Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Drug Area and Child's Health (NEUROFARBA), Section of Psychology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
BMC Psychol. 2020 Feb 22;8(1):20. doi: 10.1186/s40359-020-0386-9.
Compassionate love is defined as awareness and understanding of one's suffering, connecting with the distress, and being emotionally and cognitively moved to alleviate suffering. The Compassionate Love Scale for Humanity (CLS-H) was developed to measure compassion towards strangers who need help and/or are vulnerable. The present study aimed to develop an abbreviated version of the CLS-H using item response theory to provide a precise and non-redundant compassion measure for use in research and practice.
Undergraduate students (N = 790; 65.8% females) completed the CLS-H and other measures intended to establish external validity. Items for the short version were selected based on high amounts of information and taking into account the content coverage of the construct.
The shortened scale consisted of 9 items and performed well in measuring a large spectrum of the underlying construct with acceptable reliability. In terms of validity, the previously observed pattern of correlations was confirmed demonstrating positive associations between compassionate love and measures of self-esteem, positive affect, and life satisfaction, as well as negative associations with negative affect and anxiety.
Using IRT, we obtained a brief, precise, and valid tool for assessing compassionate love.
同情之爱被定义为对他人痛苦的觉察和理解，与痛苦产生共鸣，并在情感和认知上受到触动以减轻痛苦。《人道同情之爱量表》（CLS-H）是为衡量对需要帮助和/或脆弱的陌生人的同情心而开发的。本研究旨在使用项目反应理论开发 CLS-H 的缩写版，以提供一种精确且非冗余的同情心衡量标准，用于研究和实践。
本科生（N=790；65.8%女性）完成了 CLS-H 及其他旨在建立外部有效性的测量。短版本的项目是基于高信息量和考虑到结构内容涵盖的基础上选择的。
缩短后的量表由 9 个项目组成，在测量广泛的潜在结构方面表现良好，具有可接受的可靠性。在有效性方面，证实了先前观察到的相关性模式，表明同情之爱与自尊、积极情绪和生活满意度呈正相关，与消极情绪和焦虑呈负相关。
使用 IRT，我们获得了一种简短、精确和有效的评估同情之爱的工具。
