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Concept
Empathy quotient
Summary
Empathy quotient (EQ) is a psychological self-report measure of empathy developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. EQ is based on a definition of empathy that includes cognition and affect.
According to the authors of the measure, empathy is a combination of the ability to feel an appropriate emotion in response to another's emotion and the ability to understand anothers' emotion (this is associated with the theory of mind). EQ was designed to fill a measurement gap by measuring empathy exclusively; other measures such as the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy and the Empathy Scale have multiple factors that are uncorrelated with empathy but are associated with social skills or the ability to be emotionally aroused in general. EQ tests the empathizing–systemizing theory, a theory that places individuals in different brain-type categories based on their tendencies toward empathy and system creation, and that was intended to determine clinically the role of lack of empathy in psychopathology, and in particular to screen for autism spectrum disorder.
The EQ consists of 60 items: 40 items relating to empathy and 20 control items. "On each empathy item a person can score 2, 1, or 0." A 40-item version of the test containing only the relevant questions is also available, but may be less reliable in certain applications. Each item is a first-person statement which the test-taker must rate as either "strongly agree", "slightly agree", "slightly disagree", or "strongly disagree". All questions must be answered for the test results to be valid.
The test is scored on a scale of 0 (the least empathetic possible) to 80 (the most empathetic possible). A useful cut-off of 30 was established to screen for autism-spectrum disorders.
Together with the systematizing quotient, the empathy quotient tests Simon Baron-Cohen's empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory of autism. This cognitive theory attempts to account for two aspects of autism disorder: the social and communication barriers and the narrow interest and attention to detail.
Official source
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