Process / pipelineSelf-report questionnaire

Toronto Empathy Questionnaire

The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) is a 16-item self-report measure of empathic ability and emotional responsiveness to others' emotions. Developed by Randy Spreng and colleagues in 2009, the TEQ captures affective empathy—the capacity to feel and share another person's emotions—rather than cognitive perspective-taking. The scale has become widely used in social, clinical, and neuroscience research examining individual differences in emotional empathy and its correlates with mental health, prosocial behavior, and brain structure.

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Sources

  1. Spreng, R. N., McKinnon, M. C., Mar, R. A., & Levine, B. (2009). The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire: Scale development and initial validation of a factor-analytic solution to multiple empathy measures. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(1), 62–71. DOI: 10.1080/00223890802484381
  2. Eerland, A., Engelen, J. A., & Zwaan, R. A. (2016). The influence of body posture on affective memory. Cognition & Emotion, 30(2), 228–237. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2014.984847
  3. Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, 85. link

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ScholarGateToronto Empathy Questionnaire (Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ)). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/social-psychology/toronto-empathy-questionnaire