The Cognitive And Affective Empathy Test

The cognitive and affective empathy test by I. Fernández Pinto, B. López-Pérez and F. José García Abad is a complete, easy-to-apply tool. Since its publication in 2008, it has been known as a very valid and reliable source to study the dimension of empathy.

The great feature of this instrument is that it is not general. Instead, it analyzes both components of empathy: the cognitive and the affective component.

In addition, a very interesting book came on the market a little less than a year ago: The Empathy Effect, by Helen Riess. She is a professor at Harvard University and director of the empathy program at Massachusetts General Hospital.

To write this book, she analyzed the lack of this dimension in the medical and organizational field.  In summary, she concluded that many of those who now have a position of responsibility towards others fail in this very basic competence.

For example, you may have great skills to develop your work. You can have numerous studies, a high IQ and a leadership position. However, when empathy fails, it’s impossible to feel “whole.”

It feels like weak in many different circumstances. For example, in the ability to maintain empathetic communication, understand others in order to reach agreements and establish alliances and networks with others. Feeling unable to do these things hinders the ability to have adequate emotional intelligence.

The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test: Purpose, Characteristics, and Reliability

Therefore, having assertive tools to measure this dimension can be of great help. It is even better when it is possible to use it in different areas. Areas such as social, organizational and clinical.

Similarly, with tests such as the cognitive and affective empathy test, we can help a person become aware of their empathic limitations and get them to work on them.

The cognitive and affective empathy test has very specific purposes. First of all, it is about having a rigorous and simple tool that can be applied in different planes. Second, it involves creating a questionnaire that can provide a universal measure of empathy.

Therefore, the aim of this test is nothing more than to measure empathic ability from a cognitive and affective approach. Fernández and the others mentioned above, who are the authors of this test (2008), believe that empathy is a fundamental phenomenon in the study of human behavior.

Therefore, having this resource is both interesting and necessary. For that reason, let’s take a closer look at it.

In which areas can it be applied?

One can apply the cognitive and affective empathy test to an individual of 16 years of age or older. It is therefore possible to apply it in the educational field. However, this test was developed with the intention of being useful in three very specific areas:

• Clinical area. Used to evaluate the influence of empathy on mental disorders and criminal behavior.
• Social area. In this scenario, many use this test to better understand prosocial behavior, morality, aggressiveness, etc.
• Organizational area. As expected, empathy is important for creating better work scenarios, improving the work environment, reducing stress, and optimizing communication and productivity, among other things.

The four scales of the cognitive and affective empathy test

The cognitive and affective empathy test consists of 33 items (questions) with an answer typology according to the Likert scale. In other words, the person being evaluated has to choose between strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, and strongly disagree.

It should be noted that the main purpose of this tool is to evaluate the two basic components of empathy, which are:

• Cognitive empathy:  the ability to identify and understand people’s emotions.
• Affective Empathy: The ability to feel and interact with people’s emotions, sensations, and feelings.

On the other hand, and to evaluate these two areas, the cognitive and affective empathy test is structured in four scales:

• Acceptance of perspectives. The cognitive ability that helps us understand the vision, thoughts, and perspectives of others.

• Emotional understanding. This refers to the ability to be connected to the emotions, impressions and intentions of the people around you.
• Empathic stress. This dimension deals with an individual’s competence (or incompetence) to be attuned to other people’s negative emotions.
• Empathetic joy. Unlike the previous scale, empathic joy refers to the ability to understand and detect the positive emotions of those around you.

Is it reliable?

López-Pérez, Férnandez-Pinto, and Abad, authors of the cognitive and affective empathy test (2008), managed to create a valid, reliable, and easy-to-apply test.

The test can be done in just under 10 minutes. In addition, the scale is based on percentile scores obtained from a large sample of the general population of adult males and females.

In short, this instrument is very reliable. It is also very useful for evaluating people aged 16 and over. It is available as an excellent resource for any business, work center, health center or social organization. Empathy is a dimension that we should understand better. This test helps us do just that.