Understanding animal minds and mirroring their emotions: Validation of the Affective and Cognitive Animal Empathy Scale (AC-AES)

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.