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Abstract In the selection and training of professional helpers ‐‐ physicians, nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists, etc. ‐‐ the need for tests that focus on empathic capacity increases. An attempt has been made to develop a Swedish empathy test designed for professional helpers. The affect reading scale (ARS) is derived from a theoretical model; it focuses on a particular component in the empathic process called affect tolerance, which is defined as the ability to endure and thereby ‘read’ one's own feelings as a means of getting information of the other person's feelings. The results of the empirical studies indicate that the test has a conceptual validity that makes possible a differentiation of care‐giving professional groups with expected different degrees of development of empathic ability. The scale has also proven itself to be responsive to changes that can be attributed to educational experiences that should influence the prerequisites of empathy.
Ulla Holm (1996) studied this question.