QUESTIONING THE EMPATHY-ALTRUISM SCALE '

Summary.-In Batson's research, people are frequently divided into an empathy group and a distress group depending on their answers to a questionnaire after being exposed to someone in distress. The present study followed this procedure but obtained preexposure measures on the questionnaire as well. Analysis indicated that the distress group (n = 15) is well named-they do respond with increased distress after exposure. There was no evidence to support the claim (a) that the empathy group (n = 14), relative to the distress group, responded with increased empathy upon seeing someone in distress or (b) that the empathy group showed a greater increase in empathy than in distress. Batson, Dyck, Brandt, Batson, Powell, McMaster, and Griffitt (1988) suggest that people respond to distressed others in one of two different ways. They either respond with empathy, in which case they are concerned with acting in a selfless manner to aid the other, or they respond with personal anxiety and distress, in which case they are more concerned with acting in a selfish manner to reduce their own discomfort. It is standard procedure in Batson's research to administer the empathyaltruism scale after participants are exposed to the suffering confederate. Participants indicate the extent to which they feel alarmed, upset, worried, disturbed, distressed, grieved, perturbed (generating a distress total score) and the extent to which they feel empathic, moved, sympathetic, compassionate, softhearted, concerned (generating an empathic total score). In some studies, the distress score is subtracted from the empathy score, subjects are ranked on the resulting net score and divided at the median into the "empathy group" and the "distress group." To document that some react with distress while others react with empathy to a distressed other, it would be better to obtain "preexposure scores" on the questionnaire and then examine changes in their scores after people see someone in distress. To do so, 29 participants were asked to complete the empathy-altruism scale, then were shown a picture of a young suffering black child, and re-rated their feelings on the empathy-altruism scale plus two single traits, sad and happy (traditional in Batson's research). The photograph showed a young, sick black child with bandages on neck, abdomen, and head and was (correctly) identified as a very young Haitian child lying near death.