Empathy, the ability to infer and share others’ affective states, plays a vital role in social interactions. However, no existing scale comprehensively assesses empathy’s cognitive and affective components across positive and negative emotional valence domains. This article explores the latent structure of the empathy construct and attempts to remedy past measurement limitations by developing and validating a new 20-item self-report measure, the Perth Empathy Scale (PES). In Study 1 (N = 316), factor analyses revealed a coherent empathy construct comprised of cognitive and valence-specific affective components. Study 2 (N = 331) replicated this factor structure, showed measurement invariance between males and females, and highlighted the importance of assessing negative and positive emotions in empathy. The PES showed convergent and discriminant validity from comparisons with alexithymia and other empathy measures. Overall, this article empirically establishes a conceptually clear structure of the multidimensional empathy construct, which the PES reliably and validly measures.

同理心，即推断和分享他人情感状态的能力，在社交互动中起着至关重要的作用。然而，目前还没有量表全面评估同理心在积极和消极情绪效价域中的认知和情感成分。本文探讨了同理心构造的潜在结构，并试图通过开发和验证一种新的 20 项自我报告测量来弥补过去的测量限制，即珀斯同理心量表 (PES)。在研究 1 ( N = 316) 中，因素分析揭示了一个连贯的同理心结构，该结构由认知和效价特定的情感成分组成。研究 2 ( N =331) 复制了这种因素结构，显示了男性和女性之间的测量不变性，并强调了评估同理心中消极和积极情绪的重要性。PES 通过与述情障碍和其他同理心测量的比较显示出收敛和区分有效性。总体而言，本文根据经验建立了多维同理心结构的概念清晰结构，PES 对其进行了可靠有效的测量。