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Creation and Validation of an English-Language Version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET)

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Abstract

The measurement of cognitive and emotional empathy, reflecting abilities to understand and to experience or ‘feel’ the emotional states of others, is important for many studies pertaining to clinical conditions as well as normative personality characteristics. The Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) has been shown to be a useful and efficient instrument for indexing impaired empathy in different diagnostic groups, in particular due to its measurement of both cognitive and emotional components of empathy within the same task set. This makes the MET a valuable means for assessing empathy with implications for conditions such as autism and psychopathy. However, up to this point the MET has only been available in German, and has not been investigated in regard to specific facets of psychopathy. This report describes (a) the translation of the MET into English to allow its use in a wider range of populations, and (b) efforts undertaken to refine the measure itself and evaluate its relationship with distinct facets of psychopathy (i.e., boldness, meanness, disinhibition). As expected, MET emotional empathy showed its strongest association with the meanness component of psychopathy (r = −.31, p < .01). The resulting instrument was then validated in a sample of 80 healthy control subjects, where it showed expected associations with other empathy measures and psychopathic tendencies. Findings also highlighted some issues pertaining to evaluation of scale reliability. Results from this study indicate that this translated version of the MET can serve as an effective tool for assessing emotional and cognitive empathy in English-speaking samples.

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Notes

  1. Specifically the condensed and revised version MET-core-2.

  2. See guidelines at: http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/research_tools/translation/en/; accessed Feb 22, 2018

  3. Since CE scores were based on items involving correct versus incorrect answers, the reliability analysis for this measure used the Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20, Kuder and Richardson 1937), an internal consistency measure for dichotomous items, which is a special case of Cronbach’s alpha. This analysis yielded highly similar results for the initial (rKR-20 = .49) and the shortened scale (rKR-20 = .51), despite the difference in scale length.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Marisa Benz for providing the back-translation of items into German, and Chris Schatschneider for his assistance with scale reliability estimates.

Funding

This study was funded/supported by grant W911NF-14-1-0027 from the US Army and grant 952090 from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The content of this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Department of Veterans Affairs, Military Suicide Research Consortium, or U.S. Recruiting Command. Funding sources had no role in the study design in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, 1107 W Call St, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-4301, USA

    Jens Foell, Sarah J. Brislin, Laura E. Drislane & Christopher J. Patrick

  2. Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Isabel Dziobek

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Correspondence to Jens Foell.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Jens Foell, Sarah J. Brislin, Laura E. Drislane, Isabel Dziobek, Christopher J. Patrick declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Foell, J., Brislin, S.J., Drislane, L.E. et al. Creation and Validation of an English-Language Version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET). J Psychopathol Behav Assess 40, 431–439 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-018-9664-8

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