Architecture of Conditional Empathic Coupling: the DEIC measurement framework and a six-factor model of empathy, psychopathy, and attention

The psychology of empathy has developed for over a century as several poorly integrated lines — psychoanalytic defense theory, attachment theory, cognitive neuroscience, the clinical tradition of psychopathy, contemplative schools of witnessing — each glimpsing a fragment of the architecture, none measuring the adjacent ones. We introduce DEIC (Dynamic Empathy and Inner Conflict), a psychometric framework giving these constructs a shared coordinate system testable in a single sample. In a Russian-language online sample (N = 1426), six-factor oblique CFA validates six distinguishable factors (ID, CA, P, M, E_AF, E_cog; CFI = 0.950, RMSEA = 0.068). A seventh construct — attention (A), the witnessing function — enters as a formative moderator in conditional process SEM.Key findings: (1) E_AF and E_cog are separable; partial r(P, E_cog) = +0.32, supporting the hyper-instrumentation hypothesis in psychopathy. (2) Parallel mediation CA → {ID, P, M} → E_AF shows the P channel is empty at population level: P is architecturally orthogonal to childhood history, not its adaptive consequence. (3) A narrow conditional process SEM reveals significant two-stage A-moderation of CA → ID → E_AF (IMM = −0.00197, 95% CI [−0.00533, −0.00005]; P(IMM<0) = 96–97% across three Bayesian priors). (4) Trauma is not a verdict. The integrated-survivor profile (hi-CA × hi-A, n = 118, 17%) has the highest E_AF in the sample — higher than non-traumatized baseline. Integrated trauma becomes a resource of empathy where a witnessing relation to one's own states is present. (5) Primary and secondary psychopathy are topologically distinguishable via ID and CA (primary: n = 144, ID ≈ 0, CA ≈ 0; secondary: n = 65, ID = +0.90, CA = +0.98). (6) A is valid as a formative composite but not as reflective latent: A-CFA yields bipolar loadings; substituting latent A flips the signs of key coefficients — empirical grounds for a dedicated A-scale in wave 2. (7) The same architecture survives across seven methodologically independent channels: latent CFA, network psychometrics, free-text behavioral self-identification, CASE behavioral anchors, ROC discriminant validity, clinical-visibility asymmetry, and three-path discrimination of somatic-only presentation.DEIC is best read not as one more empathy questionnaire but as an operational grammar for distinguishing architecturally opposite configurations producing the same surface presentation — an operational dialect of what the contemplative tradition has distinguished without instruments, directed against the fragmentation of academic psychology. The paper formulates falsifiable predictions and states its boundaries (cross-sectional, monolingual, self-report) as part of a planned 18-paper program.