Personal Distress Assessment

On April 22nd I completed the Measuring Empathic Concern and Personal Distress instrument. This instrument is two part, measuring one’s empathetic concern as well as one’s reaction to personal distress. The average score for a female on the empathetic concern scale is 21.67. My score is a fourteen. The average score for a female on the personal distress scale is a 12.28. My score is an eleven. While my scores are lower than the average for my gender, I do not feel that this means I am less feeling than others. I choose to view these results as stating that I am able to detach myself from a situation and view it from a more neutral position than most. Nevertheless, some individuals view me as cold, unfeeling, or even hateful.
On a day to day basis my level of empathy and reactions to personal distress does not greatly affect me. However, I may have become used to situations that people with a higher score would see as unusual. An example of this is each of my friends have told me that before they got to know me they were intimidated by me, thought I was mean, or thought I was a ‘stone-cold bitch’. I do not find this odd because I know how I am. I know that some of my behaviors make me seem less than friendly. So I have been working towards
My friends which are always been moved by such things find my annoyance weird. However, I find it to be a pretty natural reaction. I mean if someone has never had an issue distancing themselves from a fictional character and now find it difficult to separate past emotions from the fictional current situation, I find annoyance at the situation to be understandable. Nevertheless, this might be because I am defending my own situation. My annoyance might be irrational and it might not be. My reactions might be part of getting older and developing a more empathetic view on life. Time will