Category Archives: measuring empathy

I’ve recently been involved in advising a fascinating BBC television series called Child of Our Time about how to measure empathy. This long-term project involves tracking the lives and development of 25 children from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds born in 2000, over a period of twenty years. The children are now ten, and the series currently in production aims to unveil the influences that shape their varying personality traits. One of the empathy tests we discussed is called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, created by the Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism and author of a controversial book called The Essential Difference, which argues that women are more naturally empathetic than men. The test effectively gauges how good you are at judging someone’s emotional state through looking at their eyes. You are presented with 36 sets of eyes, and for each of them you are instructed to choose which one of four words best describes what the person in the picture is thinking or feeling. Have a go at the initial three pairs of eyes in the test (the correct answers are at the end of this blog). The first offers a choice between ‘playful’, ‘comforting’, ‘irritated’ and ‘bored’: