Apathy Test: See Where Motivation Has Gone Flat Across Action, Interest and Feeling

How this apathy test is scored

The test has 18 statements, six for each of the three dimensions that apathy research has used since Robert Marin's work in the early 1990s: behavioral initiative (do you start and carry through goal-directed activity), cognitive interest (do you care about, plan for, and want to know about things), and emotional responsiveness (do events and people move you). Each statement is rated from never to almost always and scored 0 to 4, with the positively worded statements reversed so that a higher score always means more apathy. Each dimension runs from 0 to 24 and the total from 0 to 72. The result bands are thirds and are educational, not clinical cut-offs.

The breakdown is the useful part. Apathy that is mostly behavioral, where you want things but cannot get yourself to start, looks different from apathy that is mostly emotional, where you can function but feel nothing about it, and the two have different likely causes. Research using the Apathy Motivation Index, for example, found that behavioral, social, and emotional apathy separate cleanly in healthy adults and relate differently to depression, anhedonia, and fatigue. Read your highest dimension first.

Apathy vs depression vs anhedonia vs burnout

These four overlap and are constantly confused, so here is the comparison laid out plainly, one at a time. Apathy is a loss of motivation and goal-directed behavior, with the emotional tone flat rather than painful: you are not sad, you just do not care, and often you do not mind not caring. Depression is a disorder of mood: low mood or loss of pleasure most of the day for at least two weeks, with changes in sleep, appetite, energy, concentration, and self-worth, and often guilt, hopelessness, or thoughts of death. A depressed person usually suffers; an apathetic person often does not, which is one of the clearest dividing lines. Apathy can be a symptom of depression, but it also occurs on its own, and a flat, untroubled indifference without sadness or self-criticism is more typical of apathy than of depression.

Anhedonia is narrower than either: the loss of pleasure, specifically. The anhedonic person may still want things and try to get them, but the reward never arrives; the apathetic person has stopped wanting. Husain and Roiser (2018) describe the two as separable problems in the brain's motivation system, one about the anticipation and effort side, the other about the enjoyment side, which is why someone can have one without the other. Burnout is the easiest to separate once you ask about scope and history: it follows a long period of chronic stress, usually at work or in caregiving, it is marked by exhaustion and cynicism toward that particular domain, and it often lifts when the demand is removed. Apathy that spreads across life, has no clear stressor, or persists despite rest deserves a broader assessment. Those features do not by themselves rule burnout in or out, and several difficulties can occur together. If you are unsure which description fits, our Depression Test, Anhedonia Test, and Burnout Test each take about three minutes and will sharpen the picture.

Medical causes worth ruling out

Apathy is one of the symptoms most likely to have a physical cause, which is why the top band on this test points you to a doctor as well as a therapist. An underactive thyroid can produce exactly this picture, flat mood, low initiative, slowed thinking, often with weight gain, cold sensitivity, and fatigue, and it is found with a blood test. Low testosterone, vitamin B12 or vitamin D deficiency, anemia, untreated sleep apnoea, and poorly controlled diabetes can all do something similar. Medication is another frequent cause: antidepressants, particularly SSRIs, can produce emotional blunting in a meaningful minority of people; antipsychotics, some blood pressure medicines, and sedatives can flatten drive; and the effect often starts gradually enough that nobody connects it to the prescription.

Neurological conditions are the other major category. Apathy is among the most common neuropsychiatric features of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, frontotemporal dementia in particular, stroke affecting the frontal lobes or basal ganglia, traumatic brain injury, and multiple sclerosis, and in several of these it can appear before other symptoms. That is why neurology uses dedicated tools such as the Apathy Evaluation Scale and why a 2018 international consensus group published diagnostic criteria for apathy in brain disorders. A long illness, such as a recent infection, post-viral fatigue, or cancer treatment, can leave apathy behind for months as well. None of this means your result points to any of these conditions. It means that new, unexplained apathy, especially in someone over 50, with other new symptoms, or after a head injury, deserves a check-up before it is treated as purely psychological.

What helps: behavioral activation, routine, and treating the cause

When apathy may involve a medical condition or medication, reviewing that possibility with a clinician is an important part of care, and additional practical or psychological support may still help; this is the single most important reason to see a doctor if your score is high. When no physical cause is found, or alongside treatment of one, the approach with the best evidence is the one used for depression: behavioral activation. The principle is that action comes before motivation, not after it. You schedule small, specific, concrete activities tied to things you used to value, do them whether or not you feel like it, and let the sense of reward and the wish to do more rebuild gradually from the doing. Waiting to feel motivated first is the trap apathy sets, and behavioral activation is the structured way out of it.

Routine does the same work with less decision-making. Fixed wake and sleep times, meals at regular hours, movement built into the day rather than chosen each time, and a short list of non-negotiable tasks remove the moment of initiative that apathy makes so hard. External structure, such as a friend you walk with, a class with a start time, or a work pattern that others depend on, helps for the same reason. If initiative was your highest dimension and your thinking feels disorganized as well, our Executive Function Test looks at the planning and starting skills involved; if the flatness is mostly physical tiredness, the Fatigue Test may fit better. And if what you are missing is less the energy than the reason, our Motivation Test looks at what drives you in the first place. A therapist can set up behavioral activation with you and track it, and a doctor can check the physical side. Both together is the strongest combination.

Methodology & sources

This test uses 18 original statements written for Psychology.com. They are structured around the three-dimensional model of apathy introduced with the Apathy Evaluation Scale (Marin, Biedrzycki, and Firinciogullari, 1991), which treats apathy as diminished goal-directed behavior, cognition, and emotion, and which the 2018 international consensus criteria for apathy in brain disorders (Robert et al., 2018) carried forward as diminished initiative, diminished interest, and diminished emotional expression or responsiveness. The Apathy Evaluation Scale and the Apathy Motivation Index (Ang et al., 2017) are the validated instruments used in neurology and research; this page reproduces no items from either and has not been validated against them. Each statement describes one behavior or feeling and is rated from never (0) to almost always (4). Six statements, two per dimension, are worded positively and reverse scored.

Each dimension runs from 0 to 24 and the total from 0 to 72. The result bands, 0 to 24 low, 25 to 48 moderate, and 49 to 72 high, are educational thirds, not clinical cut-offs, and the three-dimension breakdown is our own grouping of items rather than a validated subscale structure. This test cannot distinguish apathy caused by a medical condition, a medication, a neurological disorder, depression, or circumstances; that distinction requires a doctor, which is why the high band routes to a GP as well as a therapist. It is a screening for education and self-reflection, not a diagnosis.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the three-dimension structure against the apathy literature, the reverse-keyed items, and the top-band routing to a physician as well as a therapist. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Marin RS, Biedrzycki RC, Firinciogullari S. Reliability and validity of the Apathy Evaluation Scale. Psychiatry Res. 1991;38(2):143-162. doi.org/10.1016/0165-1781(91)90040-V.
2. Ang YS, Lockwood P, Apps MAJ, Muhammed K, Husain M. Distinct subtypes of apathy revealed by the Apathy Motivation Index. PLoS One. 2017;12(1):e0169938. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169938.
3. Robert P, Lanctôt KL, Agüera-Ortiz L, et al. Is it time to revise the diagnostic criteria for apathy in brain disorders? The 2018 international consensus group. Eur Psychiatry. 2018;54:71-76. doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2018.07.008.
4. Husain M, Roiser JP. Neuroscience of apathy and anhedonia: a transdiagnostic approach. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2018;19(8):470-484. doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0029-9.
5. Levy R, Dubois B. Apathy and the functional anatomy of the prefrontal cortex-basal ganglia circuits. Cereb Cortex. 2006;16(7):916-928. doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhj043.

Apathy Test: Loss of Motivation and Interest FAQ