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(2), 281–292. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.43.2.281

Items of the Scale