Empathy & emotion style test
Thirty-seven statements look at how warmly you respond to other people’s feelings (empathy warmth), whether your head or your heart settles important decisions (decision style) and how often you check in with your own emotions (checking in with feelings). Rate how well each statement describes you as you generally are. The items come from public-domain IPIP scales (Barchard, 2001); this is for self-reflection, not diagnosis.
About 5 min · 37 questions · For self-reflection, not diagnosis · Results stay in your browser
Am concerned about others.
Before You Start
Why empathy warmth and decision style are measured separately, and how to read the scores and four types built from four public-domain IPIP scales.
Useful For
Useful if people often tease you for being a “T”, or if other people’s moods seem to seep into you too easily. It lets you look at how warmly you meet people apart from how you make up your mind.
Answer Honestly, Read Carefully
Think of what you actually tend to do rather than what sounds admirable. Both the warmer and the cooler styles have strengths, so candid answers bring advice you can use.
Related Tests
How to read your results
Overview
This test uses four of the seven IPIP scales for components potentially related to emotional intelligence (Barchard, 2001): Empathic Concern, Responsive Joy, Emotion-Based Decision-Making and Attending to Emotions.
Rather than rating emotional intelligence with a single number, it separates empathy toward others, the habit of noticing your own feelings and the weight feelings carry in your decisions. In particular, it does not lump “deciding with your head” and “having less empathy” together: each is measured on its own scale.
How It Works
For each of the 37 statements you choose from “Strongly disagree” (1) to “Strongly agree” (5). The original IPIP response scale runs from “Very inaccurate” to “Very accurate”; here it is shown on the same five-point scale as mind.io’s other tests. Statements worded the opposite way (such as “Feel little concern for others.”) are scored as 6 minus your answer.
Each scale score is the item average mapped onto 0–100 (an average of 1 gives 0, 3 gives 50 and 5 gives 100). Empathy warmth is the average of the Empathic Concern and Responsive Joy averages; decision style is the Emotion-Based Decision-Making score. Rounding is symmetric around 50, so mirrored answers always give mirrored scores.
Empathic Concern has ten items as published, but its two items about criminals (“Believe that criminals should receive help rather than punishment.” and “Have no sympathy for criminals.”) ask for a view on criminal justice policy more than about everyday concern for others, so they are left out. Removing one item of each direction keeps the four-and-four balance, and the other eight items are used unchanged. The IPIP allows items to be edited.
Score Interpretation
No published norms (averages and spreads from many people) exist for these scales, so results are read against each scale’s midpoint rather than as percentiles compared with others. Above 50, empathy warmth leans warm and decision style leans heart; below 50, they lean toward distance and head.
The two axes combine into four types: the Warm Problem-Solver (warmer empathy, head), the Heartfelt Resonator (warmer, heart), the Calm Analyst (cooler, head) and the Free-Spirited Feeler (cooler, heart). If either axis is exactly 50, you are the Balanced In-Betweener, shown with the types nearby.
Checking in with feelings comes from the Attending to Emotions score, which reflects how often you pay attention to your emotions, not how accurately you understand them. 63 or more (an average answer of 3.5 or more) reads as often, 37 or less (2.5 or less) as now and then, and anything between as sometimes. The “higher” and “lower” labels on each scale bar use the same cut-offs.
Limits
Self-reports can mix in the person you would like to be, and scores can shift a little with your mood on the day. High empathy warmth does not mean you read other people accurately; this is not a performance test of empathic ability.
A few items depend on your circumstances. The Empathic Concern items about homeless, poor and unemployed people can reflect social attitudes and views as well as personal empathy. The Responsive Joy items about children’s presents and birthday parties can depend on how much time you spend around children.
Barchard’s scales were developed for research, and mind.io has not separately validated the translations. This is a tool for self-reflection, not for diagnosis, hiring or evaluation.
References: Barchard, K. A. (2001), Emotional and social intelligence: Examining its place in the nomological network, doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia; International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org).
Guides to read alongside
- What empathy is: understanding, feeling with, and caring without burning outEmpathy is more than one skill: why asking beats guessing, how to share good news well, and how to care without empathic distress, with the research.
- Highly sensitive person vs introvert: how do they differ?Needing time alone doesn’t necessarily make you an introvert. How introversion differs from HSP sensitivity, with four combinations and common myths.
- Self-compassion vs self-esteem: stop being so hard on yourselfSelf-esteem rates you; self-compassion is how you treat yourself when things go wrong. Neff’s three parts, what research says, and exercises to try.
Frequently asked questions
What does the empathy & emotion style test measure?
How warmly you respond to other people’s feelings (empathy warmth), whether feelings or logic settle your important decisions (decision style) and how often you check in with your own emotions (checking in with feelings). It has 37 statements and takes about 5 minutes.
Where do the statements come from?
From four scales related to emotional intelligence (Barchard, 2001) in the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a free item collection used by researchers. IPIP items are in the public domain, so anyone may translate or adapt them. The English statements are the original wording; mind.io translated the Korean, Japanese and French ones.
If I got a T in MBTI, will my empathy score be low?
Not automatically. This test scores decision style and empathy on separate scales, so you can decide with your head and still score warm on empathy. Some research finds the two slightly related on average, but they are not the same thing. The Emotion-Based Decision-Making scale used here is also not the MBTI’s T/F scale, so this result cannot tell you your MBTI type.
Does low empathy warmth mean I lack empathy?
No. Empathy warmth is what you report about how much other people’s circumstances weigh on you and how much their joy rubs off on you. It does not measure how accurately you read others or how kindly you act, and it can simply mean a style of keeping some distance from emotional currents.
How is my type decided if a score is exactly 50?
You are shown as the Balanced In-Betweener rather than being assigned one side. Fifty is the scale’s midpoint, so when empathy warmth or decision style lands exactly on it, the types you sit between are shown together. Forcing a tie to one side would make the result look clearer than it is.
What is empathy, and which part of it does this test measure?
Psychologists usually split empathy into two strands: cognitive empathy, understanding another person’s point of view, and emotional empathy, feeling with them and caring how they are. The empathy warmth score here is a self-report on the emotional side, so it does not show how well you read other people. Reading it next to your decision style and checking-in-with-feelings scores gives a fuller picture of how you empathize.