Empathy refers to the capacity to understand, share, and respond to the emotional states and experiences of others. It is usually conceptualized as a multidimensional construct involving affective empathy, cognitive empathy, empathic concern, and sensitivity to another person's perspective.
Empathy is closely related to sympathy, compassion, prosocial motivation, and Theory of Mind, but it is not identical to them. This domain focuses mainly on self-report, state, trait, and context-specific measures of empathy, while task-based measures of social cognition are considered in related domains.
Affective empathy refers to emotional responsiveness to another person's experience. These measures focus on emotional resonance, empathic concern, compassion, and sensitivity to others' feelings.
The Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy (QMEE or EETS) is one of the earliest widely used measures of affective empathy.
The Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES) is a revised version of the QMEE that provides an updated assessment of emotional empathy and affective responsiveness.
The Emotional Empathy Scale assesses emotional sensitivity and responsiveness to others' feelings.
The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) provides a concise measure of empathy with a strong focus on affective responsiveness and concern for others.
These instruments treat empathy as a set of related but distinct components. They may assess perspective taking, emotional resonance, empathic concern, personal distress, self–other differentiation, and the ability to understand another person's emotional state.
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is one of the most widely used empathy measures. It assesses multiple dimensions, including Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern, Personal Distress, and Fantasy.
The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) explicitly distinguishes between cognitive and affective empathy.
The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) also separates cognitive and affective empathy and is commonly used in adolescent and developmental research.
The Empathy Components Questionnaire (ECQ) provides a more differentiated assessment of empathy components, including emotional contagion, responsiveness, and regulation.
The Empathy Assessment Index (EAI) assesses multiple aspects of empathy, including affective response, self–other awareness, emotion regulation, and perspective taking.
The Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) distinguishes between affective resonance, cognitive understanding, and related empathic processes.
The Perth Empathy Scale (PES) assesses cognitive and affective empathy across both positive and negative emotions, providing a more recent multidimensional model of empathic ability.
The Griffith Empathy Measure (GEM) extends this multidimensional approach to developmental contexts through observer-report formats, such as parent ratings.
The Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA) assesses empathy in children and adolescents, including affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and prosocial motivation.
Some instruments provide a global assessment of empathy as a relatively stable personality characteristic. They are useful when the goal is to estimate a general empathic tendency rather than separate affective and cognitive components.
The Empathy Quotient (EQ) is one of the most widely used general empathy measures. It captures broad empathic tendencies and is frequently used in research on individual differences, social cognition, and autism spectrum conditions.
State empathy measures assess empathic responses to a specific person, group, situation, narrative, simulation, or intervention. They are especially useful when empathy is expected to change depending on context or recent experience.
The Comprehensive State Empathy Scale (CSES) measures situational empathic responses, including empathic concern, shared affect, distress, helping motivation, empathic imagination, and cognitive empathy.
Some research instruments assess empathy through tasks, scenarios, videos, or emotion-recognition materials rather than self-report. They may combine affective empathy, cognitive empathy, Theory of Mind, and broader social-cognitive performance.
The Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) assesses both cognitive empathy, through emotion recognition, and affective empathy, through emotional responses to others' states.
The Pictorial Empathy Test (PET) assesses empathic responsiveness to photographs depicting emotional, painful, or distressing situations.
The EmpaToM is a video-based task designed to assess empathy and Theory of Mind as related but separable components of social understanding.
In some settings, empathy is assessed within specific interpersonal or professional roles. These measures describe how empathic understanding, responsiveness, and communication are expressed in healthcare, counseling, consultation, education, or other applied contexts.
The Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) is designed for medical and healthcare settings, focusing on empathic engagement in clinical interactions. © proprietary
The Consultation and Relational Empathy Measure (CARE Measure) is a patient-rated measure of clinician empathy in one-on-one consultations.
Some measures focus on the direction, modality, or personal expression of empathy. They may describe empathic orientation toward different people or groups, sensitivity to another person, and typical ways of responding to others' success, distress, or vulnerability.
⇒ Theory of Mind, emotion recognition, performance-based measures of social cognition are considered in the Social Intelligence domain.
⇒ Emotional Intelligence. Empathy overlaps with emotional understanding, emotion perception, and the ability to use emotional information in interpersonal situations.
⇒ Social attitudes. Sympathy, prosocial orientation, attitudes toward others, and broader social concern may overlap with empathy but are not identical to it.
⇒ Interpersonal Traits. Empathy is related to warmth, sensitivity, agreeableness, interpersonal responsiveness, and habitual ways of relating to others.
Empathy-related instruments should be interpreted as measuring a family of related processes rather than a single uniform trait. Affective empathy, cognitive empathy, empathic concern, personal distress, professional empathy, and situational empathic response may show different profiles in the same person.
Self-report empathy measures describe how people perceive their own empathic tendencies and typical reactions. They should not be treated as identical to task-based social-cognitive performance, emotion recognition, or Theory of Mind, which may rely on different abilities and are assessed with different methods.
A profile-based interpretation helps clarify whether the assessment concerns emotional resonance, perspective taking, concern for others, sensitivity to distress, professional responsiveness, situational change, or broader social-cognitive ability.