Investigating the acquiescent responding impact in empathy measures

Our primary objective was to examine the impact of acquiescent responding on empathy measures. We selected the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) as the measure for this case study due to its composition—the affective dissonance scale consists solely of items that are semantically reversed relative to the empathy construct, while the resonance scale comprises mostly semantically positive items—which raises questions about whether the distinction between resonance and dissonance factors is authentic or merely an effect of acquiescence. Utilizing data from 2,489 Brazilian adults, we explored ACME's factor structure by testing various models, both with and without acquiescence control. We also examined the invariance of model parameters, including those for acquiescence, across self-reported sex and assessed the influence of acquiescence on the associations between ACME's factors and external measures. Our findings indicated that while acquiescence does affect ACME, the resonance and dissonance factors are not exclusively a result of this bias. Nevertheless, it was demonstrated that both the items and their associations with external measures are significantly impacted by acquiescence. These results underscore the crucial need to account for response biases in empathy evaluations and in other psychological assessment measures.