Developing a New Apathy Measurement Scale

Apathy is both a symptom and syndrome prevalent in many pathological populations that affects motivation to display goal directed functions. Apathy has been established as having a triadic substructure by various researchers but has never been directly detected in normative and non- normative populations. Levy and Dubois (2006) proposed three apathetic subtypes, Cognitive, Emotional- Affective and Auto Activation, all with particular neural correlates and functional impairments. The aim of this study was to create and begin the validation process of a new apathy measure called the Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS), which assesses the three previously mentioned apathetic subtypes. There were 311 participants (mean = 37.4, SD = 15.0) ranging from 18 to 70 years old.Upon performing an Horn’s parallel analysis of principal factors and Exploratory Factor Analysis, 4 factors (labelled Executive, Emotional, Cognitive Initiation and Behavioural Initiation) were extracted accounting for 28.9 % of the total variance. The factors and their meanings fitted Levy and Dubois ’ definitions of the three apathetic subtypes with the exception of the Auto Activation apathy. Upon closer examination thematically the Auto Activation apathy subtype definition accounted fo