Carkhuff and Truax "This was the first empathy scale to reliably operationalize empathy into specific behaviors and statements and was specifically developed for use in teaching empathy to students in the helping professions. This scale is completed by an observer or team of observers as they watch participants respond to a stimulus person or in a role-play setting. The scale originally developed as a nine-point scale but was later revised (Carkhuff, 1969) as a five-point empathy scale with a rating of one representing low levels of empathic responding and five as high levels of empathy.
The Carkhuff and Truax scales have been used and validated in research (Truax & Carkhuff, 1967) and continue to be widely used both in social work education (Hepworth et al., 2010; Larsen & Hepworth, 1978) to teach and train in empathy. The Carkhuff and 45 Truax scales are no longer the instruments of choice outside of professional training programs"