Understanding Animal Minds and Mirroring Their Emotions: Validation of the Affective and Cognitive Animal Empathy Scale (AC-AES)

Authors

  • Jared Piazza
    Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
  • Stefan Leach
    School for Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
  • Joanna Burchell
    Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
  • Ffion Lloyd
    Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
  • Keira Strenkowski
    Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
  • Imogen Warhurst
    Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

Abstract

Current approaches to measuring empathy towards animals often fail to discriminate between understanding what animals might be feeling (cognitive empathy) and emotionally responding in a consonant way to what animals are feeling (affective empathy). Across two studies we developed and validated, with UK-based samples, a new self-report scale for assessing tendencies to experience affective and cognitive empathy towards animals—the Affective and Cognitive Animal Empathy Scale (AC-AES). The AC-AES contains 22 situation-based items that cover a range of animal species and human-animal interactive domains, 11 items per subscale. The two-factor structure was confirmed via preliminary testing (Study 1) and confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2). The subscales showed good independence, test-retest reliability, converged with human-oriented components of empathy, and predicted animal-oriented attitudes (e.g., endorsement of non-lethal animal management) and behaviours (e.g., animal-product avoidance), with some divergences; for example, cognitive empathic tendencies better predicted expansive moral concern for animals, whereas sharing in animals’ emotions correlated with a wider range of meat avoidance. Implications for future animal-advocacy research are discussed.