Construction and Validation of a Self-report Subjective Emptiness Scale

Subjective emptiness is a psychiatric symptom that is primarily assessed and studied as a criterion of borderline personality disorder, even though research suggests that it may have clinical importance beyond that diagnosis. The aim of this series of studies was to develop and validate a standalone self-report measure of subjective emptiness. A systematic, multi-step approach to identifying test content was used to generate 88 items that were then trimmed to 53 via ratings of interviews with patients and experts. This preliminary scale was administered to a sample of 544 university students, and a trimmed version was given to two samples oversampled for clinical problems (N = 1,067; N = 1,016). A five-item measure fit a unidimensional model well and had satisfactory internal consistency across these samples. External validity analyses suggested that emptiness, as measured by the Subjective Emptiness Scale (SES), is strongly related to a number of clinical constructs, particularly in the internalizing domain, indicating that emptiness is an important construct to consider in its own right, independent of its presence in the borderline criterion set.