Cognitive And Affective Empathy Test (TECA)

The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test, from

Just over a year ago, an interesting book titled ‘The Empathy Effect’ hit the market  . In it, Helen Riess, a professor at Harvard University and director of the empathy program at Massachusetts General Hospital, analyzed the lack of this dimension in the medical and organizational spheres.

According to her, many people who have a position of responsibility towards others continue to fail in this very basic competence.

Someone can be extremely skilled and effective in their work. You can have multiple degrees, a high intelligence quotient, and a leadership role. However, if you don’t have empathy, a void arises. 

There is a hole that weakens the ability to maintain empathic communication, to understand the other and reach agreements, to create alliances, bonds, and to make use of adequate emotional intelligence.

Therefore, having adequate resources to measure this dimension can be of great help. On the one hand, we have the opportunity to use them in various fields: social, organizational and clinical.

Furthermore, with tools such as the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test, we can make a person aware of their limitations in empathic matters and take responsibility for working on it.

Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA): purpose, characteristics and reliability

The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA) was designed for very specific purposes. The first is to provide a rigorous and easy-to-apply tool in various fields. The second is to form a questionnaire capable of providing an overall measure of the person’s empathy.

Therefore, the purpose of TECA is not other than measuring empathic capacity from a cognitive and affective approach. Fernández, et al. (2008), authors of this test, consider that empathy is a fundamental phenomenon in the study of human behavior. Therefore, having this feature is as necessary as it is interesting.

Let’s see more information about it. 

What are its scopes of application?

The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA) can be applied from 16 years of age onwards. This resource can, therefore, be used in the educational context, although it was developed with the idea of ​​being useful in three specific scenarios. They are as follows:

• Clinical scope : to assess the relationship of empathy in psychological disorders, as well as in crimes and criminal behavior.
• Social scope: in this scenario, TECA is very interesting to better understand pro-social behavior, moral behavior, aggressiveness, etc.
• Organizational area : as we might suppose, empathy is still essential to create better professional environments, with a more pleasant work environment, reduce stress, optimize communication and productivity, etc.

The four scales of the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA)

The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA) consists of 33 items (questions) with a likert- style response typology . That is, the person being evaluated must choose between “strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree”.

It should be noted that this instrument is used with the purpose of evaluating the two basic components of empathy, which are as follows:

• Cognitive empathy: ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions.
• Affective empathy: ability to feel and connect with the emotions, sensations and feelings of others.

In order to assess these two areas, the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test is structured into four scales:

• Adoption of perspectives : cognitive ability we have to understand the vision, thoughts and perspectives of others.

• Emotional understanding : refers to the ability to connect with the emotions, impressions and intentions of those around us.
• Empathic stress : this dimension refers to the competence (or not) to tune in to the negative emotions of others.
• Empathic joy. As opposed to the previous point, empathic joy refers to the ability to understand and detect the positive emotions of others.

Is TECA reliable?

López-Pérez, Fernández-Pinto and Abad (2008), authors of the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test, managed to create a valid, reliable and very easy to apply test (takes just over 10 minutes). In addition, their assessment is based on percentage scores obtained from a large sample of the general population of adult men and women.

It is a highly reliable instrument, very useful for evaluating people aged 16 and over, which is an excellent resource for any company, work center, health center or social agency.

Empathy is a dimension that we should all better understand and enhance in ourselves. This test can help us do that.