One of the most widely used measures of empathy is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980, 1983). This index is based on a multidimensional view of empathy and comprises four sub-scales: perspective taking, empathic concern, personal distress and fantasy. Here we present a Portuguese version of IRI which was tested with 478 university students. A confirmatory factor analysis was run on half of the sample, the results of which showed a weak adjustment of the original factorial structure to the Portuguese data. In order to enhance the factorial validity of IRI four items were eliminated from the scale, and a new confirmatory analysis was calculated on the other half of the sample. This revealed a good adjustment of the data to the expected factorial structure. Further analyses showed that this version of the scale (the Portuguese IRI) has good internal reliability, and that the correlations