The Emotion Specific Empathy (ESE) questionnaire is a 60-item measure that is intended to assess affective and cognitive empathy for six basic emotions - anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness and fear. The Surprise Cognitive Empathy sub-scale is one of 12 sub-scales of five items each and assesses the extent to which one can cognitively take another person’s perspective and understand why that person is surprised. The other sub-scales can be found on EMERGE. Please refer to the paper for the order of questions when administering the entire measure.
Geographies Tested:
Populations Included: Female, Male
Age Range:
1. It is easy for me to understand why others become surprised when something unexpected happens to them.
2. I have a hard time predicting what situations will make other persons surprised.
3. If someone tells me about an event that made him/her surprised, I can easily understand why that event made him/her surprised.
4. It is difficult for me to understand what makes my friends surprised.
5. I can easily think about events that will make my friends surprised.
*Items reverse coded during scoring
Response Options
Disagree Strongly - -3
Disagree Somewhat - -2
Disagree Slightly - -1
Neutral - 0
Agree Slightly - 1
Agree Somewhat - 2
Agree Strongly - 3
Scores for subscales are calculated by taking an average across the items. The asterisk indicates that the item should be reverse coded when scored.
Olderbak, S., Sassenrath, C., Keller, J., & Wilhelm, O. (2014). An emotion-differentiated perspective on empathy with the emotion specific empathy questionnaire. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 653. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00653
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Evidence-based Measures of Empowerment for Research on Gender Equality (EMERGE)
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