BEES: Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (Mehrabian, 1997)
"Definition of Emotional Empathy
"Emotional Empathy" is defined as one's vicarious experience of another's emotional experiences -- feeling what the other person feels. In the context of personality measurement, it describes individual differences in the tendency to have emotional empathy with others. Some individuals tend to be generally more empathic in their dealings with others; they typically experience more of the feelings others feel, whereas others tend to be generally less empathic. In addition, Emotional Empathy has been found to relate to generally healthy and adjusted personality functioning and to reflect interpersonal positiveness and skill. The Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES) measures both of the aforementioned components of Emotional Empathy (i.e., vicarious experience of others' feelings; interpersonal positiveness) in a balanced way. It is a completely new scale and is based on a substantial amount of research evidence derived with an earlier scale developed in my laboratory.
An interesting and extremely important feature of the BEES is that it relates negatively (r = -.50) to interpersonal violence and, thus, may be useful (as an indirect and subtle measure) for identifying persons who may have a potential to behave in highly aggressive or violent ways (Mehrabian, 1997b)."