Empathy Test

Answer 32 short questions by choosing the option that comes closest to what happens inside you. There are no right or wrong answers. At the end you’ll see your level of empathy on a single scale. It takes about 7 minutes.

A close friend sits down across from you at lunch in a heavy, gray mood. As the conversation goes on, how far does your own mood end up following theirs? Soup you've been craving since breakfast arrives, and you eat it happily, chatting away while their week comes out in gray pieces. For a minute your shoulders sag along with theirs; then a spoon clatters at the next table and you're back to yourself. Though the trip you're excited about still glows at the back of your mind, your voice drops to their pitch and your jokes dry up. By the time the plates are cleared, the vacation that thrilled you this morning seems pointless, and you're sighing on the same slow beat they do. Out on the street, their mood is the one you're wearing; the cheerfulness you woke up with is out of reach.

A friend has just been through a breakup and asks you to spend the whole Saturday with them, the day you had set aside for a trip you've been looking forward to. How much of your own plan are you ready to give up to be there for them? From the station platform, you send a long, warm message and a silly photo of your cat, then board your train. An hour of the morning goes to a coffee with them near the station, and after the hug you're on your way. By two o'clock the trip is canceled and you're on their couch with a bag of their favorite food, listening. Tickets forfeited, weekend cleared, you end up in their spare room, taking over the cooking and the phone calls. Lost deposit, cleared calendar, a week moved into their spare room; asked what it cost you, you have to stop and think, since the price wasn't part of the decision.

The meeting room has gone stiff and quiet with something nobody is saying out loud. How relaxed and unaffected does your body stay in that room? Your neck stiffens and your knee starts bouncing as the silence stretches across the table. Until someone's chair scrapes, your hands stay loose on the table; then your shoulders creep up around your ears. Something thrums low in your stomach as you settle into your seat, and you shrug it off. Slow breaths, hands open on the table: you let the silence thicken around you. You stretch your legs out and read the wall clock with the loose ease of someone at a bus stop; the strain in the room might as well be in another building.

In the supermarket line, a stranger ahead of you counts out coins with shaking hands and comes up short. How tender do you feel toward someone you don't know at all? You glance at the line, check your list, and your mind is already down the dairy aisle. Something soft flickers as the coins scatter, and it's gone before you've unloaded your basket. As you watch their hands shake over the coins, a clear warmth settles behind your ribs, and you wish this would go easier for them. Out in the parking lot the tenderness has come with you, and those trembling hands stay in front of your eyes as you load your bags. The humming freezers and bright ceiling lights take on the softness of what you're watching, and your throat aches with wanting good things for this stranger.

A friend sits next to you waiting for news that will decide something big for them, nerves showing in every movement. How strongly does their anxiety rise in you as well? Beside you, your friend chews a thumbnail; you peel an orange, split it, and hold out a segment, comfortably unhurried. Butterflies turn up in your stomach as they talk, and you blame the second coffee. Somewhere along the way the worry has become your own, and your chest tightens with it, no longer something you're watching in them. You've stopped following what they say; your eyes are locked on the phone on the table and your pulse is loud, with a sick dread over a decision that isn't yours. Soon you're both pacing the room, hands cold, muttering worst outcomes in matching whispers, your dread as loud as theirs.

A friend has asked you to help paint their study and has said they want sunny yellow. How strongly does your own idea of the best color steer what ends up on the walls? Sunny yellow gets your full enthusiasm as you stir the can, admire it out loud, and picture how it will feel for them to walk into that room. 'Maybe something paler?' you murmur, catch their face, and say 'yellow it is' before the sentence has finished. With sage-green swatches held up beside the can, you make your case gently, then paint yellow all the same and suggest sage for the trim. Gray goes into the yellow they chose until it's a sort-of-yellow, because you can see how much better the room would look. Sage paint, already bought, comes out of your bag and goes on the walls; their mention of yellow earns a shrug and a 'trust me'.

You arrive at a housewarming already tired, and the apartment is loud with laughter and music. How far does the room lift your own energy? Tired as when you arrived, you sit perched on the arm of the couch, watching the party like a film you've already seen. Twenty minutes near the loud kitchen and you notice your face has lifted and a smile comes a little easier. Bit by bit the music and laughter pick you up: your voice gets louder and the tiredness you brought in fades. Fumes were all you had when you came in, and now you're dancing in the hallway, volunteering to fetch drinks, buzzing. Nobody stands out as louder or more joyful than you: chorus at full volume, an arm around a stranger, on the same wave as the whole apartment.

At a market stall, a seller short-changes an elderly visitor who hasn't noticed, and it's none of your business. How strong is the protective surge you feel for the visitor? You pay for your plums, tuck the bag under your arm and stroll on past the stall, pleased with the price. Your step slows at the stall and your eyes follow the visitor's hands across the coins for a moment; then a passing cart pulls your attention away. Something in you bristles and stays bristled; you keep looking back at the stall and at the visitor's puzzled face. Heat rises in your chest and you edge closer, wanting to put yourself between the visitor and the seller. Bus, errands, headache: your own concerns drop away, and what's left is a fierce wish that this person goes home unharmed.

A friend tells you about an awful moment at the dentist, wincing through the story. How far does your face follow theirs? Relaxed and a touch amused, your expression stays exactly as it was while they grimace through the story. When they wince, the corner of your mouth twitches, then smooths out. Your brows pull together and your nose wrinkles in step with their grimace. Their squint and twisted mouth turn up on your face so exactly that they laugh and point. Crease for crease, clench for clench, right down to the tilt of the head, your face becomes theirs in the same instant.

A cousin opens the front door and finds a childhood friend home from abroad, and the hallway erupts. How much of an onlooker do you stay while it happens? You're in the middle of the hallway hug, laughing with wet eyes as if it were your own reunion. Hanging back at the doorframe, you clap and grin until someone waves you into the hug. From the couch, plate on your knee, you watch fondly, pleased for them the way you'd be pleased at a film's happy ending. It's their moment, not yours, so you step aside to let the two of them have it and check your messages. Like a street scene from a cafe window, the tears and shouting play out, and you go back to your crossword.

At a conference reception, you're chatting with someone who leans on the bar with folded arms. How closely does your own stance come to resemble theirs? Hands in your pockets, you rock on your heels while they lean on the bar, arms folded. One hip takes your weight a moment after theirs, a small echo of their lean. Propped against the bar, arms folded, head tilted at the same angle: that's you, too. Their lean, their folded arms, even the hand they lift to rub the back of the neck: all of it turns up in your own stance. From across the room, the two of you look like a pair of bookends, same stance, same tilt, gestures traded back and forth like a rehearsed routine.

A colleague at the next desk puts down the phone, visibly holding back tears. How far do your voice and body turn toward them before you have decided to comfort them? In your usual brisk voice, you ask about the printer and swivel back to your screen. It's a shade gentler than the rest of your day's talking, that 'Everything all right?' of yours. As you say their name, your voice drops, your chair rolls closer and your shoulders soften. Office noise drops out of your world as you turn your whole body to face them, voice hushed to a murmur. Crouched by their chair with a hand near theirs, you find yourself speaking in a low, slow voice you didn't decide on.

The person ahead of you in the post office line is shouting at the clerk about a lost parcel, and it isn't about you at all. How calm and unbothered do you stay? Irritation climbs in your jaw as the sharp words pile up, until you're ready to bark at the clerk too. After a sentence or two of calm, their tone gets under your skin and your shoulders go tight. There's a poster on the wall to read, and you stay calm, with only a thin edge of prickliness under your ribs. The shouting is like rain on a roof: it's happening over there, and your mood stays where you left it. Over the shouting you hear the radio behind the counter and hum along, as pleasant as you were at the door.

Your roommate walks in from the hallway after reading a message, shoulders sagging, and hasn't said a word. How plainly does concern show on your face? Book in hand, you give them a friendly nod, face as easy as it was before they came in, and read on. You glance up as they cross the room, a small crease between your brows, and then your eyes drop to the document open in front of you. Before your mouth can ask, your eyes have said 'what happened?', soft under a gathered brow. Worry spreads across your whole face: brow creased, mouth pulled down, eyes fixed on them. One glance at your face tells them everything: it has become a single question mark of care.

A friend starts crying on your couch as they tell you what happened. How visible is your own reaction to their tears? Dry-eyed, you pour them water and say the right things, your voice level as a tabletop. There's a small catch in your throat as the first tear falls, and you clear it away. When you say 'come here', your eyes have filled and the words wobble. Tears spill over your lashes as they sob, and you leave them where they fall. Before long you're crying openly beside them, both of you a mess of tissues.

In a cafe, a customer tears into a young trainee behind the counter, and it is no part of your business. How far do you go in stepping in for the trainee? You keep your eyes on the menu board and wait for your flat white. For a second you feel like saying something; then you pocket the thought and study the pastries. Everything in you leans toward speaking up, mouth dry, though you stay where you are. 'That's enough,' you say, loud enough to be heard, and the customer's tirade falters. Not your fight, and yet you're between the two of them, asking the trainee if they'd like a break and calmly telling the customer to leave.

After an afternoon with a cousin who was in a giddy, fizzy mood, you go over the day that evening. Looking back, how much of the mood you carried home was theirs? That night, at the sink, you replay the afternoon with your cousin and find your mood is the one you took there: a flat, ordinary Tuesday ache. A faint fizz of your cousin's giddiness is still in your step on the stairs, like perfume on a scarf, though the evening itself feels like yours. Midway through folding laundry it dawns on you that the giddy, list-making energy came from your cousin and sits alongside your own tiredness like a second coat. Traced to its source, the brightness you're wearing is your cousin's laugh across the restaurant table, with only a thin layer of your own morning mood underneath. It's only in bed that you follow the thread all the way back and see that the wired, breathless state you're falling asleep in is your cousin's, carried home intact.

A friend messages that they've just lost their job and need to talk, right as you settle in to watch the finale of a show you've been saving. How much does your own convenience decide the amount of comfort they receive? Before you've finished reading their message, the episode is paused and you're dialing, the couch still warm behind you. Over the paused screen you wince, then hear yourself say 'take your time, I'm here' before the wince has faded. One eye stays on the paused finale while you talk to them, and the call lasts as long as you can spare. 'Ten minutes, then I'm back to my show,' you say, and ten minutes is what they get. Face down goes the phone after a quick 'text me tomorrow', and the show carries on; their news can wait for your schedule.

You walk into a friend's living room for dinner just as the hosts stop talking, and the air feels tight. How sharp does your attention become before anyone says a word? Lemon tart or brownie is the biggest decision on your mind as you hang up your coat, and the hush is only a hush. On the clink of cutlery your ears sharpen, and your eyes flick to the hosts. Somewhere between coat and couch, you catch yourself scanning faces and choosing your first words with care. Cough, dripping tap, a chair pushed back: all of it snaps your eyes over, and telling yourself to relax makes no difference. Before your bag is off your shoulder, your whole attention is fixed on the room like a hand on a rail, waiting for whatever breaks.

A stranger is hauling a suitcase up a flight of station stairs in the rain. How strong is your pull to do a small kind thing for them? With the departure board in your eyes and your card already out, you step around the suitcase and tap through the barrier. 'I could carry that' crosses your mind and is gone before you reach the top step. On the stairs you slow, leaning toward offering an arm, and by the time the doors beep you've settled on the offer. It takes effort to hold back: your hand is already rising and 'let me take that' is on your tongue. Up the steps you go, one hand already on the suitcase handle, before it registers that nobody asked.

A colleague tells you in detail how worried they are about their contract. You follow exactly why. How wide is the gap between following their worry and feeling any of it? By the end of their first sentence your hands have gone cold, and their worry sits in your chest as if you had brought it in yourself. Feeling arrives a moment behind the logic, softly, like an echo of what they've just said, and you catch it. Sure, it's reasonable to be rattled, you tell yourself, nodding, while your own mood barely stirs. Their dilemma fits into three tidy lines in your head, and where the fear should be there's only a faint hum. Contract dates, notice periods, the manager's silence: you take in the lot the way you'd read a train timetable, correct and complete, with nothing stirring.

A neighbor is home recovering from an operation and you're doing their shopping. How much do you shop for what suits them rather than for what you would pick yourself? What goes into the basket is what you would love to be handed: your favorite soup, your favorite tea, and you call it kindness. Into the cart goes your usual soup, then a box of the cookies you remember they like. In the tea aisle you put back the blend you love and take the plain one they mentioned in passing. Ginger cookies and one exact brand of bread you wouldn't touch yourself: you text for both and cross town to the one shop that stocks them. Top to bottom the list is theirs: soft foods, an odd brand of jam, a paperback in their favorite series; your own preferences don't cross your mind while you shop.

You take a seat in a study room where everyone is flat and quiet after a bad exam. How steady does your own energy stay? Within minutes your shoulders slump and your voice thins to the same low murmur as everyone else's. After a cheerful question or two, you hear your own voice sag toward theirs anyway. Spirits dip as you sit down, then settle at a level you recognize as your own. Tea from your flask and a small joke go around the table, and your own mood stays easy and lively; the flat air leaves barely a mark. While gloom hangs over the table, you breeze in humming and chat about weekend plans; your energy is exactly what it was in the corridor.

This morning a colleague was blamed unfairly in front of the whole team. Looking back this evening, how strongly is your concern for them still with you? Nothing of the meeting follows you to your desk; the afternoon spreadsheet has your full attention. At lunch a faint pang for your colleague surfaces, then gets buried under your sandwich order. That evening you wonder how they're doing, and you type a message to ask. Blame replays in your head, coloring your dinner and the walk home with sympathy and a lingering anger on their behalf. Hours later your heart pounds with the same protective fury as in the meeting room, and you lie awake rehearsing what you'd say in their defense.

On a video call, a colleague's face breaks into a smile at some good news. How far does your own face change before you notice it yourself? On the call a colleague beams, so you decide to smile back, and you do it on purpose, the way you'd nod. As they beam, your lips curl up, and you spot it in your own thumbnail before the smile is fully there. In the corner of the screen your own grin appears, and you notice it a beat after it arrived. Already your face has lit up when you notice that you've done exactly what they did. Seconds before you had worked out what the good news was, your whole face had already lit up, as a teammate points out afterward.

At a friend's wedding, a toast turns tender. How strong is the physical welling-up in you? Everyone around you is dabbing their eyes, while you sit clear-eyed, appreciating how well the toast is delivered. Your eyes prickle briefly as the toast turns tender, and a swallow settles it. When the speaker's voice cracks, a lump rises in your throat and you have to look at your plate. Across the table the couple exchange looks, and your eyes brim while the room swims. Tears run down your cheeks and you laugh through them as you reach for a napkin.

You're having coffee with a friend. How far does your copying of their posture and gestures run ahead of your awareness of it? Leaning in like them takes a deliberate decision on your part, and you make it when you want to show you're listening. Their legs cross and yours follow; you catch it and uncross them with a smile. Two cups in, you realize both of you have been resting a chin on a hand, elbows on the table. It's at the goodbye by the door that you notice you've been cutting the air with your hands just as they do, since you sat down. The photo your friend posts of your coffee catch-up shows you sitting exactly as they sit, arm over the chair back, and you have no memory of moving into it.

At the intermission of a choir concert, you see a friend alone by the lobby window, eyes wet. How strong is the pull to go to them before you have decided anything? Holiday flights are the topic on your mind as you chat by the program stand, at ease. Toward the window your weight drifts, for a heartbeat, and then you turn back to your drink. There's a pull, like a tide, and you choose to wait, because they might want privacy. Everything in you leans toward the window; you put your glass down and edge through the crowd, eyes fixed on their face, wondering whether to go. Before a single thought has formed, you're beside them at the window with a hand on their sleeve.

You're snappy over supper, and tracing the mood back, you land on something earlier in the day. How much of it turns out to be somebody else's anger? Going over your grumpy evening, you find the cause is your own: a missed train and a cold sandwich. Over reheated soup, you notice a thread running from the edge in your mood back to a supplier's curt call, alongside the missed train and the rain. Traced back, your sourness splits into two strands: a bad commute, and a real sting left by the customer who shouted at you on the phone. The manager's tirade at nine o'clock is the source of the mood you've worn all evening, with only the rain and the missed bus adding trim. At the sink, you follow the tension back to one point, a raised voice at nine o'clock, and find no other root.

A teammate slumps against the counter in the shared kitchen, clearly struggling, and hasn't asked for anything. How strongly does care rise in you? While your teammate slumps at the counter, you fill your water bottle and think about your two o'clock. Fondness for them turns up in you, then slips away as the kettle clicks off. The spoon stops in your mug and your shoulders angle toward your teammate, a plain warmth spreading through you, though no one has asked you for anything. Care fills you and starts turning into plans: what to say, whether to fetch water, who could cover their next call. Your coffee goes cold while your attention stays fixed on them, and nothing else in the building gets a look in.

Across the train car, a stranger is wiping away tears, and you can't know why. How deeply does sadness rise in you? The stranger wipes their eyes while you finish your podcast episode and look out of the window. At the sight of their wet cheeks, a thin gray shadow crosses your mood, then the next station arrives. The phone goes dark in your hand while you watch the stranger's shoulders shake, and a heavy quiet settles low in your belly, story unknown. At your stop you stay seated, throat tight and a hand pressed to your breastbone, and slip out through the closing doors only at the last second. The whole carriage narrows to the stranger's bowed head; your chest hollows, your hands go cold in your lap, and you mourn a loss you know nothing about.

Raised voices carry up from the apartment below, where someone is being torn into. How far do you hold it as none of your concern? It's your own family the shouting seems to belong to, and you stop on the stairs, heart knocking. At your door you hover, telling yourself it's not your place, then go down and knock to ask if everyone is all right. 'That's theirs to sort out,' you think, closing your door softly, though the sound stays with you for a while. Earbuds in, music up, you go on chopping vegetables; other people's rows are other people's. By morning you can't say what the row was about and don't care to; it belonged to the apartment below.

Your results are no accident

The classic 16-type personality test rooted in Jung's typology has been rebuilt from the ground up: a new CoreTypes methodology, and a far higher level of accuracy. These might be the most useful ten minutes you'll ever spend on yourself: you walk away with the key to your decisions, your relationships and your results — and it's yours for good.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is being an empath scientifically real?

Not as a separate type of person. Researchers don't sort people into empaths and everyone else, but the pieces behind the word are real: feeling something yourself when others are upset, and caring what happens to them. Both vary smoothly from person to person, and everyone has some of each, which is why this test shows where you sit on a single scale instead of handing out a label.

Can a psychologist diagnose you as an empath?

No. The word isn't a clinical category, so there is nothing to diagnose. This test asks how you see yourself and places you on one scale; it informs and does not diagnose, and neither a low nor a high level points to any condition.

Empath vs highly sensitive person: what's the difference?

In everyday talk the two labels overlap, and studies find the traits related but not the same. High sensitivity is about how strongly your own surroundings register: light, noise, textures, crowded rooms. Empathy is about how other people's moods reach you and what they stir in you. This test covers only the second.

Can empaths feel other people's physical pain?

Not literally. What research supports is emotional contagion: another person's distress sets off a matching emotional state in you, an echo of feeling and not of physical sensation. Separately, a small number of people report sensing touch they merely see on someone else's body, but that is a rare, distinct case, far from what everyday results here capture.

What are the signs of being an empath?

Popular lists mention sensing unspoken moods, absorbing other people's feelings, needing time alone to recover, feeling drained in crowds and being the person others confide in. Two of these, picking up moods and being moved by what others feel, match what this test scores, and it scores them as degrees. The recovery-related signs fall outside it, and however long a checklist gets, it can't show that you belong to a separate type.

Methodology

Your result is only a position on this test's scale. The test has 32 statements covering sixteen ways of being affected by other people's feelings, each asked twice from different angles, with five graded answers. Some statements point toward the low end on purpose. The total places you in one of five levels, with boundaries set by the meaning of the answers, not by equal slices.

The design borrows from multidimensional empathy research, where empathy is a set of separate responses, not a single trait. Two are combined here: how strongly someone else's feeling stirs a matching feeling in you, and how strongly it turns into warmth and a wish to help. A plain definition is in a psychology dictionary's entry, while a university research center's overview separates emotional from cognitive empathy and weighs benefits against costs.

The limits matter. Everything rests on self-report, a shaky tool for traits people like in themselves. The test can't tell you how accurately you read other people. It leaves out a further response, being overwhelmed by what others feel, raised only as a warning in the two highest results. "Empath" is a popular label with no clinical category behind it, and a high result is no evidence of a special ability. Nor does it stand in for any commercial questionnaire.

This test is for information only. It is not a diagnostic tool and does not replace a qualified professional if something about your emotional life worries you.

References

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
Batson, C. D., Fultz, J., & Schoenrade, P. A. (1987). Distress and empathy: Two qualitatively distinct vicarious emotions with different motivational consequences. Journal of Personality, 55(1), 19–39. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1987.tb00426.x
Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional Contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–100.

Author: Lex Tarrel, Personality Typologist Reviewed by: Igor Lyadskiy, PhD