Published in the research literature as Responsive Distress.
What happens in you when someone else is hurting?
How strongly other people's pain lands on you.
Responsive Distress is about what happens in somebody when another person is hurting. Whether it lands on them, and how hard.
This one is easy to hear as a measure of how much somebody cares, and it is not. It is about transfer: whether another person's pain produces the feeling in the person watching, or produces the wish to help without the feeling coming across.
Both of those are care. They do different work. One makes somebody very easy to be sad with; the other makes them very useful when everything has gone wrong and somebody has to make phone calls.
It runs separately from Responsive Joy, which surprises people. Being wide open to a room's distress and largely unmoved by its celebration is a normal combination, and so is the reverse.
Where somebody sits also moves with what else is going on. A hard year tends to shut this down for a while, which is not a change of character and is usually the thing that lets somebody keep functioning.
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Start your free assessmentEvery one of the seven runs between two named ends, and neither end is the one to aim for. Each buys something and each costs something, which is why both of them have a name here.
Another person's pain registers without arriving. Somebody at this end can sit with a friend through the worst news of their life and stay level, and the levelness is not indifference. What it buys is that they are the person to have in a crisis, because they can think while everybody else is underwater. What it costs is that calm gets read as not minding, and the reading is hard to argue with from outside.
Somebody else's pain lands with real weight. A distressing story from a stranger stays with this person for the afternoon, and a friend in trouble is felt physically rather than understood at a distance. What it buys is company that nobody has to explain themselves to. What it costs is a limited supply: too much of it in one week leaves them with nothing left, and they are rarely the first to notice.
The middle usually means it depends on closeness. A friend's trouble lands hard and the news does not, which is the ordinary arrangement and is what lets somebody stay functional while still being reachable.
A result names one of five positions along this scale. They run from one end to the other, and no figure sits beside them: there is no reference sample for these scales, so nothing here can say how many people land where.
The steady end gets called cold and the moved end gets called fragile, and both are unfair. This measures how much of somebody else's feeling comes across, not how much anybody cares and not how well they cope. Plenty of people at the steady end are the ones still there at midnight.
The pair. Responsive Distress is about catching pain; Responsive Joy is about catching happiness. They run separately, and a person can be wide open to one and closed to the other.
Both are about other people's difficulty. Responsive Distress is about how much of it a person feels; Empathic Concern is about how far their concern reaches, including to strangers.
A scale describes a tendency, not an ability. There is no good end of any of the seven, and where somebody sits says nothing about how well they handle what they feel.
It also says nothing about where they stand next to anybody. No reference sample exists for these scales, so a result describes how one person answered and stops there.
Or start with what emotional intelligence means.
Sixty-eight questions, about eight minutes. You get a plain read on all seven scales, free, with both ends of every one of them named rather than scored.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
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