Toronto Empathy Questionnaire

The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) is a self-report questionnaire measuring a person’s emotional ability to understand and respond to others.

Take the test here:

Who the test is designed for

• Adults (age 16+) of average intelligence to higher intelligence.

Test versions & translations

The TEQ  is available in:

• English
• Greek^[1]Psychometric properties of the Greek version of the Toronto Composite Empathy Scale in Greek dental students (Tsiantou et al., 2013)^[2]The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire: Reliability and Validity in a Nationwide Sample of Greek Teachers (Kourmousi et al., 2017) (request the authors for the Greek version of the test)

Taking the test

The TEQ consists of 16 statements, giving you 5 choices for each statement:^[3]Toronto Empathy Questionnaire | Psychology Tools

• Never
• Rarely
• Sometimes
• Often
• Always

Note: There are no right or wrong answers or trick questions.

Scoring

• Scoring range: 0–64
• Threshold score: 45↓
  • The TEQ scores exhibited a negative correlation with the Autism Quotient.
  • Scores 45 or higher indicate you have higher than normal empathy.
  • The lower the score, the less empathetic you are.
• Most non-autistic males score:  43.46–44.45
• Most non-autistic females score: 44.62–48.93

Scoring is as follows:

• Never = 0
• Rarely = 1
• Sometimes = 2
• Often = 3
• Always = 4

Questions

• Positively worded items: 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 16.
• Negatively worded items are reverse scored: 2, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15.

Methods

You can take the test using two methods of scoring:

1. Automated-scoring, which is for most purposes.
2. Self-scoring, in case you want documentation of your answers.

Validity

How reliable, accurate, valid, and up to date is the test?
In three studies, the TEQ demonstrated strong validity, correlating positively with social skills, self-report measures of empathy, and negatively with measures of autism symptomatology.

Discussion

Natalie:

• The TEQ is a good measure of one’s emotional empathy. I score 54 out of 60, indicating that I have high empathy, correlating well with my experience and career as a psychotherapist. I believe the TEQ to be a better alternative to Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathy Quotient (EQ), as the EQ leaves many autistics feeling surprised and confused by their low score.
• We know we have strong feelings—often too strong, but the EQ usually scores us as having shallow empathy. It is important to understand that Baron-Cohen’s EQ looks primarily at whether a person responds in a neurotypical way to social situations—not their capacity for emotional empathy.
• The test was designed to test empathy in autistics. It uses negatively worded statements to avoid bias, but negatively worded statements are difficult for autistics and produce a disadvantage for us. For example, “Other people’s misfortunes do not disturb me a great deal.” The statements produce a “disagree” response to avoid response bias. For clarity, I convert to a positive version then choose the answer opposite to the positive version.
• The authors claim that the TEQ is inversely correlated with the Autism Quotient and/or autism traits, but this does not hold true for many of us. For instance, my AQ score of 42 is high, but my TEQ of 54 is particularly high. Seeing as the TEQ was written in 2009, it would be nice if the test could be updated to better reflect the empathetic capacity of autistic people.

Kendall:

• The negative statements are confusing and a problem for me. They’re easily understood, but figuring out what my answer should be is convoluted. Unlike other tests, the choices here are more useful – I don’t feel so boxed in and restricted. This questionnaire more accurately depicts my concept of empathy or the lack thereof (TEQ 48 vs EQ 13).

Toronto Empathy Questionnaire

Select the answer that best reflects the frequency to which each statement applies.

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