| The importance of empathy in therapeutic relations has been acknowledged as a necessary component in forming positive relationships with clients (Greenberg, Rice, and Elliot, 1993). The process of a client being able to relate their emotional experience to an empathic therapist can result in self-awareness, self-reflection, and comfortable disclosure of inner feelings from the client. Thus, it is important that self-empathy can become measurable in order to detect individuals that do not possess the strengths needed for better recovery from stressful events.; The purpose of this study was to validate a newly developed scale measuring self-empathy. The Self-Empathy Scale (SES) assesses three predicted markers of the self-empathic individual: self-awareness, self-prizing, and self-soothing. One-hundred and eighty university students were recruited to complete the study (63 males and 117 females). A Principal Components analysis using Varimax rotation was used to determine the factor structure of the Self-Empathy Scale. Simple correlational analyses were used to examine the concurrent and discriminant validity of the SES. Partial support was found for the Self-Empathy Scale: Five factors, rather than the hypothesised three factors, were found representing different aspects of self-awareness, self-regard, and self-soothing. Concurrent validity was supported by a positive relationship between self-empathy and self-efficacy, and self-empathy was found to be a distinct construct from alexithymia, giving the scale discriminant validity. |
