The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test, from I. Fernández Pinto, B. El Lupez-Pérez and F. José García Abad, is a complete and easy-to-apply instrument, which since its publication in 2008 has remained a resource of great value and confidence to evaluate the dimension of empathy based on the components that define it: cognitive and emotional domains.
Just over a year ago, an interesting book titled?The Empathy Effect? (The effect of empathy). In this work, Helen Riess, a harvard university professor and director of the empathy program at Massachusetts General Hospital, discussed the absence of this dimension in the medical and organizational field.
- According to her.
- Many people who have a position of responsibility to others continue to fail in this basic skill.
Someone can be extremely competent and effective in their work, you can have multiple degrees, a high IQ and a leadership position, but if you don’t have empathy, a vacuum appears.
There is a hole that weakens the ability to maintain empathetic communication, to understand and make agreements, to create alliances, to connect and to use the right emotional intelligence.
Therefore, having the appropriate 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.
In addition, with tools such as the cognitive and emotional empathy test, we can aware a person of their limitations of empathy and take responsibility for working with them.
If your emotional skills aren’t competent, if you’re not self-aware, if you can’t handle your painful emotions, if you can’t empathize and maintain emotional relationships, whatever your intelligence, won’t you go very far?. – Daniel Goleman-
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 areas, the second is to form a questionnaire capable of providing a global measure of the empathy of the person being evaluated.
Therefore, the goal of TECA is to measure empathetic capacity from a cognitive and emotional approach; Fernandez et al. (2008), authors of this test, see empathy as a fundamental phenomenon in the study of human behavior. , having this resource is necessary and interesting.
Let’s look at more information about that
The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA) can be applied from the age of 16, so this resource can be used in the educational field, although it was developed with the idea of being useful in three specific scenarios that are:
The Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA) consists of 33 items (questions) with Likert type of response typology, i. e. the person evaluated must choose between “totally agreeing, agreeing, disagreeing or disagreeing, disagreeing and totally disagreeing”. .
It should be noted that this instrument is used to evaluate the two basic components of empathy, which are:
To evaluate these two areas, the cognitive and emotional empathy test is structured on four scales:
The authors of the cognitive and emotional empathy test, Lupez-Pérez, Fernandez-Pinto and Abad (2008), have managed to create a valid, reliable and very easy-to-apply test (it takes just over 10 minutes). The evaluation is based on percentage scores obtained from a large sample of the general population of adult men and women.
It is a very reliable tool, very useful to evaluate people from the age of 16, which seems to be an excellent resource for any company, work center, health center or social agency.
Empathy is a dimension that we should all understand and improve in ourselves, and this test can help us achieve this.