The Empathy Measure

The Empathy Measure is a conversational assessment that maps seven emotional skills: naming feelings, inner honesty, composure, seeing a situation straight, finding the need underneath it, reading other people, and holding steady under pressure. It measures how precisely you read and name what happens inside you and inside other people. It does not measure how happy or how kind you are.

The assessment is a short interview of ten open questions, asked one at a time and written fresh after each answer. Each question is asked at a level: a strong answer lifts the next question up a level, a thin one brings it down. The score for a skill depends on both how well the answer was given and how hard the question was, so an easy question answered perfectly cannot produce a high score. That is also what makes two sessions comparable, because the same number means the person handled the same level, not the same wording.

It is built for adults, teenagers and children, and runs in more than thirty languages. For a child under seven, a parent answers about their child, and the questions ask for real remembered episodes rather than ratings. There is no multiple choice anywhere, and nothing to tick. A person can answer in whatever language they like, while the questions keep coming in the language the session began in.

At the end you receive a picture of the seven skills, with a score for each one, the moment in your own answers that showed it, what that number means in plain words, and one small thing to practise. You also get a much simpler version you can read in about a minute, and a shareable image of the whole shape. The full report stays on your own device; the server keeps only a way to reach you, the choices you made, and the numbers.

One short interview is a sample, not a diagnosis. It is a picture of skills at one moment, useful for noticing the shape of your empathy and the one thing most worth building next. You can come back and take it again another day, and the questions will be different.

The Empathy Measure was created by Eric Gonzalez-Payne.