Socionic Projections of the BES Questionnaire Scale Intended for Measuring Two Components of Empathy

The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) is an instrument that was initially used in global psychology to assess empathy in young people and adolescents based on the two-component concept of empathy represented by “cognitive” and “affective” empathy (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006 – a two-component questionnaire scale consisting of 20 questions in total). However, recent studies of empathy have led to the understanding that within BES it is defined as supported by three factor components, namely emotional contagion (what BES considers actual “affective” empathy), emotional disconnection (isolation, detachment — the desire to help or not help other people, which in socionics is close to rationality–decisiveness, and in the Big Five to the Agreeableness factor), and cognitive empathy. At present, the three-component BES scale (with the added subscale of emotional disconnection) has also been validated for adults. Western studies have also conducted and published comparisons of BES with other concepts of empathy. In our socionic experiments, we tested in its links with socionics only the initial 2006 version of the BES scale (two-component), which has strictly two subscales. The first is for measuring the so-called “cognitive empathy,” which is understood as the ability to recognize another’s mood and emotions, interest in their manifestation and causes, as well as an increased interest in observing emotional expressions in other people. For cognitive empathy, resonant sharing of another’s mood, as well as the desire to provide some help to others, are not required. Socionic profiles of cognitive empathy according to BES depend almost entirely (97%) only on the logic–ethics dichotomy (all ethical types have high cognitive empathy). Rationality, democracy, terminality, cheerfulness, etc., practically do not participate in the formation of this property. In fact, as understood by BES, it is completely identical to socionic ethics. The second BES subscale is called “affective empathy” and is measured in BES exclusively as the susceptibility to others’ emotions, others’ experiences (both positive and negative) for the subject. Socionic profiles of affective empathy according to BES are close to the averaged profile of the sum of all scales of the IRI questionnaire, which understands and measures empathy as the degree of sharing another person’s emotional state (with some addition of the subject’s own “emotionality” in the IRI), and depend mainly on socionic ethics and rationality. The SEE psychotype has BES cognitive empathy scores just as high (well above average) as all other ethical psychotypes. However, in affective empathy it turns out to be, on the contrary, among the strongly lagging (its affective empathy score is significantly below average). Likewise, EIE and IEE score high on BES cognitive empathy, but only average on affective empathy. Thus, the BES cognitive and affective empathy subscales are correlated with each other only very moderately (the sample correlation between the scores of these two subscales = 0.59).

The BES cognitive and affective empathy scales are also often used, like the IRI empathy questionnaire, in neuroimaging research within modern neuroscience.
We especially emphasize that the Basic Empathy Scale “BES” (especially the original two-component version) proceeds from a substantially different approach to empathy than the IRI questionnaire (also discussed earlier). Literature on the “BES” scale:

Socionic Projections of the BES Questionnaire Scale Intended for Measuring Two Components of Empathy

More about this dichotomy