DEIC-DRAFT Questionnaire: Development and Validation of a Comprehensive Instrument for Assessing Realized Empathy with Consideration of Defense Mechanisms

This article presents the development and validation of the DEIC-DRAFT questionnaire for comprehensive assessment of realized empathy with consideration of defense mechanisms, childhood trauma, and internal conflict. The DEIC-DRAFT questionnaire (Dynamic Empathy and Inner Conflict—a provisional name reflecting the focus on empathy and internal conflicts) consists of 131 unique items covering 14 scales: empathy (E), psychopathy (P), suppression (S), dissociation (D), affective isolation (AIS), flattening (F), internal dissonance (IDS), masking (MS), adverse childhood experience (ACE), childhood alienation (CA), emotional climate (EC), affective disruption index (ADI), attention (A), and lie control scale (Lie).Innovative features of the instrument include separation of declarative and behavioral formulations, control of structural artifacts, integral metrics (R-metric with unified 0–1 scale, discrepancy index DI, Defensive Hardness Index (DHI)), and focus on defense mechanisms as central emotion regulators.The study was conducted on a sample of 1,293 participants (70.6% women, 24.7% men, 4.6% other gender categories, age range 12–65 years, 90.3% aged 18–40 years) who completed the questionnaire online. Results confirmed high reliability of main scales (α = 0.65 [95% CI: 0.63, 0.67]–0.85), revealed a defense mechanism supercluster with dense correlations (0.77–0.94), discovered a stable gap between declarative and behavioral responses (0.43 scores, p < .001), and identified a clear structure of defense mechanisms.Key findings include identification of the ”dark zone” of empathy, confirmation of advantages of behavioral items, validation of ”don’t remember” response as a dissociationmarker, and development of a method for controlling structural artifacts. The R-metric represent empathy, suppression, dissociation, and psychopathy scale scores respectively, demonstrates a unified scale with 0.20/0.40 thresholds for assessing realized empathy. This metric quantifies the balance between empathic capacity and psychopathic traits, providing an intuitive measure of realized empathy potential. The instrument shows significant potential for clinical practice, psychoeducation, and scientific research.