Multidimensional Empathy Assessment
NOESIS adaptation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980)
~9 min · 28 questions · Free partial report
Twenty-eight statements about four different capacities that all get called empathy: working out how a situation looks from someone else's side, being pulled into the inner life of characters in books and films, feeling warmth for people who are struggling, and being flooded by distress of your own when someone suffers in front of you. Psychology stopped treating empathy as a single trait decades ago. The four dimensions are distinct, each can run high or low independently of the others, and one of them, personal distress, describes your own discomfort rather than your attunement to anyone else. This assessment reads each dimension separately and never adds them into one empathy score, because the four do not belong on one ruler. It is built on the multidimensional empathy model of Davis (1980). The items are a NOESIS adaptation, independently written and not independently validated, so treat results as structured self-reflection rather than a validated measurement.
Four capacities get called empathy, and one of them is not about the other person at all.
- Separate the four things that 'being empathic' usually blurs together: the cognitive work of taking another person's viewpoint, the imaginative pull of stories and characters, the warmth you feel toward people in difficulty, and the distress their suffering sets off in you. See which dimensions carry your relationships, and whether the cost of witnessing pain lands on the other person's side or on yours.
No signup required to start. The Partial Report is free at the end. The Complete costs $9.90, if and when you want it.
What this test measures
P
Perspective Taking
The habit of reconstructing how a situation looks from the other person's position before judging it, including in disagreement.
F
Fantasy
How far you enter imagined lives: stepping inside characters in books, films and stories, and feeling what happens to them as if it were happening nearby.
E
Empathic Concern
Warmth and concern for people who are having a hard time, including people you will never meet: being moved by their difficulty and wanting things to go better for them.
P
Personal Distress
The self-oriented side of empathy: how much other people's crises unsettle you, producing anxiety, helplessness or the urge to leave. A high score means more distress of your own, not more empathy.
Discover where you stand on each dimension.
Start for free →No prior signup. Free partial result immediately.
From first click to report.
The process is simple: you respond, the system calculates, and the result appears. No prior signup, no form, no waiting.
- 1
Click "Start for free"
No signup required to start. You identify yourself at the end, when you want to save the result. The test opens immediately.
- 2
Answer the questions
Likert 5-point self-description scale (Not like me at all to Very much like me). Visible progress bar. You can pause and resume from any device after identifying yourself.
- 3
Get the Partial Report
Immediate and free. A text summary of each dimension, with indication of high, medium, or low.
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Decide if you want the Complete
The Partial already delivers value. The Complete adds percentiles, norm comparison, charts, applied recommendations, and a verifiable Certificate.
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Explore in the Integrative Chat
Talk to an AI about your results. Ask how your profile applies to your career, what a high score means, or compare with other tests.
The Partial is yours right away. The Complete, when it makes sense.
| Free and paid, side by side | Partial Report (free, always) | Complete Report ($9.90) |
|---|---|---|
| Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Raw score for each dimension | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-paragraph overview reading | ✓ | ✓ |
| Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension | — | ✓ |
| Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms | — | ✓ |
| Inter-dimensional chart with accessible data table | — | ✓ |
| Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care | — | ✓ |
| Certificate with public verification and PDF download | — | ✓ |
- ✓Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension
- ✓Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms
- ✓Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care
- ✓Certificate with public verification and PDF download
You only pay after completing the test, if you want to go beyond the Partial.
- ✓Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers
- ✓Raw score for each dimension
- ✓One-paragraph overview reading
- ✓Free trial of the Integrative Chat, unlocked by your first test
Payment via PIX (instant) or credit card. Access for 1 year. After that, the report stays visible in read-only mode.
What you receive.
Radar chart with percentiles. Illustrative example.
Executive Summary
"You present a profile marked by high intellectual curiosity and above-average conscientiousness, with moderate extraversion and balanced emotional reactivity. This combination suggests someone who seeks novelty in a disciplined way."
Illustrative example.
Scale analysis
The Complete Report details the practical meaning of each score in 3 to 5 paragraphs, personalized by your combined profile. It is not a generic text by range; the analysis crosses all dimensions to generate specific observations about you.
Applied recommendations
Practical recommendations by area (career, relationships, studies, self-care), based on your combined profile. Certificate with verifiable QR and PDF download.
Why trust this instrument.
Based on the multidimensional model of empathy of Davis (1980), this assessment uses 28 independently developed items — 7 for each of the four dimensions, 9 reverse-keyed — on a 5-point self-description scale, scored as raw 7 to 35 sums per dimension with NOESIS-labeled bands. Reverse-keyed items are turned in the scoring, never by relabeling the answer options. There is deliberately no total empathy score: the model's own author recommends against a composite, because personal distress tends to run against the other three dimensions and adding them cancels out the information the profile carries. The items were written by NOESIS to represent the published construct and have not been independently validated; the original instrument's psychometrics do not apply to them. Personal distress is read as self-oriented reactivity, never as a higher form of empathy.
- Authors:
- Davis
- Year:
- 1980
The reliability, norms, and cutoffs shown are those of the original instrument (Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980)).
This NOESIS adaptation has not yet been independently validated.
- Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, 85. Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113-126.
The theory behind this test.
Multidimensional Model of Empathy
Model treating empathy not as a single trait but as a set of separate though related constructs (Davis, 1980, 1983): two cognitive — perspective taking, the tendency to adopt another person's point of view, and fantasy, the tendency to transpose oneself imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictional characters — and two affective — empathic concern, other-oriented feelings of sympathy for people in difficulty, and personal distress, self-oriented anxiety and unease when witnessing another person's suffering. The dimensions vary independently and correlate unevenly, with personal distress typically running against the others, which is why the model prescribes a profile of separate readings and no composite empathy score.
Learn more about this theory →Target Audience
Anyone who wants a more precise picture than 'empathic or not': people told they are too sensitive or too detached, professionals whose work runs on reading others, and anyone curious why they cry at films but freeze at real bad news.
Recommended ages: 18+
Questions the report answers.
Can you get out of your own head when it counts?
Perspective taking is the deliberate move of reconstructing how a situation looks from where the other person stands, with their information and their stakes. High scores make you a better negotiator, a fairer judge of decisions, and harder to offend, because behavior that looks hostile usually looks different from inside. It is also the dimension most like a skill: it improves with practice, and it costs effort you may skip when tired or certain you are right.
How far into a story do you actually go?
Fantasy measures imaginative transposition: whether characters in books and films stay outside you or whether you live parts of the plot from the inside. It sounds like the trivial dimension and is not: the same machinery that lets a novel wreck your evening is the machinery you use to simulate lives you have never lived. Low scores mean fiction stays entertainment; high scores mean it functions as rehearsal for being someone else.
Does other people's struggle move you toward them?
Empathic concern is the other-oriented warmth in the model: tenderness, protectiveness, and the pull to side with whoever is having the harder time. It is what most people mean by a good heart. High scores usually make you generous and trusted, with a known cost: your emotional weather depends partly on people you cannot control. Low scores mean your care shows up as acts and decisions more than as feelings, which is a difference worth knowing about yourself.
Whose alarm goes off when someone else is hurting?
Personal distress reads what witnessing suffering does to you: whether it triggers anxiety, helplessness, and an urge to get away. Read this scale differently from the other three, because a high score does not mean more empathy. It means the sight of pain sets off your own alarm, and energy goes to managing your reaction before it can go to the other person. A low score is not coldness; paired with high empathic concern, it is the profile of people who stay useful in emergencies.
Who benefits most.
The person who has been called too sensitive
They cry at films, absorb the mood of every room, and have been told to grow a thicker skin. Four separate readings can show what is actually high: warm concern for others, imaginative absorption, or a distress response that exhausts them. Each of those deserves a different answer.
The fixer who misses the feelings
They solve the problem in front of them, accurately and fast, and learn later that the person wanted company rather than a solution. A profile that separates understanding a viewpoint from being moved by it puts a finger on what their conversations are missing.
The calm one who wonders if something is wrong with them
Crises make them practical, not tearful, and they have quietly wondered whether that means they lack empathy. Often the answer is low personal distress with intact concern: the combination that makes someone worth having around on a bad day.
Frequently asked questions
Is a high score on all four scales better?
No, and that is the most important thing to know before reading your report. Three scales describe capacities and inclinations where higher generally serves you or the people around you. Personal distress is different: it measures how much other people's suffering floods you with discomfort of your own. A high score there means witnessing pain costs you more, and the reaction points inward, toward escaping the situation, not toward helping. Some of the most useful people in a crisis score low on it while scoring high on empathic concern.
Does this measure emotional intelligence?
It measures a neighbor of it. Emotional intelligence covers perceiving, understanding, and managing emotions, your own included; empathy as measured here is your dispositional reactivity to other people's experiences, before any managing happens. The two overlap: perspective taking feeds the understanding part of emotional intelligence. But this assessment says nothing about how well you regulate what you feel, and an emotional intelligence test says little about whether a character in a novel can ruin your evening. Related constructs, different questions, worth measuring separately.
What is the NOESIS adaptation?
The construct and its four dimensions follow the multidimensional empathy model of Davis (1980), whose original instrument is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. The 28 items here are NOESIS's own wording: independently written, checked against the construct but not against the original text, and not independently validated. The original instrument's published statistics do not apply to these items. If you need a validated research instrument, use the original under its own permission terms; if you want a structured, honest way to look at your own empathy, this is built for that.
Why is there no total empathy score?
Because the author of the model recommends against one, and the data agree with him. The four dimensions correlate with each other unevenly, and personal distress tends to run against the other three: people high in perspective taking are often low in distress. Adding four numbers that pull in different directions produces a total that cancels out exactly the information you came for. Your report is a profile of four separate readings.
Can empathy change, or am I stuck with these scores?
The dimensions are dispositions, so they move slowly, but they are not fixed. Perspective taking behaves the most like a skill: it responds to deliberate practice, asking what the other person knew and wanted before judging. Empathic concern tends to widen with exposure to lives unlike yours. Personal distress often drops as you gain experience with hard situations, which is one reason emergency professionals score lower on it over time. Retaking the assessment after a year of real change reads better than retaking it after a motivated week.
Can my company use this to screen candidates?
It should not, and we say so to companies too. The items are transparent self-report: anyone who wants to look empathic in a hiring process can produce the profile they think is wanted. In corporate settings this assessment belongs in development, feedback and team conversations, where the person answering has no reason to perform. That is the use it is built and offered for.
Combine instruments for a fuller profile.
Each test measures different dimensions. The Integrative Chat crosses the results of all tests you complete, revealing connections no single instrument can show.
Emotional Intelligence Assessment
~5 min·16 questions
How well do you read your own emotions, read other people's, and put both to use? Sixteen statements, four skill readings.
Start for free →Multidimensional Empathy Assessment
No signup, no time limit. The Partial is free at the end.
The Complete costs $9.90, if and when you want it.
This test is a self-knowledge tool for informational purposes. It does not constitute a psychological or clinical diagnosis and does not replace evaluation by a qualified professional. The report indicates the AI model used in text generation.
© 2026 NOESIS. All items independently developed. Construct based on the multidimensional empathy model of Davis (1980); no item text is reproduced from the original instrument.