What Kind of Empathy Do You Have?
Understanding what someone feels and catching it are two different abilities
Empathy gets used as a single compliment, but it describes two abilities that can exist entirely without each other. One is working out what someone else is feeling. The other is feeling it yourself. A skilled negotiator may have the first without much of the second; someone who cries at a stranger's bad news may have the second without being accurate about the first. This test scores them separately.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you are with people in general, not only with the people you love.
What it measures
Four facets across two families. On the cognitive side: perspective taking, the habit of seeing a situation from where someone else is standing, and imagining, the habit of putting yourself into other people's experience including in fiction. On the affective side: emotional contagion, catching other people's mood without meaning to, and responsiveness, reacting to visible distress in the people around you.
Based on: Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (Reniers et al., 2011)
Possible results
Perspective taking
Seeing the situation from where the other person stands.
Imagining
Putting yourself inside someone else's experience.
Emotional contagion
Catching other people's mood without choosing to.
Responsiveness
Reacting when someone in front of you is struggling.
Common questions
Is it bad to score low on emotional contagion?
No, and there is a good argument that it is an advantage when paired with high responsiveness. Research on empathic distress finds that absorbing someone's suffering leads to withdrawal and burnout, while concern for them without absorption leads to helping. Nurses, paramedics and therapists who last tend to have exactly this shape: they notice everything and catch nothing.
Can cognitive empathy be used against people?
Yes, and this is the clearest reason to measure the two sides separately. Accurately modelling what someone feels is a skill, and a skill is neutral about its use - it is what makes a good teacher and also what makes a good manipulator. What restrains it is not more cognitive empathy but the affective side, or a trait like honesty-humility.
Can empathy be increased?
The cognitive side responds to practice more readily than the affective side. Deliberately stating someone's position back to them before replying is a small habit with a measurable effect, mostly because it forces you to build the model rather than assume you already have it. The affective side is closer to temperament and shifts slowly, though compassion training studies show it can be steered towards concern and away from absorbed distress.
Sources
- Reniers, R. L. E. P., Corcoran, R., Drake, R., Shryane, N. M., & Vollm, B. A. (2011). The QCAE: A Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy. Journal of Personality Assessment.
- Myszkowski, N., Brunet-Gouet, E., Roux, P., Robieux, L., Malezieux, A., Boujut, E., & Zenasni, F. (2017). Is the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy measuring two or five dimensions? Evidence in a French sample. Psychiatry Research.
- Klimecki, O., & Singer, T. (2012). Empathic distress fatigue rather than compassion fatigue? Integrating findings from empathy research in psychology and social neuroscience. Pathological Altruism.
An honest note Two honest limits. First, the split between cognitive and affective empathy is well established in theory but contested in this particular questionnaire: a French validation found that five correlated factors fit the data better than the two-family structure, so treat the grouping as a useful summary rather than a hard boundary. Second, empathy measured by self-report is a claim about your intentions, not a demonstration of accuracy - studies that check people's guesses against what the other person actually felt find that confidence in your own empathy and accuracy are only loosely related.
Try one of these next
How Existentially Isolated Are You?
Feeling like nobody sees the world quite the way you do, even in a crowd
How Quickly Do You Fall in Love?
Falling fast is a trait, and it has a name
How Did Your Family Communicate?
The family you grew up in taught you rules about talking that you probably never noticed