empathy meaning essay

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Empathy Defined

What is empathy.

The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.

Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy : “Affective empathy” refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. “Cognitive empathy,” sometimes called “perspective taking,” refers to our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions. Studies suggest that people with autism spectrum disorders have a hard time empathizing .

Empathy seems to have deep roots in our brains and bodies, and in our evolutionary history . Elementary forms of empathy have been observed in our primate relatives , in dogs , and even in rats . Empathy has been associated with two different pathways in the brain, and scientists have speculated that some aspects of empathy can be traced to mirror neurons , cells in the brain that fire when we observe someone else perform an action in much the same way that they would fire if we performed that action ourselves. Research has also uncovered evidence of a genetic basis to empathy , though studies suggest that people can enhance (or restrict) their natural empathic abilities.

Having empathy doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll want to help someone in need, though it’s often a vital first step toward compassionate action.

For more: Read Frans de Waal’s essay on “ The Evolution of Empathy ” and Daniel Goleman’s overview of different forms of empathy , drawing on the work of Paul Ekman.

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Why Practice It?

Empathy is a building block of morality—for people to follow the Golden Rule, it helps if they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. It is also a key ingredient of successful relationships because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others. Here are some of the ways that research has testified to the far-reaching importance of empathy.

• Seminal studies by Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg have shown that people higher in empathy are more likely to help others in need, even when doing so cuts against their self-interest .
• Empathy is contagious : When group norms encourage empathy, people are more likely to be empathic—and more altruistic.
• Empathy reduces prejudice and racism : In one study, white participants made to empathize with an African American man demonstrated less racial bias afterward.
• Empathy is good for your marriage : Research suggests being able to understand your partner’s emotions deepens intimacy and boosts relationship satisfaction ; it’s also fundamental to resolving conflicts. (The GGSC’s Christine Carter has written about effective strategies for developing and expressing empathy in relationships .)
• Empathy reduces bullying: Studies of Mary Gordon’s innovative Roots of Empathy program have found that it decreases bullying and aggression among kids, and makes them kinder and more inclusive toward their peers. An unrelated study found that bullies lack “affective empathy” but not cognitive empathy, suggesting that they know how their victims feel but lack the kind of empathy that would deter them from hurting others.
• Empathy reduces suspensions : In one study, students of teachers who participated in an empathy training program were half as likely to be suspended, compared to students of teachers who didn’t participate.
• Empathy promotes heroic acts: A seminal study by Samuel and Pearl Oliner found that people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust had been encouraged at a young age to take the perspectives of others.
• Empathy fights inequality. As Robert Reich and Arlie Hochschild have argued, empathy encourages us to reach out and want to help people who are not in our social group, even those who belong to stigmatized groups , like the poor. Conversely, research suggests that inequality can reduce empathy : People show less empathy when they attain higher socioeconomic status.
• Empathy is good for the office: Managers who demonstrate empathy have employees who are sick less often and report greater happiness.
• Empathy is good for health care: A large-scale study found that doctors high in empathy have patients who enjoy better health ; other research suggests training doctors to be more empathic improves patient satisfaction and the doctors’ own emotional well-being .
• Empathy is good for police: Research suggests that empathy can help police officers increase their confidence in handling crises, diffuse crises with less physical force, and feel less distant from the people they’re dealing with.

For more: Learn about why we should teach empathy to preschoolers .

How Do I Cultivate It?

Humans experience affective empathy from infancy, physically sensing their caregivers’ emotions and often mirroring those emotions. Cognitive empathy emerges later in development, around three to four years of age , roughly when children start to develop an elementary “ theory of mind ”—that is, the understanding that other people experience the world differently than they do.

From these early forms of empathy, research suggests we can develop more complex forms that go a long way toward improving our relationships and the world around us. Here are some specific, science-based activities for cultivating empathy from our site Greater Good in Action :

• Active listening: Express active interest in what the other person has to say and make him or her feel heard.
• Shared identity: Think of a person who seems to be very different from you, and then list what you have in common.
• Put a human face on suffering: When reading the news, look for profiles of specific individuals and try to imagine what their lives have been like.
• Eliciting altruism: Create reminders of connectedness.

And here are some of the keys that researchers have identified for nurturing empathy in ourselves and others:

• Focus your attention outwards: Being mindfully aware of your surroundings, especially the behaviors and expressions of other people , is crucial for empathy. Indeed, research suggests practicing mindfulness helps us take the perspectives of other people yet not feel overwhelmed when we encounter their negative emotions.
• Get out of your own head: Research shows we can increase our own level of empathy by actively imagining what someone else might be experiencing.
• Don’t jump to conclusions about others: We feel less empathy when we assume that people suffering are somehow getting what they deserve .
• Show empathic body language : Empathy is expressed not just by what we say, but by our facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, and eye contact (or lack thereof).
• Meditate: Neuroscience research by Richard Davidson and his colleagues suggests that meditation—specifically loving-kindness meditation, which focuses attention on concern for others—might increase the capacity for empathy among short-term and long-term meditators alike (though especially among long-time meditators).
• Explore imaginary worlds: Research by Keith Oatley and colleagues has found that people who read fiction are more attuned to others’ emotions and intentions.
• Join the band: Recent studies have shown that playing music together boosts empathy in kids.
• Play games : Neuroscience research suggests that when we compete against others, our brains are making a “ mental model ” of the other person’s thoughts and intentions.
• Take lessons from babies: Mary Gordon’s Roots of Empathy program is designed to boost empathy by bringing babies into classrooms, stimulating children’s basic instincts to resonate with others’ emotions.
• Combat inequality: Research has shown that attaining higher socioeconomic status diminishes empathy , perhaps because people of high SES have less of a need to connect with, rely on, or cooperate with others. As the gap widens between the haves and have-nots, we risk facing an empathy gap as well. This doesn’t mean money is evil, but if you have a lot of it, you might need to be more intentional about maintaining your own empathy toward others.
• Pay attention to faces: Pioneering research by Paul Ekman has found we can improve our ability to identify other people’s emotions by systematically studying facial expressions. Take our Emotional Intelligence Quiz for a primer, or check out Ekman’s F.A.C.E. program for more rigorous training.
• Believe that empathy can be learned : People who think their empathy levels are changeable put more effort into being empathic, listening to others, and helping, even when it’s challenging.

For more : The Ashoka Foundation’s Start Empathy initiative tracks educators’ best practices for teaching empathy . The initiative gave awards to 14 programs judged to do the best job at educating for empathy . The nonprofit Playworks also offers eight strategies for developing empathy in children .

What Are the Pitfalls and Limitations of Empathy?

According to research , we’re more likely to help a single sufferer than a large group of faceless victims, and we empathize more with in-group members than out-group members . Does this reflect a defect in empathy itself? Some critics believe so , while others argue that the real problem is how we suppress our own empathy .

Empathy, after all, can be painful. An “ empathy trap ” occurs when we’re so focused on feeling what others are feeling that we neglect our own emotions and needs—and other people can take advantage of this. Doctors and caregivers are at particular risk of feeling emotionally overwhelmed by empathy.

In other cases, empathy seems to be detrimental. Empathizing with out-groups can make us more reluctant to engage with them, if we imagine that they’ll be critical of us. Sociopaths could use cognitive empathy to help them exploit or even torture people.

Even if we are well-intentioned, we tend to overestimate our empathic skills. We may think we know the whole story about other people when we’re actually making biased judgments—which can lead to misunderstandings and exacerbate prejudice.

Understanding others’ feelings: what is empathy and why do we need it?

Senior Lecturer in Social Neuroscience, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Pascal Molenberghs receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award: DE130100120) and Heart Foundation (Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship: 1000458).

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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This is the introductory essay in our series on understanding others’ feelings. In it we will examine empathy, including what it is, whether our doctors need more of it, and when too much may not be a good thing.

Empathy is the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. It is a construct of multiple components, each of which is associated with its own brain network . There are three ways of looking at empathy.

First there is affective empathy. This is the ability to share the emotions of others. People who score high on affective empathy are those who, for example, show a strong visceral reaction when watching a scary movie.

They feel scared or feel others’ pain strongly within themselves when seeing others scared or in pain.

Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand the emotions of others. A good example is the psychologist who understands the emotions of the client in a rational way, but does not necessarily share the emotions of the client in a visceral sense.

Finally, there’s emotional regulation. This refers to the ability to regulate one’s emotions. For example, surgeons need to control their emotions when operating on a patient.

Another way to understand empathy is to distinguish it from other related constructs. For example, empathy involves self-awareness , as well as distinction between the self and the other. In that sense it is different from mimicry, or imitation.

Many animals might show signs of mimicry or emotional contagion to another animal in pain. But without some level of self-awareness, and distinction between the self and the other, it is not empathy in a strict sense. Empathy is also different from sympathy, which involves feeling concern for the suffering of another person and a desire to help.

That said, empathy is not a unique human experience. It has been observed in many non-human primates and even rats .

People often say psychopaths lack empathy but this is not always the case. In fact, psychopathy is enabled by good cognitive empathic abilities - you need to understand what your victim is feeling when you are torturing them. What psychopaths typically lack is sympathy. They know the other person is suffering but they just don’t care.

Research has also shown those with psychopathic traits are often very good at regulating their emotions .

Why do we need it?

Empathy is important because it helps us understand how others are feeling so we can respond appropriately to the situation. It is typically associated with social behaviour and there is lots of research showing that greater empathy leads to more helping behaviour.

However, this is not always the case. Empathy can also inhibit social actions, or even lead to amoral behaviour . For example, someone who sees a car accident and is overwhelmed by emotions witnessing the victim in severe pain might be less likely to help that person.

Similarly, strong empathetic feelings for members of our own family or our own social or racial group might lead to hate or aggression towards those we perceive as a threat. Think about a mother or father protecting their baby or a nationalist protecting their country.

People who are good at reading others’ emotions, such as manipulators, fortune-tellers or psychics, might also use their excellent empathetic skills for their own benefit by deceiving others.

Interestingly, people with higher psychopathic traits typically show more utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas such as the footbridge problem. In this thought experiment, people have to decide whether to push a person off a bridge to stop a train about to kill five others laying on the track.

The psychopath would more often than not choose to push the person off the bridge. This is following the utilitarian philosophy that holds saving the life of five people by killing one person is a good thing. So one could argue those with psychopathic tendencies are more moral than normal people – who probably wouldn’t push the person off the bridge – as they are less influenced by emotions when making moral decisions.

How is empathy measured?

Empathy is often measured with self-report questionnaires such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) or Questionnaire for Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE).

These typically ask people to indicate how much they agree with statements that measure different types of empathy.

The QCAE, for instance, has statements such as, “It affects me very much when one of my friends is upset”, which is a measure of affective empathy.

Cognitive empathy is determined by the QCAE by putting value on a statement such as, “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.”

Using the QCAE, we recently found people who score higher on affective empathy have more grey matter, which is a collection of different types of nerve cells, in an area of the brain called the anterior insula.

This area is often involved in regulating positive and negative emotions by integrating environmental stimulants – such as seeing a car accident - with visceral and automatic bodily sensations.

We also found people who score higher on cognitive empathy had more grey matter in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

This area is typically activated during more cognitive processes, such as Theory of Mind, which is the ability to attribute mental beliefs to yourself and another person. It also involves understanding that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives different from one’s own.

Can empathy be selective?

Research shows we typically feel more empathy for members of our own group , such as those from our ethnic group. For example, one study scanned the brains of Chinese and Caucasian participants while they watched videos of members of their own ethnic group in pain. They also observed people from a different ethnic group in pain.

The researchers found that a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is often active when we see others in pain, was less active when participants saw members of ethnic groups different from their own in pain.

Other studies have found brain areas involved in empathy are less active when watching people in pain who act unfairly . We even see activation in brain areas involved in subjective pleasure , such as the ventral striatum, when watching a rival sport team fail.

Yet, we do not always feel less empathy for those who aren’t members of our own group. In our recent study , students had to give monetary rewards or painful electrical shocks to students from the same or a different university. We scanned their brain responses when this happened.

Brain areas involved in rewarding others were more active when people rewarded members of their own group, but areas involved in harming others were equally active for both groups.

These results correspond to observations in daily life. We generally feel happier if our own group members win something, but we’re unlikely to harm others just because they belong to a different group, culture or race. In general, ingroup bias is more about ingroup love rather than outgroup hate.

Yet in some situations, it could be helpful to feel less empathy for a particular group of people. For example, in war it might be beneficial to feel less empathy for people you are trying to kill, especially if they are also trying to harm you.

To investigate, we conducted another brain imaging study . We asked people to watch videos from a violent video game in which a person was shooting innocent civilians (unjustified violence) or enemy soldiers (justified violence).

While watching the videos, people had to pretend they were killing real people. We found the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, typically active when people harm others, was active when people shot innocent civilians. The more guilt participants felt about shooting civilians, the greater the response in this region.

However, the same area was not activated when people shot the soldier that was trying to kill them.

The results provide insight into how people regulate their emotions. They also show the brain mechanisms typically implicated when harming others become less active when the violence against a particular group is seen as justified.

This might provide future insights into how people become desensitised to violence or why some people feel more or less guilty about harming others.

Our empathetic brain has evolved to be highly adaptive to different types of situations. Having empathy is very useful as it often helps to understand others so we can help or deceive them, but sometimes we need to be able to switch off our empathetic feelings to protect our own lives, and those of others.

Tomorrow’s article will look at whether art can cultivate empathy.

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What Is Empathy?

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

Verywell / Bailey Mariner

Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else's position and feeling what they are feeling.

Empathy means that when you see another person suffering, such as after they've lost a loved one , you are able to instantly envision yourself going through that same experience and feel what they are going through.

While people can be well-attuned to their own feelings and emotions, getting into someone else's head can be a bit more difficult. The ability to feel empathy allows people to "walk a mile in another's shoes," so to speak. It permits people to understand the emotions that others are feeling.

Press Play for Advice on Empathy

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast , featuring empathy expert Dr. Kelsey Crowe, shares how you can show empathy to someone who is going through a hard time. Click below to listen now.

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Signs of Empathy

For many, seeing another person in pain and responding with indifference or even outright hostility seems utterly incomprehensible. But the fact that some people do respond in such a way clearly demonstrates that empathy is not necessarily a universal response to the suffering of others.

If you are wondering whether you are an empathetic person, here are some signs that show that you have this tendency:

• You are good at really listening to what others have to say.
• People often tell you about their problems.
• You are good at picking up on how other people are feeling.
• You often think about how other people feel.
• Other people come to you for advice.
• You often feel overwhelmed by tragic events.
• You try to help others who are suffering.
• You are good at telling when people aren't being honest .
• You sometimes feel drained or overwhelmed in social situations.
• You care deeply about other people.
• You find it difficult to set boundaries in your relationships.

Are You an Empath? Take the Quiz!

Our fast and free empath quiz will let you know if your feelings and behaviors indicate high levels of traits commonly associated with empaths.

Types of Empathy

There are several types of empathy that a person may experience. The three types of empathy are:

• Affective empathy involves the ability to understand another person's emotions and respond appropriately. Such emotional understanding may lead to someone feeling concerned for another person's well-being, or it may lead to feelings of personal distress.
• Somatic empathy involves having a physical reaction in response to what someone else is experiencing. People sometimes physically experience what another person is feeling. When you see someone else feeling embarrassed, for example, you might start to blush or have an upset stomach.
• Cognitive empathy involves being able to understand another person's mental state and what they might be thinking in response to the situation. This is related to what psychologists refer to as the theory of mind or thinking about what other people are thinking.

Empathy vs. Sympathy vs. Compassion

While sympathy and compassion are related to empathy, there are important differences. Compassion and sympathy are often thought to be more of a passive connection, while empathy generally involves a much more active attempt to understand another person.

Uses for Empathy

Being able to experience empathy has many beneficial uses.

• Empathy allows you to build social connections with others . By understanding what people are thinking and feeling, you are able to respond appropriately in social situations. Research has shown that having social connections is important for both physical and psychological well-being.
• Empathizing with others helps you learn to regulate your own emotions . Emotional regulation is important in that it allows you to manage what you are feeling, even in times of great stress, without becoming overwhelmed.
• Empathy promotes helping behaviors . Not only are you more likely to engage in helpful behaviors when you feel empathy for other people, but other people are also more likely to help you when they experience empathy.

Potential Pitfalls of Empathy

Having a great deal of empathy makes you concerned for the well-being and happiness of others. It also means, however, that you can sometimes get overwhelmed, burned out , or even overstimulated from always thinking about other people's emotions. This can lead to empathy fatigue.

Empathy fatigue refers to the exhaustion you might feel both emotionally and physically after repeatedly being exposed to stressful or traumatic events . You might also feel numb or powerless, isolate yourself, and have a lack of energy.

Empathy fatigue is a concern in certain situations, such as when acting as a caregiver . Studies also show that if healthcare workers can't balance their feelings of empathy (affective empathy, in particular), it can result in compassion fatigue as well.

Other research has linked higher levels of empathy with a tendency toward emotional negativity , potentially increasing your risk of empathic distress. It can even affect your judgment, causing you to go against your morals based on the empathy you feel for someone else.

Impact of Empathy

Your ability to experience empathy can impact your relationships. Studies involving siblings have found that when empathy is high, siblings have less conflict and more warmth toward each other. In romantic relationships, having empathy increases your ability to extend forgiveness .

Not everyone experiences empathy in every situation. Some people may be more naturally empathetic in general, but people also tend to feel more empathetic toward some people and less so toward others. Some of the factors that play a role in this tendency include:

• How you perceive the other person
• How you attribute the other individual's behaviors
• What you blame for the other person's predicament
• Your past experiences and expectations

Research has found that there are gender differences in the experience and expression of empathy, although these findings are somewhat mixed. Women score higher on empathy tests, and studies suggest that women tend to feel more cognitive empathy than men.  

At the most basic level, there appear to be two main factors that contribute to the ability to experience empathy: genetics and socialization. Essentially, it boils down to the age-old relative contributions of nature and nurture .

Parents pass down genes that contribute to overall personality, including the propensity toward sympathy, empathy, and compassion. On the other hand, people are also socialized by their parents, peers, communities, and society. How people treat others, as well as how they feel about others, is often a reflection of the beliefs and values that were instilled at a very young age. 

Barriers to Empathy

Some people lack empathy and, therefore, aren't able to understand what another person may be experiencing or feeling. This can result in behaviors that seem uncaring or sometimes even hurtful. For instance, people with low affective empathy have higher rates of cyberbullying .

A lack of empathy is also one of the defining characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder . Though, it is unclear whether this is due to a person with this disorder having no empathy at all or having more of a dysfunctional response to others.

A few reasons why people sometimes lack empathy include cognitive biases, dehumanization, and victim-blaming.

Cognitive Biases

Sometimes the way people perceive the world around them is influenced by cognitive biases . For example, people often attribute other people's failures to internal characteristics, while blaming their own shortcomings on external factors.

These biases can make it difficult to see all the factors that contribute to a situation. They also make it less likely that people will be able to see a situation from the perspective of another.

Dehumanization

Many also fall victim to the trap of thinking that people who are different from them don't feel and behave the same as they do. This is particularly common in cases when other people are physically distant.

For example, when they watch reports of a disaster or conflict in a foreign land, people might be less likely to feel empathy if they think that those who are suffering are fundamentally different from themselves.

Victim Blaming

Sometimes, when another person has suffered a terrible experience, people make the mistake of blaming the victim for their circumstances. This is the reason that victims of crimes are often asked what they might have done differently to prevent the crime.

This tendency stems from the need to believe that the world is a fair and just place. It is the desire to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get—and it can fool you into thinking that such terrible things could never happen to you.

Causes of Empathy

Human beings are certainly capable of selfish, even cruel, behavior. A quick scan of the news quickly reveals numerous unkind, selfish, and heinous actions. The question, then, is why don't we all engage in such self-serving behavior all the time? What is it that causes us to feel another's pain and respond with kindness ?

The term empathy was first introduced in 1909 by psychologist Edward B. Titchener as a translation of the German term einfühlung (meaning "feeling into"). Several different theories have been proposed to explain empathy.

Neuroscientific Explanations

Studies have shown that specific areas of the brain play a role in how empathy is experienced. More recent approaches focus on the cognitive and neurological processes that lie behind empathy. Researchers have found that different regions of the brain play an important role in empathy, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula.

Research suggests that there are important neurobiological components to the experience of empathy.   The activation of mirror neurons in the brain plays a part in the ability to mirror and mimic the emotional responses that people would feel if they were in similar situations.

Functional MRI research also indicates that an area of the brain known as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) plays a critical role in the experience of empathy. Studies have found that people who have damage to this area of the brain often have difficulty recognizing emotions conveyed through facial expressions .  

Emotional Explanations

Some of the earliest explorations into the topic of empathy centered on how feeling what others feel allows people to have a variety of emotional experiences. The philosopher Adam Smith suggested that it allows us to experience things that we might never otherwise be able to fully feel.

This can involve feeling empathy for both real people and imaginary characters. Experiencing empathy for fictional characters, for example, allows people to have a range of emotional experiences that might otherwise be impossible.

Prosocial Explanations

Sociologist Herbert Spencer proposed that empathy served an adaptive function and aided in the survival of the species. Empathy leads to helping behavior, which benefits social relationships. Humans are naturally social creatures. Things that aid in our relationships with other people benefit us as well.

When people experience empathy, they are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors that benefit other people. Things such as altruism and heroism are also connected to feeling empathy for others.

Tips for Practicing Empathy

Fortunately, empathy is a skill that you can learn and strengthen. If you would like to build your empathy skills, there are a few things that you can do:

• Work on listening to people without interrupting
• Pay attention to body language and other types of nonverbal communication
• Try to understand people, even when you don't agree with them
• Ask people questions to learn more about them and their lives
• Imagine yourself in another person's shoes
• Strengthen your connection with others to learn more about how they feel
• Seek to identify biases you may have and how they affect your empathy for others
• Look for ways in which you are similar to others versus focusing on differences
• Be willing to be vulnerable, opening up about how you feel
• Engage in new experiences, giving you better insight into how others in that situation may feel
• Get involved in organizations that push for social change

A Word From Verywell

While empathy might be lacking in some, most people are able to empathize with others in a variety of situations. This ability to see things from another person's perspective and empathize with another's emotions plays an important role in our social lives. Empathy allows us to understand others and, quite often, compels us to take action to relieve another person's suffering.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Learn How to Write a Perfect Empathy Essay

Are you having a hard time, finding good tips and tricks on writing an empathy essay? Of course, writing it gets easy when you have the proper guidelines. Such as the  professional research paper writers  have for you in this interesting blog post.

Writing an empathy essay is like delving into understanding emotions, seeing things from other’s perspectives, and showing care and understanding. It talks about how empathy shapes relationships, impacts society, and why it’s vital for a kinder world.

No need to fret, as this blog post is like a friendly guide for beginners that will help them understand everything about writing an empathy essay. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What is an Empathy Essay?

An empathy essay or emotions essay revolves around the exploration and analysis of empathy as a concept, trait, or practice. It’s about exploring and analyzing what empathy is all about, whether it’s a concept, a trait, or something you have to practice. You know, getting into the nitty-gritty of understanding emotions, different perspectives, and how we can relate to other people’s experiences.

The point of this essay is to show how empathy is super important in relationships, connections between people, and even in society as a whole. It’s all about showing how empathy plays a big role and why it’s so important.

Key elements in empathy writing include a clear definition and explanation of empathy, supported by relatable anecdotes or case studies to illustrate its application. It should delve into empathy’s psychological and societal implications, discussing its effects on individual well-being, relationships, and society at large. Moreover, the empathy essays require a balanced exploration of challenges and complexities related to empathy, such as cultural differences, biases, and the boundaries of empathy in various situations.

Students might find it useful to consider a  professional paper writing service  for an empathy essay due to various reasons. These services often provide access to experienced writers who specialize in crafting well-researched and structured essays. Professional writers can offer a fresh perspective, present nuanced arguments, and ensure the essay meets academic standards.

Why Empathy Essay Writing is Challenging for Some Students?

Writing an essay with empathy can pose challenges for students due to several reasons.

Complex Nature of Empathy

Understanding empathy involves navigating emotional intelligence, perspective-taking, and compassionate understanding, which can be challenging to articulate coherently.

Subjectivity and Personal Experience

Expressing subjective feelings and personal experiences while maintaining objectivity in empathic writing can be difficult for students.

Navigating Sensitivity

Addressing sensitive topics and human complexities while maintaining a respectful and empathetic tone in writing can be demanding.

Handling Diverse Perspectives

Grasping and objectively presenting diverse perspectives across different cultural and social contexts can pose a challenge.

Time Constraints and Academic Pressures

Juggling multiple assignments and deadlines might limit the time and focus students can dedicate to thoroughly researching and crafting an empathy essay.

Expert Tips on Writing a Perfect Empathy Essay

Here are some tips with corresponding examples for writing an empathy essay:

Start with a Compelling Story

Begin your essay with a narrative that illustrates empathy in action. For instance, recount a personal experience where you or someone else demonstrated empathy. For instance:

Example:  As a child, I vividly recall a moment when my grandmother’s empathetic nature became evident. Despite her own struggles, she always took time to comfort others, such as when she helped a neighbor through a difficult loss.

Define Empathy Clearly

Define empathy and its various dimensions using simple language.

Example:  Empathy goes beyond sympathy; it’s about understanding and feeling what someone else is experiencing. It involves recognizing emotions and responding with care and understanding.

Use Real-life Examples

For achieving empathy in writing, incorporate real-life instances or case studies to emphasize empathy’s impact.

Example:  Research shows how empathy in healthcare professionals led to improved patient outcomes. Doctors who showed empathy were found to have patients with higher satisfaction rates and better recovery.

Explore Perspectives

Discuss different perspectives on empathy and its challenges.

Example:  While empathy is crucial, cultural differences can sometimes pose challenges. For instance, what’s considered empathetic in one culture might differ in another, highlighting the need for cultural sensitivity.

Highlight Benefits

Explain the positive outcomes of empathy in various contexts.

Example:  In workplaces, empathy fosters a more cohesive team environment. A study by the researcher found that leaders who display empathy tend to have more engaged and motivated teams.

Acknowledge Challenges

Address the complexities or limitations of empathy.

Example:  Despite its benefits, there are challenges in maintaining boundaries in empathetic relationships. It’s important to balance being empathetic and avoiding emotional burnout.

Conclude with Impact

Wrap up by emphasizing the broader impact of empathy.

Example:  Ultimately, fostering empathy creates a ripple effect, contributing to a more compassionate and understanding society, where individuals feel seen, heard, and supported.

Steps of Writing an Empathy Essay

Here are the steps for writing an empathy essay. You’ll notice that most of the steps are the same as  writing a research paper  or any such academic task.

Understanding the Topic

Familiarize yourself with the concept of empathy and its various dimensions. Define what empathy means to you and what aspects you aim to explore in your essay.

Gather information from credible sources, including academic articles, books, and real-life examples that illustrate empathy’s role and impact. Take notes on key points and examples that you can incorporate into your essays on empathy

Create an outline that includes an introduction (with a thesis statement defining the scope of your essay), body paragraphs discussing different aspects of empathy (such as its definition, importance, challenges, and benefits), and a conclusion summarizing the main points.

Introduction

Start your essay with a compelling hook or anecdote related to empathy. Introduce the topic and provide a clear thesis statement outlining what you’ll discuss in the essay.

Body Paragraphs

Each paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of empathy supported by evidence or examples. Discuss empathy’s definition, its significance in different contexts (personal, societal, professional), challenges in practicing empathy, benefits, and potential limitations.

Use Examples

Incorporate real-life examples or case studies to illustrate your points and make them relatable to the reader.

Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge differing perspectives or potential counterarguments related to empathy and address them thoughtfully within your essay.

Summarize the main points discussed in the essay. Restate the significance of empathy and its impact, leaving the reader with a lasting impression or call to action.

Edit and Revise

Review your essay for coherence, clarity, and consistency. Check for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Ensure that your ideas flow logically and that your essay effectively communicates your thoughts on empathy.

Make any necessary revisions based on feedback or additional insights. Ensure that your essay meets the guidelines and requirements if it’s for a specific assignment. Then, finalize and submit your empathy essay.

Final Thoughts

In this blog post, we’ve tried to make writing an empathy essay easier for students. We’ve explained it step by step, using easy examples and clear explanations. The goal is to help students understand what empathy is and how to write about it in an essay.

The steps we’ve shared for writing an empathy essay are straightforward. They start with understanding the topic and doing research, then move on to outlining, writing, and polishing the essay. We’ve highlighted the importance of using personal stories, real-life examples, and organizing ideas well.

Students can benefit from our  assignment writing service  for their empathy essays. Our experienced writers can provide expert help, ensuring the essays meet academic standards and are well-written. This support saves time and helps students focus on other schoolwork while getting a top-notch empathy essay.

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Empathy 101: 3+ Examples and Psychology Definitions

Has a book, film, or photograph ever driven you to tears?

Or have you ever felt driven to ease someone else’s emotions?

If you have answered yes to at least one of these, then you have experienced empathy.

Empathy is a complex psychological process that allows us to form bonds with other people. Through empathy, we cry when our friends go through hard times, celebrate their successes, and rage during their times of hardship. Empathy also allows us to feel guilt, shame, and embarrassment, as well as understand jokes and sarcasm.

In this article, we explore empathy, its benefits, and useful ways to measure it. We also look at empathy fatigue – a common experience among clinicians and people in the caring professions – and provide beneficial resources.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free . These science-based exercises will not only enhance your ability to understand and work with your emotions but will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains

What is empathy in psychology, the empathy quotient, 7 real-life examples, is it important 3+ benefits of empathy, empathy vs sympathy and compassion, assessing empathy: 4 helpful questionnaires, a note on empathy fatigue, positivepsychology.com resources, a take-home message.

In psychology, empathy is loosely defined as an ability to understand and experience someone else’s feelings and to adopt someone else’s viewpoint (Colman, 2015). The term ‘empathy’ comes from the German word Einfuhlung, which means “projecting into” (Ganczarek, Hünefeldt, & Belardinelli, 2018) and may explain why empathy is considered the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Difficulties with defining empathy

Defining empathy clearly and exhaustively enough to be studied in psychology is difficult. For example, is empathy the ability to understand or feel or share or interpret  someone else’s feelings?

Each of these verbs differs slightly, providing a different meaning to empathy. As a result, the underlying psychological mechanism and part of the brain responsible for empathy also differ.

Part of the difficulty defining empathy is that it comprises multiple components. For example, Hoffman (1987) argued that empathy in children develops across four different stages and that each stage lays down the foundation for the next.

These four stages are:

• Global empathy or ‘emotion contagion,’ where one person’s emotion evokes the same emotional reaction in another person (or the observer).
• Attention to others’ feelings, where the observer is aware of another person’s feelings but doesn’t mirror them.
• Prosocial actions, where the observer is aware of another person’s feelings and behaves in a way to comfort the other person.
• Empathy for another’s life condition, where the observer feels empathy toward someone else’s broader life situation, rather than their immediate situation right at this instance.

Fletcher-Watson and Bird (2020) provide an excellent overview of the challenges associated with defining and studying empathy. They argue that empathy results from a four-step process:

• Step 1: Noticing/observing someone’s emotional state
• Step 2: Correctly interpreting that emotional state
• Step 3: ‘Feeling’ the same emotion
• Step 4: Responding to the emotion

Empathy is not achieved if any of these four steps fail.

This multi-component conception of empathy is echoed across other research. For example, Decety and Cowell (2014) also posit that empathy arises from multiple processes interacting with each other.

These processes are:

• Emotional: The ability to share someone else’s feelings
• Motivational: The need to respond to someone else’s feelings
• Cognitive: The ability to take someone else’s viewpoint

Part of this confusion stems from their corresponding definitions.

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s emotions and perspectives. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, interpret, and manage other people’s emotions, as well as your own. This last inclusion – your own emotions – is what distinguishes emotional intelligence from empathy.

The Empathy Quotient is a measurement of empathy (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). It is akin to the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) but is a measure of empathy rather than intelligence. Like IQ, higher scores of the Empathy Quotient are meant to represent higher abilities of empathy.

Importantly, the Empathy Quotient differs from the Emotional Quotient. Emotional Quotient is measured using the BarOn Emotional Quotient-Inventory (Bar-On, 2004) and aims to measure emotional intelligence rather than empathy. It’s easy to confuse them because “EQ” is used to refer to both.

To determine whether the Empathy Quotient is a suitable test of empathy, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004) administered the measurement to a group of neurotypical people and a group of people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and compared their scores.

On average, individuals with Asperger syndrome scored significantly lower than neurotypical people. From this study, a score of 30 was determined to be a critical cut-off mark. Scores less than 30 were typically found among the participants with Asperger syndrome. Furthermore, the test-retest reliability of the Empathy Quotient was high, suggesting that the test reliably measures empathy.

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Since empathy is so complex and involved in so many social interactions, there are many examples of empathy in the real world.

In a discussion with a friend, have you ever felt so moved that you experienced the same emotion that they did? Or maybe a friend shared a cringe-worthy story of sheer humiliation, and that feeling was mirrored in you.

These situations when you experienced the same emotions as your friends are examples of empathy. Other examples of empathy include understanding someone else’s point of view during an argument, feeling guilty when you realize why someone might have misunderstood what you said, or realizing something you said was a faux pas . These scenarios require you to take someone else’s viewpoint.

Some of the best examples of empathy can be found in the work by Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande. Sacks was a neurologist who had a profound impact through his thoughtful, patient-driven books on the field of psychiatry and neuropsychology.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon who worked with the World Health Organization and has published several books on improving healthcare and healthcare systems. Both authors address their patients in a sensitive, thoughtful manner that evokes a lot of empathy in the reader.

The following books are highly recommended:

• Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

We participate in many scenarios in which we convey and receive information with other people, verbally and nonverbally.

Regardless of whether or not these interactions are important, we have to perceive, interpret, and respond to numerous cues.

Empathy is more than ‘just’ the ability to feel what someone else is feeling. Empathy is an essential skill that allows us to effectively engage with other people in social contexts (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004).

Without empathy, we would struggle to:

• understand other people’s feelings, motivations, and behaviors;
• respond appropriately to someone else’s feelings; and
• understand social interactions that rely on subtle behaviors, cues, and social norms, such as jokes, faux pas, and sarcasm.

The ability to respond appropriately to someone else’s emotions is extremely important for forming bonds. Empathy underlines the bond that forms between parent and child (Decety & Cowell, 2014).

Some researchers even consider some aspects of empathy to be a defining feature of humans. Our ability to consider another person’s viewpoint is considered uniquely human (Decety & Cowell, 2014).

Jean Decety and Jason Cowell (2014) argue that empathy is one process that contributes to understanding and engaging in complex social behavior, such as prosocial behavior, which includes volunteering as well as providing care for people who are terminally ill.

Earlier in this article, we mentioned the studies by Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004) in which they compared Empathy Quotient scores between people with Asperger syndrome and neurotypical people.

People on the autism–Asperger spectrum are believed to have a diminished capacity for empathy and, as a result, struggle with social contexts. However, their lower empathy scores do not mean that they are without feeling or should be considered psychopaths (who also have lower scores of empathy).

People on the autism spectrum often report that their intention is not to hurt other people’s feelings, and they feel guilty if they caused someone else’s hurt feelings (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004).

Furthermore, people on the autism spectrum often report that they want human connections; however, they struggle to make them because they are not aware of how their behavior affects how other people perceive them (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). This shows how important empathy is in developing relationships and interpreting subtle social cues.

The three terms – empathy, sympathy, and compassion – are often confused with each other, because they are often used when referring to someone else’s feelings. For example, in response to a friend’s bad news, do you feel empathy, sympathy, or compassion? The terms are used in similar contexts, but they refer to different behaviors.

• From the definitions provided above, empathy involves interpreting, understanding, feeling, and acting on other people’s feelings. Empathy is a multidimensional process and relies on affective, cognitive, behavioral, and moral components (Jeffrey, 2016). Remember, empathy is the ability to adopt someone else’s viewpoint or to put yourself into someone else’s shoes.
• Sympathy is the feeling of pity for someone else’s misfortune or circumstances.
• Compassion is the desire and act of wanting to alleviate someone else’s suffering. Compassion includes the affective components of empathy and sympathy, but it is accompanied by an action to change the circumstances of the person who is suffering (Sinclair et al., 2017). A compassionate act can also result in our suffering alongside the other person; this is referred to as co-suffering. Compassion is also linked to altruistic behavior (Jeffrey, 2016).

Examples of Empathy vs Sympathy vs Compassion

To further cement the difference between these three terms, consider the following examples:

Emma relays a recent event where she was extremely embarrassed. As she retells the story, her friend, Tamika, groans and mutters “Oh my word, I would feel so embarrassed. I would want the world to swallow me whole!”

In this example, Tamika doesn’t actually want to disappear into a hole. Instead, she’s correctly understanding and interpreting the situation that Emma found herself in. She is most likely experiencing empathy for Emma’s situation. She is not feeling pity, nor is she acting compassionately.

Jerome’s mother recently suffered a near-fatal heart attack. He listens to his mother retell her sisters about her experience. As she recounts her experience, she starts crying, because she was so afraid, and she realized that she might never see her loved ones again. Jerome starts crying as he listens to his mother.

In this example, Jerome is feeling sympathy (pity) for his mother and what she went through.

On his route to university, Jamal sees the same homeless man every day. The homeless man sits in the same place, regardless of the weather, with a sign next to him that asks for assistance. Jamal decides to donate some of his clothing to the homeless man.

Jamal’s behavior is an act of compassion . By donating his clothing, he is trying to alleviate the homeless man’s suffering. He may also be experiencing sympathy towards the man, but the act of trying to change the man’s situation is an act of compassion.

Use these questionnaires to determine what your current level of empathy is.

Empathy Quotient

The Empathy Quotient, including the entire questionnaire, its psychometric properties, and the scoring, is described in the original paper by Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004). Professor Simon Baron-Cohen works with the Autism Research Centre (ARC), and the 60-item Empathy Quotient, as well as the scoring matrix, is available from the ARC website .

The Empathy Questionnaire (EmQue)

The Empathy Questionnaire (EmQue), designed by Rieffe, Ketelaar, and Wiefferink (2010), measures empathy in young children (average age of around 30 months) and reflects Hoffman’s (1987) theory of how empathy developed in children.

The questionnaire comprises three subscales, which map onto the first three stages of empathy development posited by Hoffman (1987). The questionnaire correlates well with other measures that aim to capture similar constructs. You can access this questionnaire on the Academia website .

The Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA)

A similar version of the EmQue also exists for older children. This version is known as the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA; Overgaauw, Rieffe, Broekhof, Crone, & Güroğlu, 2017).

Unlike the EmQue, the EmQue-CA is a self-report measure. In other words, the adolescents and children must answer how much they agree with each statement, rather than their parents observing their behaviors.

The final version of the EmQue-CA measures the following three subscales: affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and intention to comfort. The 14 questions and the psychometric properties of the questionnaire are reported in the original paper, which can be accessed on the Frontiers in Psychology website as a free downloadable PDF .

The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ)

The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) was developed by refining a collection of questionnaires that measure empathy into a core set of questions (Spreng, McKinnon, Mar, & Levine, 2009).

Researchers collected questions from multiple empathy questionnaires, administered these questions to a large sample of students, and then using exploratory factor analysis, refined the questions to a core set of 16.

The questionnaire and scoring rules are described in the appendix of the original paper (Spreng et al., 2009), which can be accessed on the Measurement Instrument Database for the Social Sciences .

Finally, the TEQ and the Empathy Quotient have a strong, positive correlation, confirming that the questions in both measure the same psychological construct.

Empathy is often confused with sympathy, which involves a lack of truly understanding another person’s experience.

For instance, if your friend recently lost their job, expressing sympathy would include feeling sorry for them and wishing them luck finding another job.

In contrast, empathy entails relating to your friend’s frustrations and fears about unemployment and actively experiencing those negative emotions by putting yourself in their shoes.

An example of compassion would be assisting your friend in applying for other jobs and updating their resume.

While empathy and sympathy drive acts of compassion, compassion stands out due to its proactive nature of motivating individuals to alleviate suffering.

Recognizing the distinctions between sympathy, empathy, and compassion can help you adjust your emotional responses when someone is going through hardship, enabling you to provide better support.

Feeling empathy is a very useful skill, especially for health professionals such as clinicians, therapists, and psychologists. But the ability to feel empathy for other people comes at the cost of empathy fatigue.

Empathy fatigue refers to the feeling of exhaustion that health professionals experience in response to constantly revisiting their emotional wounds through their clients’ experience (Stebnicki, 2000). For example, a therapist whose client is going through bereavement may be reminded of their own grief and trauma.

By being emotionally available for their client through emotional and stressful periods, the therapist experiences fatigue at a psychological, emotional, and physiological level (Stebnicki, 2000).

Besides manifesting as a sense of fatigue, we can consider empathy fatigue as a form of re-trauma, and as a result, the symptoms resemble that of secondary traumatic stress disorder.

Empathy fatigue in the clinical domain is also referred to as ‘counselor impairment’ because the clinician’s ability to perform their job is impaired (Stebnicki, 2007). An outcome of empathy fatigue is burnout, with a particularly sudden onset (Stebnicki, 2000).

Stebnicki (2007) provides a comprehensive list of strategies that clinicians can use to prevent empathy fatigue:

• Self-awareness of the symptoms of empathy fatigue
• Self-care strategies and lifestyle behaviors that protect the clinician from empathy fatigue
• Using a support group and supervisor during periods of empathy fatigue

Finally, PositivePsychology.com’s post detailing self-care for therapists can be easily adapted to other industries. For example, these tips could be incorporated into a wellness session in the workplace to help prevent empathy fatigue.

17 Exercises To Develop Emotional Intelligence

These 17 Emotional Intelligence Exercises [PDF] will help others strengthen their relationships, lower stress, and enhance their wellbeing through improved EQ.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Below is a list of four items, each targeting a different aspect of empathy.

To help children better understand what is meant by empathy, we recommend the What is Empathy? worksheet. In this worksheet, children are asked to recall scenarios when they experienced a similar emotion as someone else. Children are also asked to think of reasons why empathy is a good thing and how they can improve their sense of empathy.

To practice looking at things from a fresh perspective, we recommend the 500 Years Ago Worksheet and the Trading Places Worksheet. Both worksheets can be used in group exercises, but only the second one is also appropriate for individual clients.

In five steps, the Listening Accurately Worksheet  lays out an easy-to-follow guide to better develop empathy through active listening .

This worksheet is especially useful for clinicians and health professionals but is also very appropriate for anyone working in a profession where they need to communicate with other people constantly.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others develop emotional intelligence, this collection contains 17 validated EI tools for practitioners. Use them to help others understand and use their emotions to their advantage.

If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we are willing to stand in the other person’s shoes — as my mom would say — just for a moment, stand in their shoes. Because here’s the thing about life: there’s no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days, when you need a hand. There are other days when we’re called to lend a hand.

U.S. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Inauguration speech

And that is what empathy is: being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Humans are social creatures, and empathy is an important skill. Without empathy, we will struggle to connect and form bonds. Underdeveloped empathy results in awkward social interactions, which can also weaken social bonds.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

By connecting, by understanding, by having empathy, we can all stand together, lend a hand when needed, and be given a hand when we, in turn, may need it.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free .

• Bar-On, R. (2004). The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i): Rationale, description and summary of psychometric properties. In G. Geher (Ed.),  Measuring emotional intelligence: Common ground and controversy (pp. 115–145). Nova Science Publishers.
• Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). The Empathy Quotient: An investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders , 34 (2), 163–175.
• Colman, A. M. (2015). A dictionary of psychology . Oxford University Press.
• Decety, J., & Cowell, J. M. (2014). The complex relation between morality and empathy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 18 , 337–339.
• Fletcher-Watson, S., & Bird, G. (2020). Autism and empathy: What are the real links?  Autism ,  24 (1), 3–6.
• Ganczarek, J., Hünefeldt, T., & Belardinelli, M. O. (2018). From “Einfühlung” to empathy: Exploring the relationship between aesthetic and interpersonal experience.  Cognitive Processing ,  19 (4), 141–145.
• Gawande, A. (2017).  Being mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end. Picador.
• Hoffman, M. L. (1987). The contribution of empathy to justice and moral judgment. In N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer (Eds.), Cambridge studies in social and emotional development. Empathy and its development (pp. 47–80). Cambridge University Press.
• Jeffrey, D. (2016). Empathy, sympathy and compassion in healthcare: Is there a problem? Is there a difference? Does it matter? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , 109 (12), 446–452.
• John Donne. (2020, October 17). Wikiquote . Retrieved January 20, 2021, from https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=John_Donne&oldid=2878168
• Overgaauw, S., Rieffe, C., Broekhof, E., Crone, E. A., & Güroğlu, B. (2017). Assessing empathy across childhood and adolescence: Validation of the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA). Frontiers in Psychology , 8 , Article 870.
• Rieffe, C., Ketelaar, L., & Wiefferink, C. H. (2010). Assessing empathy in young children: Construction and validation of an Empathy Questionnaire (EmQue). Personality and Individual Differences , 49 (5), 362–367.
• Sacks, O. (1998).  The man who mistook his wife for a hat: And other clinical tales. Touchstone.
• Sacks, O. W. (2011).  Awakenings (New ed.). Picador.
• Sinclair, S., Beamer, K., Hack, T. F., McClement, S., Raffin Bouchal, S., Chochinov, H. M., & Hagen, N. A. (2017). Sympathy, empathy, and compassion: A grounded theory study of palliative care patients’ understandings, experiences, and preferences. Palliative Medicine , 31 (5), 437–447.
• 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.
• Stebnicki, M. A. (2000). Stress and grief reactions among rehabilitation professionals: Dealing effectively with empathy fatigue. Journal of Rehabilitation , 66 (1).
• Stebnicki, M. A. (2007). Empathy fatigue: Healing the mind, body, and spirit of professional counselors. American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation , 10 (4), 317–338.

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Im positive that the origin of the word ’empathy’ comes from Greek, with ‘pathos’ being an umbrella word for emotions (sympathy, apathy, antipathy, and from there passion, compassion etc).

It’s important to mention that empathy is not a sign of a weak personality. I did a huge work before I could finally cry when touched by my friend’s story. Because “men shouldn’t show their tears in public.” But don’t you dare tell me how I should react! 😀

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Despite its linguistic roots in ancient Greek, the concept of empathy is of recent intellectual heritage. Yet its history has been varied and colorful, a fact that is also mirrored in the multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. In its philosophical heyday at the turn of the 19 th to the 20 th century, empathy had been hailed as the primary means for gaining knowledge of other minds and as the method uniquely suited for the human sciences, only to be almost entirely neglected philosophically for the rest of the century. Only recently have philosophers become again interested in empathy in light of the debate about our folk psychological mindreading capacities. In the second half of the last century, the task of addressing empathy was mainly left to psychologists who thematized it as a psychological phenomenon and process to be studied by the method of the empirical sciences. Particularly, it has been studied by social psychologists as a phenomenon assumed to be causally involved in creating prosocial attitudes and behavior. Nevertheless, within psychology it is at times difficult to find agreement of how exactly one should understand empathy; a fact of which psychologists themselves have become increasingly aware. The purpose of this entry is to clarify the concept of empathy by surveying its history in various philosophical and psychological discussions and by indicating why empathy was and should be regarded to be of such central importance in understanding human agency in ordinary contexts, in the human sciences and for the constitution of ourselves as social and moral agents.

1. Historical Introduction

• 2.1 Mirror Neurons, Simulation, and the Philosophical Revival of Empathy

3.1. The Critique of Empathy in the Context of a Hermeneutic Conception of the Human Sciences

3.2. the critique of empathy within the context of a naturalist conception of the human sciences, 4. empathy as a topic of scientific exploration in psychology, 5.1. empathy and altruistic motivation, 5.2. empathy, moral development, and moral agency, 6. conclusion, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

The psychologist Edward Titchener (1867-1927) introduced the term “empathy” in 1909 into the English language as the translation of the German term “Einfühlung” (or “feeling into”), a term that by the end of the 19 th century was in German philosophical circles understood as an important category in philosophical aesthetics. Even in Germany its use as a technical term of philosophical analysis did not have a long tradition. Various philosophers certainly speak throughout the 19 th century and the second half of the 18 th century in a more informal manner about our ability to “feel into” works of arts and into nature. Particularly important here is the fact that romantic thinkers, such as Herder and Novalis, viewed our ability to feel into nature as a vital corrective against the modern scientific attitude of merely dissecting nature into its elements; instead of grasping its underlying spiritual reality through a process of poetic identification. But in using mainly the verbal form in referring to our ability to feel into various things they do not treat such an ability as a topic that is worthy of sustained philosophical reflection and analysis. Robert Visher was the first to introduce the term “Einfühlung” in a more technical sense—and in using the substantive form he indicates that it is a worthy object of philosophical analysis—in his “On the Optical Sense of Form: A contribution to Aesthetics” (1873).

It was however Theodor Lipps (1851-1914) who scrutinized empathy in the most thorough manner. Most importantly, Lipps not only argued for empathy as a concept that is central for the philosophical and psychological analysis of our aesthetic experiences. His work transformed empathy from a concept of philosophical aesthetics into a central category of the philosophy of the social and human sciences. For him, empathy not only plays a role in our aesthetic appreciation of objects. It has also to be understood as being the primary basis for recognizing each other as minded creatures. Not surprisingly, it was Lipps's conception of empathy that Titchener had in mind in his translation of “Einfühlung” as “empathy.”

In order to appreciate the philosophical motivation for focusing on empathy one has to keep in mind the intellectual context within which an account of aesthetic perception took place at the end of the 19 th century. According to the dominant (even though not universally accepted) positivistic and empiricist conception, sense data constitute the fundamental basis for our investigation of the world. Yet from a phenomenological perspective, our perceptual encounter with aesthetic objects and our appreciation of them as being beautiful—our admiration of a beautiful sunset, for example—seems to be as direct as our perception of an object as being red or square. By appealing to the psychological mechanisms of empathy, philosophers intended to provide an explanatory account of the phenomenological immediacy of our aesthetic appreciation of objects. Lipps conceives of empathy as a psychological resonance phenomenon that is triggered in our perceptual encounter with external objects. More specifically, these resonance phenomena are triggering inner “processes” that give rise to experiences similar to ones that I have when I engage in various activities involving the movement of my body. Since my attention is perceptually focused on the external object, I experience them—or I automatically project my experiences—as being in the object. If those experiences are in some way apprehended in a positive manner and as being in some sense life-affirming, I perceive the object as beautiful, otherwise as ugly. In the first case, Lipps speaks of positive; in the later of negative empathy. Lipps also characterizes our experience of beauty as “objectified self-enjoyment,” since we are impressed by the “vitality” and “life potentiality” that lies in the perceived object (Lipps 1906, 1903 a,b).

In his Aesthetik, Lipps closely links our aesthetic perception and our perception of another embodied person as a minded creature. The nature of aesthetic empathy is always the “experience of another human” (1905, 49) . We appreciate another object as beautiful because empathy allows us to see it in analogy to another human body. Similarly, we recognize another organism as a minded creature because of empathy. Empathy in this context is more specifically understood as a phenomenon of “inner imitation,” where my mind mirrors the mental activities or experiences of another person based on the observation of his bodily activities or facial expressions. Empathy is ultimately based on an innate disposition for motor mimicry, a fact that is well established in the psychological literature and was already noticed by Adam Smith (1853). Even though such a disposition is not always externally manifested, Lipps suggests that it is always present as an inner tendency giving rise to similar kinaesthetic sensations in the observer as felt by the observed target. In seeing the angry face of another person we instinctually have a tendency of imitating it and of “imitating” her anger in this manner. Since we are not aware of such tendencies, we see the anger in her face (Lipps 1907). Despite the fact that Lipps's primary examples of empathy focus on the recognition of emotions expressed in bodily gestures or facial expressions, his conception of empathy should not be understood as being limited to such cases. As his remarks about intellectual empathy suggest (1903b/05), he regards our recognition of all mental activities—insofar as they are activities requiring human effort—as being based on empathy or on inner imitation (See also the introductory chapter in Stueber 2006).

The above explication of empathy constitutes Lipps' core concept of empathy. In this respect one could rightfully call Lipps one of the first proponents of simulation theory (and proposing a position that is very similar to the version of simulation theory advocated currently by Goldman 2006). Unfortunately, in Lipps one finds also a much broader sense of empathy that is not compatible with the notion of empathy as a form of vicarious imitation. Lipps talks about a “universal apperceptive empathy” and a general “empathy of nature.” He even utilizes empathy in order to explain certain perceptual illusions. In these contexts, the term “empathy” refers to any mental activity on part of the observer that is triggered in the perceptual encounter with an external stimulus and that has to be understood as being constitutive for our comprehension of an object qua object. Here one should think of mental activities that are, for example, required to see a line as a line or mental activities that are necessary to grasp events within nature as being events in a causal nexus (Lipps 1912/13). Rightfully, this liberal employment of the term found no takers, since in its wider usage the concept of empathy looses all of its distinctiveness. Everything and nothing seems to have to do with empathy.

2. Empathy and the Philosophical Problem of Other Minds

Lipps's core concept of empathy and his claim that empathy should be understood as the primary epistemic means for our perception of other persons as minded creatures were highly influential and were the focus of a considerable debate among philosophers at the beginning of the 20 th century(Prandtl 1910, Stein 1917, Scheler 1973). Even philosophers who did not agree with Lipps's specific explication, found the concept of empathy appealing because his argument for empathy was closely tied to a thorough critique of what was widely seen at that time as the only alternative for conceiving of knowledge of other minds, that is, Mill's inference from analogy. This inference is best understood as describing the steps that enable us to attribute mental states to other persons based on the observation of their physical behavior and our direct experience of mental states from the first person perspective. Traditionally, the inference from analogy presupposes a Cartesian conception of the mind according to which access to our own mind is direct and infallible, whereas knowledge of other minds is indirect, inferential, and fallible. More formally one can characterize the inference from analogy as consisting of the following premises or steps.

i.) Another person X manifests behavior of type B . ii.) In my own case behavior of type B is caused by mental state of type M . iii.) Since my and X 's outward behavior of type B is similar, it has to have similar inner mental causes. (It is thus assumed that I and the other persons are psychologically similar in the relevant sense.) Therefore: The other person's behavior ( X 's behavior) is caused by a mental state of type M .

Like Wittgenstein, but predating him considerably, Lipps argues in his 1907 article “Das Wissen von fremden Ichen” that the inference from analogy falls fundamentally short of solving the philosophical problem of other minds. Lipps does not argue against the inference from analogy because of its evidentially slim basis, but because it does not allow us to understand its basic presupposition that another person has a mind that is psychologically similar to our own mind. The inference from analogy thus cannot be understood as providing us with evidence for the claim that the other person has mental states like we do because within its Cartesian framework we are unable to conceive of other minds in the first place. For Lipps, analogical reasoning requires the contradictory undertaking of inferring another person's anger and sadness on the basis of my sadness and anger, yet to think of that sadness and anger simultaneously as something “absolutely different” from my anger and sadness. More generally, analogical inference is a contradictory undertaking because it entails “entertaining a completely new thought about an I, that however is not me, but something absolutely different” (Lipps 1907, 708, my translation).

Yet while Lipps diagnoses the problem of the inference of analogy within the context of a Cartesian conception of the mind quite succinctly, he fails to explain how empathy is able to provide us with an epistemically sanctioned understanding of other minds or why our “feeling into” the other person's mind is more than a mere projection. More importantly, Lipps does not sufficiently explain why empathy does not encounter similar problems to the ones diagnosed for the inference from analogy and how empathy allows us to conceive of other persons as having a mind similar to our own if we are directly acquainted only with our own mental states. The fundamental problem for Lipps's defense of empathy as primary method of knowing other minds consists in the fact that he still conceives of empathy within the context of a Cartesian conception of the mind tying our understanding of mental affairs and mental concepts essentially to the first person perspective (See Stueber 2006).

Wittgenstein's critique of the inference from analogy is in the end more penetrating because he recognizes that its problem depends on a Cartesian account of mental concepts. If my grasp of a mental concept is exclusively constituted by me experiencing something in a certain way, then it is impossible for me to conceive of how that very same concept can be applied to somebody else, given that I cannot experience somebody else's mental states. I therefore cannot conceive of how another person can be in the same mental state as I am because that would require that I can conceive of my mental state as something, which I do not experience. But according to the Cartesian conception this seems to be a conceptually impossible task. Moreover, if one holds on to a Cartesian conception of the mind, it is not clear how appealing to empathy, as conceived of by Lipps, should help us in conceiving of mental states as belonging to another mind.

Within the phenomenological tradition, the above shortcomings of Lipps's position of empathy were quite apparent (see for example Stein 1917, 24 and Scheler 1973, 236). Yet despite the fact that they did not accept Lipps's explication of the mechanism of empathy, authors within the phenomenological tradition of philosophy were persuaded by Lipps's critique of the inference from analogy. For that very reason, Husserl and Stein, for example, continued using the concept of empathy and regarded empathy as an irreducible “type of experiential act sui generis” (Stein 10), which allows us to view another person as being analogous to ourselves without this “analogizing apprehension” constituting an inference of analogy (Husserl 1963, 141). Scheler went probably the furthest in rejecting the Cartesian framework in thinking about the apprehension of other minds, while keeping committed to something like the concept of empathy. [ 1 ] (In order to contrast his position from Lipps, Scheler however preferred to use the term “nachfühlen” rather than “einfühlen.”) For Scheler, the fundamental mistake of the debate about the apprehension of other minds consists in the fact that it does not take seriously certain phenomenological facts. Prima facie, we do not encounter merely the bodily movements of another person. Rather, we are directly recognizing specific mental states because they are characteristically expressed in states of the human body; in facial expressions, in gestures, in the tone of voice, and so on. (See Scheler 1973, particularly 232-258; see also Zahavi 2007, who argues that Scheler's insights should be taken seriously in the contemporary theory of mind debate. For him, Scheler points to a more appropriate alternative of thinking about the apprehension of other minds than simulation theory or theory theory.)

Nevertheless, philosophers in the phenomenological tradition never provided a philosophically comprehensive account of mental concepts that would allow us to see them as part of an intersubjectively accessible practice in which we interpret, predict, and explain the behavior of other agents. Certainly, a few of our mental concepts, particularly concepts of emotions, could be easily understood as being definable in light of the characteristic bodily expressions associated with specific mental states. But not all mental concepts can be defined in this manner, particularly the central folk psychological concepts of belief and desire. Besides an unfamiliarity with the phenomenological literature, the lack of a comprehensive account of mental concepts should be viewed as the main systematic reason of why the idea that empathy is the primary means of understanding other minds has never been taken seriously in the analytic tradition of philosophy until very recently and why the theory theory position has been so dominant in philosophical circles after the decline of behaviorism. (For further reasons to reject empathy as a primary means of understanding other minds see also section 3 of this entry.) Theory theorists conceive of our understanding of mental concepts as being constituted by an implicit grasp of their role in a folk psychological theory and its law-like psychological generalizations. They conceive of the attribution of mental states to other people as a theoretical inference. We infer the existence of mental states from behavioral evidence together with knowledge of theoretical principles that link the existence of mental states to such evidence in a complex fashion. In suggesting that attributing a mental state to another person is a theoretical inference based on the use of a theory and available evidence, theory theorists also propose an alternative to the traditional inference from analogy; an alternative that philosophers like Lipps or Scheler never even considered in their defense of empathy . Moreover, theory theorists are not without conceptual resources to account for the phenomenological fact that we seem to directly grasp another person's mental states by looking at his facial expressions. For them, such phenomenological directness in the apprehension of particular mental states can be explicated in terms of our familiarity with a folk psychological theory. (For a critical discussion see Stueber 2006).

2.1. Mirror Neurons, Simulation, and the Philosophical Revival of Empathy

The idea that empathy—particularly empathy as inner imitation as Lipps conceived of it—is the primary epistemic means for understanding other minds has been revived in the 1980's by simulation theorists in the context of the interdisciplinary debate about folk psychology; an empirically informed debate about how best to describe the underlying causal mechanisms of our folk psychological abilities to interpret, explain, and predict other agents. (See Davies and Stone 1995). In contrast to theory theory, simulation theorists conceive of our ordinary mindreading abilities as an ego-centric method and as a “knowledge poor” strategy, where I do not utilize a folk psychological theory but use myself as a model for the other person's mental life. It is not the place here to discuss the contemporary debate extensively, but it has to be emphasized that contemporary simulation theorists vigorously discuss how to account for our grasp of mental concepts and whether simulation theory is committed to Cartesianism. Whereas Goldman (2002, 2006) links his version of simulation theory to a neo-Cartesian account of mental concepts, other simulation theorists develop versions of simulation theory that are not committed to a Cartesian conception of the mind. (Gordon 1995a, b, and 2000; Heal 2003; and Stueber 2006).

Moreover, Lipps' idea of empathy as inner imitation has received some empirical confirmation from recent findings in the neurosciences according to which so called mirror neurons play an important role in recognizing another person's emotional states and intentions when observing his behavior. With the help of the term “mirror neuron,” scientists refer to the fact that there is significant overlap between neural areas of excitation that underlie our observation of another person's action and areas that are stimulated when we execute the very same action. A similar overlap between neural areas of excitation has also been established for our recognition of another person's emotion based on his facial expression and our experiencing the emotion. (For a survey on mirror neurons see Rizzolatti/ Craighero/ Fadiga 2002; Gallese 2003a and b, Goldman 2006, chap. 6). Since the face to face encounter between persons is the primary situation within which human beings recognize themselves as minded creatures and attribute mental states to others, the system of mirror neurons can be interpreted as having a causally central role for the establishment of intersubjective relations. For that very reason, the neuroscientist Gallese thinks of mirror neurons as constituting what he calls the “shared manifold of intersubjectivity” (Gallese 2001, 44). Stueber (2006, chap. 4)—inspired by Lipps's conception of empathy as inner imitation—refers to mirror neurons as mechanisms of basic empathy; [ 2 ] as mechanisms that allow us to apprehend directly another person's emotions in light of his facial expressions and that enable us to understand his bodily movements as goal-directed actions. The evidence from mirror neurons—and the fact that in perceiving other people we use very different neurobiological mechanisms than in the perception of physical objects—does suggest that in our primary perceptual encounter with the world we do not merely encounter physical objects. Rather, even on this basic level, we distinguish already between mere physical objects and objects that are more like us (See also Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). The mechanisms of basic empathy have to be seen as Nature's way of dissolving one of the principal assumptions of the traditional philosophical discussion about other minds shared by opposing positions such as Cartesianism and Behaviorism; that is, that we perceive other people primarily as physical objects and do not distinguish already on the perceptual level between physical objects like trees and minded creatures like ourselves. Mechanisms of basic empathy might therefore be interpreted as providing us with a perceptual basis for developing an intersubjectively accessible folk psychological framework that is applicable to the subject and observed other (Stueber 2006,142-45).

Yet it should be noted that everyday mindreading is not restricted to the realm of basic empathy. Ordinarily we not only recognize that other persons are afraid or that they are reaching for a particular object. We understand their behavior in more complex social contexts in terms of their reasons for acting using the full range of psychological concepts including the concepts of belief and desire. Evidence from neuroscience shows that these mentalizing tasks involve very different neuronal areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal cortex, and the cingulate cortex. (For a survey see Kain and Perner 2003; and Frith and Frith 2003). Low level mindreading in the realm of basic empathy has therefore to be distinguished from higher levels of mindreading (Goldman 2006). It is clear that low level forms of mindreading have to be conceived of as being relatively knowledge poor as they do not involve a psychological theory or complex psychological concepts. How exactly one should conceive of high level mindreading abilities, whether they involve primarily knowledge poor simulation strategies or knowledge rich inferences is controversially debated within the contemporary debate about our folk psychological mindreading abilities. (For the debate see Davies and Stone 1995, Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997, Gordon 1995, Curry and Ravenscroft 2002, Heal 2003, Hutto 2008, Nichols and Stich 2003, Goldman 2006, and Stueber 2006). Interestingly, the debate about how to conceive of these more complex forms of mindreading resonates with the traditional debate about whether empathy is the unique method of the human sciences and whether or not one has to strictly distinguish between the methods of the human and the natural sciences. Regardless of how one views this specific debate it should be clear that ideas about mindreading developed originally by proponents of empathy at the beginning of the 20 th century can no longer be easily dismissed.

3. Empathy as the Unique Method of the Human Sciences

At the beginning of the 20 th century, empathy understood as a non-inferential and non-theoretical method of grasping the content of other minds became closely associated with the concept of understanding (Verstehen); a concept that was championed by the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy concerned with explicating the methods used in grasping the meaning and significance of texts, works of arts, and actions. (For a survey of this tradition see Grondin 1994). Hermeneutic thinkers insisted that the method used in understanding the significance of a text or a historical event has to be fundamentally distinguished from the method used in explaining an event within the context of the natural sciences. This methodological dualism is famously expressed by Droysen in saying that “historical research does not want to explain; that is, derive in a form of an inferential argument, rather it wants to understand” (Droysen 1977, 403), and similarly in Dilthey's dictum that “we explain nature, but understand the life of the soul” (Dilthey 1961, vol. 5, 144). Yet Droysen and authors before him never conceived of understanding solely as an act of mental imitation or solely as an act of imaginatively “transporting” oneself into the point of view of another person. Such “psychological interpretation” as Schleiermacher (1998) used to call it, was conceived of as constituting only one aspect of the interpretive method used by historians. Other tasks mentioned in this context involved critically evaluating the reliability of historical sources, getting to know the linguistic conventions of a language, and integrating the various elements derived from historical sources into a consistent narrative of a particular epoch. The differences between these various aspects of the interpretive procedure were however downplayed in the early Dilthey. For him, grasping the significance of any cultural fact had to be understood as a mental act of “transposition.” Understanding the meaning of a text, an action, or work of art requires us to relate it to the primary realm of significance; that is, our own mental life accessible through introspection. (See for example Dilthey 1961, vol. 5, 263-265). Even though Dilthey himself never used the empathy terminology, his position certainly facilitated thinking about understanding as a form of empathy. No wonder then, that at this time the concepts of empathy and understanding were used almost interchangeably in order to delineate a supposed methodological distinction between the natural and the human sciences. (See Stueber 2006 for a more extensive discussion).

Ironically, the identification of empathy and understanding and the associated claim that empathy is the sole and unique method of the human sciences also facilitated the decline of the empathy concept and its almost utter disregard by philosophers of the human and social sciences later on, in both the analytic and continental/hermeneutic traditions of philosophy. Within both traditions, proponents of empathy were—for very different reasons—generally seen as advocating an epistemically naïve and insufficiently broad conception of the methodological proceedings in the human sciences. As a result, most philosophers of the human and social sciences maintained their distance from the idea that empathy is central for our understanding of other minds and mental phenomena. Notable exceptions in this respect are R.G. Collingwood and his followers, who suggested that reenacting another person's thoughts is necessary for understanding them as rational agents (Collingwood 1946, Dray 1957 and 1995). Notice however that in contrast to the contemporary debate about folk psychology, the debate about empathy in the philosophy of social science is not concerned with investigating underlying causal mechanisms. Rather, it addresses normative questions of how to justify a particular explanation or interpretation.

Philosophers arguing for a hermeneutic conception of the human and social sciences insist on a strict methodological division between the human and the natural sciences. [ 3 ] Yet they nowadays favor the concept of understanding (Verstehen) and reject the earlier identification of understanding and empathy for two specific reasons. First, empathy is no longer seen as the unique method of the human sciences because facts of significance, which a historian or an interpreter of literary and non-literary texts are interested in, do not solely depend on facts within the individual mind. Within the philosophy of history, for example, it has become the established consensus that a historian is not and should not be bound by the agent's perspective in telling the story about a particular historical event or a particular period that he is interested in. Historians necessarily surpass the conceptual categories of the agent, since the significance of historical events is constituted not only by an agent's intentions but by their long range and at times unintended consequences (Danto 1965). Similarly, philosophers such as Hans Georg Gadamer, have argued that the significance of a text is not tied to the author's intentions in writing the text. In reading a text by Shakespeare or Plato we are not primarily interested in finding out what Plato or Shakespeare said but what these texts themselves say. Moreover, like the significance of any historical event, the significance of a literary text is dependent on its effect on subsequent generations and its meaning supervenes on its own interpretive history. (Gadamer 1989; for a critical discussion see Skinner (in Tully 1988); “Introduction” in Kögler and Stueber 2000; and Stueber 2002).

The above considerations, however, do not justify the claim that empathy has no role to play within the context of the human sciences. It justifies merely the claim that empathy cannot be their only method, at least as long as one admits that recognizing the thoughts of individual agents has to play some role in the interpretive project of the human sciences. Accordingly, a second reason against empathy is also emphasized. Conceiving of understanding other agents as being based on empathy is seen as an epistemically extremely naïve conception of the interpretation of individual agents, since it seems to conceive of understanding as a mysterious meeting of two individual minds outside of any cultural context. Philosophers, influenced by considerations of Heidegger and also the later Wittgenstein, have started to think of individual agents as socially and culturally embedded creatures and have started to conceive of the mind of individual agents as being socially constituted. Understanding other agents thus presupposes an understanding of the cultural context within which an agent functions. Moreover, in the interpretive situation of the human sciences, the cultural background of the interpreter and the person, who has to be interpreted, can be very different. In that case, I can not very easily put myself in the shoes of the other person and imitate his thoughts in my mind. If understanding medieval knights, to use an example of Winch (1958), requires me to think exactly as the medieval knight did, then it is not clear how such a task can be accomplished from an interpretive perspective constituted by very different cultural presuppositions. Making sense of other minds has, therefore, to be seen as an activity that is a culturally mediated one; a fact that empathy theorists according to this line of critique do not sufficiently take into account when they conceive of understanding other agents as a direct meeting of minds that is independent of and unaided by information about how these agents are embedded in a broader social environment. [ 4 ] (See Stueber 2006, chap.6, Zahavi 2001, 2005; for the later Dilthey see Makreel 2000).

Philosophers, who reject the methodological dualism between the human and the natural sciences as argued for in the hermeneutic context, are commonly referred to as naturalists in the philosophy of social science. They deny that the distinction between understanding and explanation points to an important methodological difference. Even in the human or social sciences, the main point of the scientific endeavor is to provide epistemically justified explanations (and predictions) of observed or recorded events (see also Henderson 1993). At most, empathy is granted a heuristic role in the context of discovery. It however can not play any role within the context of justification. As particularly Hempel (1965) has argued, to explain an event involves—at least implicitly—an appeal to law-like regularities providing us with reasons for expecting that an event of a certain kind will occur under specific circumstances. Empathy might allow me to recognize that I would have acted in the same manner as somebody else. Yet it does not epistemically sanction the claim that anybody of a particular type or anybody who is in that type of situation will act in this manner.

Hempel's argument against empathy has certainly not gone unchallenged. Within the philosophy of history, Dray (1957), following Collingwood, has argued that empathy plays an epistemically irreducible role, since we explain actions in terms of an agent's reasons. For him, such reason explanations do not appeal to empirical generalizations but to normative principles of actions outlining how a person should act in a particular situation. More recently, similar arguments have been articulated by Jaegwon Kim (1984, 1998). Yet as Stueber (2006, chap. 5) argues such a response to Hempel would require us to implausibly conceive of reason explanations as being very different from ordinary causal explanations. It would imply that our notions of explanation and causation are ambiguous concepts. Reasons that cause agents to act in the physical world would be conceived of as causes in a very different sense than ordinary physical causes. Moreover, as Hempel himself suggests, appealing to normative principles explains at most why a person should have acted in a certain manner. It does not explain why he ultimately acted in that way. Consequently, Hempel's objection against empathy retain their force as long as one maintains that reason explanations are a form of ordinary causal explanations and as long as one conceives of the epistemic justification of such explanations as implicitly appealing to some empirical generalizations.

Despite these concessions to Hempel, Stueber suggests that empathy (specifically reenactive empathy) has to be acknowledged as playing a central role even in the context of justification. For him, folk psychological explanations have to be understood as being tied to the domain of rational agency. In contrast to explanations in terms of mere inner causes, folk psychological explanations retain their explanatory force only as long as agents' beliefs and desires can also be understood as reasons for their actions. The epistemic justification of such folk psychological explanations implicitly relies on generalizations involving folk psychological notions such as belief and desire. Yet the existence of such generalizations alone does not establish specific beliefs and desires as reasons for a person's actions. Elaborating on considerations by Heal (2003) and Collingwood (1946), Stueber suggests that recognizing beliefs and desires as reasons requires the interpreter to be sensitive to an agent's other relevant beliefs and desires. Individual thoughts function as reasons for rational agency only relative to a specific framework of an agent's thoughts that are relevant for consideration in a specific situation. Most plausibly—given our persistent inability to solve the frame problem—recognizing which of another agent's thoughts are relevant in specific contexts requires the practical ability of reenacting another person's thoughts in one's own mind. Empathy's central epistemic role has to be admitted, since beliefs and desires can be understood only in this manner as an agent's reasons. (See Stueber 2002, 2003 and 2006, chaps. 4 and 5). For similar reasons, Stueber (2006, chap. 6) argues that, while the above objections to empathy from hermeneutic philosophers limit the scope of empathy within the social sciences, they do not imply that empathy has no role to play in our understanding of individual agency. Rather, empathy should be seen as the implicit default method for understanding individual agency that needs at times to be supplemented by various theoretical and narrative strategies (See also Henderson and Horgan 2000 and Stueber 2008).

The discussion of empathy within psychology has been largely unaffected by the critical discussion and negative view of empathy that became prevalent in mainstream philosophical circles until the 1980's. Rather, psychologists were more influenced by the positive evaluation of empathy by philosophers from the beginning of the century. Empathy related phenomena were in general understood as playing an important role in interpersonal understanding and as causal factors motivating humans to act in a prosocial manner. Indeed by the time philosophers were ready to retire the empathy concept, psychologists tried to investigate empathy in an experimentally rigorous manner. Throughout the early 20 th century, but particularly since the late 1940's, empathy has been an intensively studied topic of psychological research.

As psychologists themselves have become increasingly aware, the empirical investigation of empathy has been hindered (particularly in the beginning) by conceptual confusions and a multiplicity of definitions of the empathy concept. (See for example Davis 1994 and Eisenberg and Strayer 1987). Within social psychology, this state of affairs is due to the fact that the empathy concept merged with and completely replaced the multi-dimensional concept of sympathy used by earlier psychologists and philosophers (Wispe 1986, 1987, and particularly 1991). Whereas the emphasis in the philosophical discussion—outside the context of aesthetics—lay on empathy's cognitive role in providing us with knowledge of other minds, the concept of sympathy was primarily situated within the context of moral psychology and moral philosophy. In the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, sympathy referred to a family of psychological mechanisms that would allow us to explain how an individual could be concerned about and motivated to act on behalf of another human being. Given its focus on human social motivation, it is no wonder that within this context one did not only stress cognitive abilities to understand other persons. One also referred to our emotional reactivity in encountering another person, particularly when perceiving another person's suffering or distress. [ 5 ]

More broadly one can distinguish two psychological research traditions studying empathy related phenomena; that is, the study of what is currently called empathic accuracy and the study of empathy as an emotional phenomenon in the encounter of others. The first area of study defines empathy primarily as a cognitive phenomenon and conceives of empathy in general terms as “the intellectual or imaginative apprehension of another's condition or state of mind,” to use Hogan's (1969) terminology. Within this area of research, one is primarily interested in determining the reliability and accuracy of our ability to perceive and recognize other persons' enduring personality traits, attitudes and values, and occurrent mental states. One also investigates the various factors that influence empathic accuracy. One has, for example, been interested in determining whether empathic ability depends on gender, age, family background, intelligence, emotional stability, the nature of interpersonal relations, or whether it depends on specific motivations of the observer. (For a survey see Ickes 1993 and 2003; and Taft 1955). A more detailed account of the research on empathic accuracy and some of its earlier methodological difficulties can be found in the

Supplementary document on the Study of Cognitive Empathy and Empathic Accuracy .

Philosophically more influential has been the study of empathy defined primarily as an emotional or affective phenomenon, which psychologists in the middle of the 1950's started to focus on. In this context, psychologists have also addressed issues of moral motivation that have been traditionally topics of intense discussions among moral philosophers. They were particularly interested to investigate (i) the development of various means for measuring empathy as a dispositional trait of adults and of children and as a situational response in specific situations, (ii) the factors on which empathic responses and dispositions depend, and (iii) the relation between empathy and pro-social behavior and moral development. Before discussing the psychological research on emotional empathy and its relevance for moral philosophy and moral psychology in the next section, it is vital to introduce important conceptual distinctions that one should keep in mind in evaluating the various empirical studies.

Anyone reading the emotional empathy literature has to be struck by the fact that empathy tended to be incredibly broadly defined in the beginning of this specific research tradition. Stotland, one of the earliest researcher who understood empathy exclusively as an emotional phenomenon, defined it as “an observer's reacting emotionally because he perceives that another is experiencing or is about to experience an emotion” (1969, 272). According to Stotland's definition very diverse emotional responses such as feeling envy, feeling annoyed, feeling distressed, being relieved about, feeling pity, or feeling what Germans call Schadenfreude (feeling joyful about the misfortune of another) have all to be counted as empathic reactions. Since the 1980's however, psychologists have fine tuned their understanding of empathy conceptually and distinguished between different aspects of the emotional reaction to another person; thereby implicitly acknowledging the conceptual distinctions articulated by Max Scheler (1973) almost a century earlier. In this context, it is particularly useful to distinguish between the following reactive emotions that are differentiated in respect to whether or not such reactions are self or other oriented and whether they presuppose awareness of the distinction between self and others. (See also the survey in the Introduction to Eisenberg/Strayer 1987, and the introduction in Stueber 2006)

• Emotional contagion: Emotional contagion occurs when people start feeling similar emotions caused merely by the association with other people. You start feeling joyful, because other people around you are joyful or you start feeling panicky because you are in a crowd of people feeling panic. Emotional contagion however does not require that one is aware of the fact that one experiences the emotions because other people experience them, rather one experiences them primarily as one's own emotion (Scheler 1973, 22). A newborn infant's reactive cry to the distress cry of another, which Hoffman takes as a “rudimentary precursor of empathic distress” (Hoffman 2000, 65), can probably be understood as a phenomenon of emotional contagion, since the infant is not able to properly distinguish between self and other.

Affective Empathy: More narrowly and properly understood, empathy in the affective sense is the vicarious sharing of an affect. It is an emotional response involving in Hoffman's words “the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another's situation than with his own situation” (Hoffman 2000, 30). According to this definition, empathy does not necessarily require that the subject and target feel similar emotions (even though this is most often the case). Rather the definition also includes cases of feeling sad when seeing a child who plays joyfully but who does not know that it has been diagnosed with a serious illness (assuming that this is how the other person himself or herself would feel if he or she would fully understand his or her situation). In contrast to mere emotional contagion, genuine empathy presupposes the ability to differentiate between oneself and the other. It requires that one is minimally aware of the fact that one is having an emotional experience due to the perception of the other's emotion, or more generally due to attending to his situation. In seeing a sad face of another and feeling sad oneself, such feeling of sadness should count as genuinely empathic only if one recognizes that in feeling sad one's attention is still focused on the other and that it is not an appropriate reaction to aspects of one's own life. Moreover, empathy outside the realm of a direct perceptual encounter involves some appreciation of the other person's emotion as an appropriate response to his or her situation. To be happy or unhappy because one's child is happy or sad should not count necessarily as an empathic emotion. It cannot count as a vicarious emotional response if it is due to the perception of the outside world from the perspective of the observer and her desire that her children should be happy. My happiness about my child being happy would therefore not be an emotional state that is more congruent to his situation. Rather, it is an emotional response appropriate to my own perspective on the world. In order for my happiness or unhappiness to be genuinely empathic it has to be happiness or unhappiness about what makes the other person happy. (See Sober and Wilson 1998, 231-237; for a useful discussion see also H. Maibom 2007). It is exactly for this reason that perspective taking has been traditionally conceived of as a mechanism of empathy. Yet it has to be admitted that empirically both forms of emotional responses are very often intertwined.

Sympathy: In contrast to affective empathy, sympathy is not an emotion that is congruent with the other's emotion or situation such as feeling the sadness of the other person's grieving for the death of his father. Rather, sympathy is seen as an emotion sui generis that has the other's negative emotion or situation as its object from the perspective of somebody who cares for the other person's well being (Darwall 1998). In this sense, sympathy consists of “feeling sorrow or concern for the distressed or needy other,” a feeling for the other out of a “heightened awareness of the suffering of another person as something that needs to be alleviated.” (Eisenberg 2000a, 678; Wispe 1986, 318; and Wispe 1991).

Whereas it is quite plausible to assume that empathy—that is, empathy with negative emotions of another or what Hoffman (2000) calls “veridical empathic distress”—under certain conditions (and when certain developmental markers are achieved) can give rise to sympathy, it should be stressed that the relation between affective empathy and sympathy is a contingent one; the understanding of which requires further empirical research. First, sympathy does not necessarily require feeling any kind of congruent emotions on part of the observer, a detached recognition or representation that the other is in need or suffers might be sufficient. (See Scheler 1973 and Nichols 2004). Second, empathy or empathic distress might not at all lead to sympathy. People in the helping professions, who are so accustomed to the misery of others, suffer at times from compassion fatigue. It is also possible to experience empathic overarousal because one is emotionally so overwhelmed by one's empathic feelings that one is unable to be concerned with the suffering of the other (Hoffman 2000, chap. 8). In the later case, one's empathic feeling are transformed or give rise to mere personal distress, a reactive emotional phenomenon that needs to be distinguished from emotional contagion, empathy, and sympathy.

Personal Distress: Personal distress in the context of empathy research is understood as a reactive emotion in response to the perception/recognition of another's negative emotion or situation. Yet, while personal distress is other-caused like sympathy, it is, in contrast to sympathy, primarily self-oriented . In this case, another person's distress does not make me feel bad for him or her, it just makes me feel bad, or “alarmed, grieved, upset, worried, disturbed, perturbed, distressed,and troubled;” to use the list of adjectives that according to Bateson's research indicates personal distress (Batson et al. 1987 and Batson 1991). And, in contrast to empathic emotions as defined above, my personal distress is not any more congruent with the emotion or situation of another. Rather it wholly defines my own outlook onto the world.

While it is conceptually necessary to differentiate between these various emotional responses, it has to be admitted that it is empirically not very easy to discriminate between them, since they tend to occur together. This is probably one reason why early researchers tended not to distinguish between the above aspects in their study of empathy related phenomena. Yet for the purpose of evaluating the impact and contribution of empathy to an agent's motivation (and for evaluating empathy's centrality for moral psychology), it is important to distinguish between various aspects of emotional responding to another person. As Batson's work—summarized in his 1991—suggests, personal distress is only inducing us to help another for egoistic reasons: One wants to get rid of the unpleasant feeling of seeing the other in need, and one helps because one conceives of helping as a means of achieving those egoistic ends. Feelings of being sympathetic, moved by, being compassionate, tender, warm and soft-hearted towards the other's plight (Batson et al. 1987, 26)—that is, feelings that are associated with sympathy according to the above classification but which Batson calls feelings of empathy (see his 1991 , 86/87)—on the other hand motivate for altruistic reasons. In such altruistic motivations the welfare of the other is the ultimate goal of my helping behavior (for this terminology see Sober and Wilson 1998); my helping behavior is not regarded to be a further means to another goal that I desire. Nevertheless, given the ambiguity of the empathy concept within psychology—particularly in the earlier literature—in evaluating and comparing different empirical empathy studies it is always crucial to keep in mind how empathy has been defined and measured within the context of these studies. For a more extensive discussion of the methods used by psychologists to measure empathy see the

Supplementary document on Measuring Empathy .

5. Empathy and Moral Psychology

Moral philosophers have always been concerned with moral psychology and with articulating an agent's motivational structure, since the philosophical articulation of principles for the normative evaluation of human behavior has to be psychologically plausible. Normative rules are commonly thought of as expressing an obligation for human agents and as asserting a motivational pull on the agent's will. For that very reason, descriptive knowledge of the psychological or biological constitution of human beings can be understood as providing us with knowledge of plausible constraints for evaluating the validity of various normative standards. Moreover, two additional assumptions have traditionally been important for considerations by moral philosophers. First, moral norms have to be distinguished from mere social conventions in that they are somehow regarded to be universally valid, independent from the commands of social authority and a particular culture. Second, moral motivation is in some sense self-less, it is not the mere satisfaction of selfish desires (an intuition that despite their differences both Kant and Schopenhauer agree on.) Giving to charity for selfish reasons seems to diminish the moral worth of that action. For Kant, both intuitions imply that we have to think of morality and moral norms as being derived from pure reason with its abstract notions of duty and conformity to the law. Philosophers who have been skeptical about the claim that pure reason with its abstract notion of duty can be motivationally effective, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize our natural ability to sympathize with the suffering of other people and have claimed that sympathy has to be seen as the primary non-selfish (moral) motivation in human beings.(See Schopenhauer's critique of Kant (Schopenhauer 1995) in this respect). Moreover, some philosophers like Smith (1853/1966) and Schopenhauer (1995) also suggest that the normative force of various moral standards is derived from reflections on the results of sympathizing with others in various situations. Yet the claim that sympathy leads to actions that are in some sense selflessly motivated and that it is the capacity for sympathy that is empirically necessary for moral agency has never been sufficiently substantiated by those very same philosophers. It is easily imaginable that, even if the suffering of another person makes me feel sad, I am just interested in helping the other person not for selfless reasons—because I am interested in his well-being—but because I want for selfish reasons to get rid off a bad feeling. It is also imaginable that moral agency is possible without sympathy, even if as a matter of fact most people do have such feelings from time to time. It is exactly for this very reason that psychological research on emotional empathy has become so important for contemporary philosophers. It promises that the question regarding the validity of some of the above assumptions about the structure of human motivation can be answered in an empirically informed and rigorous manner. In this context, the work of the psychologists Batson and Hoffman are of particular interest.

In a series of ingeniously designed experiments, Batson has accumulated evidence for what he calls the empathy-altruism thesis. The task of those experiments consists in showing that empathy/sympathy does indeed lead to genuinely altruistic motivation rather than to helping behavior because of predominantly egoistic motivations. According to the egoistic interpretation of empathy related phenomena, empathizing with another person in need is associated with a negative feeling or can lead to a heightened awareness of the negative consequences of not helping; such as feelings of guilt, shame, or social sanctions. Alternatively, it can lead to an enhanced recognition of the positive consequences of helping behavior such as social rewards or good feelings. Empathy according to this interpretation induces us to help through mediation of purely egoistic motivations. We help others only because we recognize helping behavior as a means to egoistic ends. It allows us to reduce our negative feelings (aversive arousal reduction hypothesis), to avoid “punishment,” or to gain specific internal or external “rewards” (empathy-specific punishment and empathy-specific reward hypotheses).

Notice however that in arguing for the empathy-altruism thesis, Batson is not claiming that empathy always induces helping behavior. Rather, he argues against the predominance of an egoistic interpretation of an agent's motivational structure. He argues for the existence of genuinely altruistic motivations and more specifically for the claim that empathy causes such genuinely altruistic motivation. These genuinely altruistic motives (together with other egoistic motives) are taken into account by the individual agent in deliberating about whether or not to help. Even for Batson, the question of whether the agent will act on his or her altruistic motivations depends ultimately on how strong they are and what costs the agent would occur in helping another person.

The basic set up of Batson's experiments consists in the manipulation of the situation of the experimental subjects (dependent on the egoistic alternative to be argued against) and the manipulation of empathy/sympathy felt for an observed target in need. The decisive evidence for the empathy/sympathy-altruism thesis is always the recorded behavior of the subject, who is in a high empathy condition and in a situation where his helping behavior can not plausibly be seen as a means for the satisfaction of a personal goal. Since here is not the place to extensively describe the details of Batson's experiments, a brief description of the experimental set up—focusing on Batson's argument against the aversive arousal interpretation of empathy—and a brief evaluation of the success of his general argumentative strategy has to suffice (for more details see Batson 1991). In all of his experiments Batson assumes—based on Stotland (1969) and others—that empathy/sympathy can be manipulated either by manipulating the perceived similarity between subjects and targets or by manipulating the perspective taking attitude of the subjects. Empathy according to these assumptions can be increased by enhancing the perceived similarity between subject and target or by asking the subject to imagine how the observed person would feel in his or her situation rather than asking the subject to attend carefully to the information provided. [Note also that instructing the subject to imagine how they themselves would feel in the other's situation, rather than instructing them to imagine how the other feels, is associated with an increase in personal distress and not only sympathetic feelings. (Batson et al. 1997b and Lamm, Batson, and Decety 2007).]

In trying to argue against the aversive arousal reduction interpretation, Batson also manipulates the ease with which a subject can avoid helping another person (in this case taking his place when they see him getting electric shocks). He reasons that if empathy leads to genuinely altruistic motivations, subjects in the high empathy/easy escape condition should still be willing to help. If they were only helping in order to reduce their own negative feelings, they would be expected to leave in this situation, since leaving is the less costly means for reaching an egoistic goal. As Batson was happy to report, the results confirmed his empathy/sympathy-altruism hypothesis, not only in the above experiments but also in experiments testing other alternative interpretations of empathy such as the empathy- specific punishment and the empathy-specific award hypotheses.

Researchers generally agree in finding Batson's experimental research program and the accumulated evidence for the empathy-altruism thesis to be impressive. Yet they disagree about how persuasive one should ultimately regard his position. In particular it has been pointed out that his experiments have limited value, since they target only very specific egoistic accounts of why empathy might lead to helping behavior. Batson is not able to dismiss conclusively every alternative egoistic interpretation. In addition, it has been claimed that egoism has the resources to account for the result of his experiments. For example, one might challenge the validity of Batson's interpretation by speculating whether empathy/sympathy leads to a heightened awareness of the fact that one will be troubled by bad memories of seeing another person in need, if one does nothing to help him or her. In this case even an egoistically motivated person would help in the high empathy/easy escape condition. (For this reply and various other egoistic interpretations of Batson's experiments see Sober and Wilson 1998, 264-271).

Cialdini and his collaborators have suggested an even more elaborate non-altruistic interpretation of helping behavior in high empathy/easy escape conditions. According to their suggestions, conditions of high empathy are also conditions of increased “interpersonal unity, wherein the conception of self and other are not distinct but are merged to some degree” (Cialdini et al. 1997, 490). It is this increased feeling of oneness rather than empathy that is causally responsible for motivating helping behavior (For a discussion see Batson et al. 1997a, Neuberg et al. 1997, and Batson 1997). One therefore has to be cautious in claiming that Batson has conclusively proven that the empathy/sympathy-altruism hypothesis is true, if that means one has logically excluded every egoistic alternative in accounting for helping behavior. But it has to be acknowledged that Batson has radically changed the argumentative dialectic of the egoism-altruism debate by forcing the egoistic account of human agency to come up with ever more elaborate alternative interpretations in order to account for helping behavior within its framework. Egoism was supposed to provide a rather unified and relatively simple account of the motivational structure of human agency. In challenging the predominance and simplicity of this framework in an empirically acute fashion, Batson has at least established altruism—claiming that besides egoistic motivations we are also motivated by genuinely altruistic reasons—as an empirically plausible hypothesis. He has shown it to be a hypothesis one is almost persuaded to believe that it is true, as he himself recently has characterized his own epistemic attitude (Batson 1997, 522.) More positively expressed, Batson's research has at least demonstrated that empathy/sympathy is a causal factor in bringing about helping behavior. Regardless of the question of the exact nature of the underlying motivation for helping or prosocial behavior, psychologists generally assume that in adults and children a positive correlation between empathy—measured in a variety of ways—and prosocial behavior has been established; and this despite the fact that the above aspects of emotional responding to another person have not always been sufficiently distinguished. (For a survey see Eisenberg and Miller 1987; Eisenberg/Fabes 1998. For a general survey of the various factors contributing to prosocial behavior see Bierhoff 2002).

Regardless of how exactly one views the strength of Batson's position, his research alone does not validate the thesis, articulated by various traditional moral philosophers, that sympathy or empathy is the basis of morality or that it constitutes the only source for moral motivation. First, nothing in his research has shown that empathy/sympathy is empirically necessary for moral agency. Second, some of Batson's own research casts doubt on the claim that sympathy/empathy is the foundation of morality as empathy induced altruism can lead to behavior that conflicts with our principles of justice and fairness. One, for example, tends to assign a better job or a higher priority for receiving medical treatment to persons with whom one has actually sympathized, in violation of the above moral principles (See Batson et al. 1995). Empathy/Sympathy has to be regarded as being prone to certain non-moral biases. Whereas our feeling of sympathy/empathy might lead to selfless and other oriented behavior, such behavior is not necessarily derived from the right sort of selflessness and impartiality characteristic of the moral attitude. Since Batson understands empathy primarily as an emotional phenomenon, it should also be kept in mind that the research discussed above is not at all relevant for deciding the question of whether or not sophisticated mindreading abilities are required for full blown moral agency. (See Nichols 2001 and Batson et al. 2003 in this respect.)

Within the psychological literature, one of the most comprehensive accounts of empathy and its relation to the moral development of a person is provided by the work of Martin Hoffman (for a summary see his 2000). Hoffman views empathy as a biologically based disposition for altruistic behavior (Hoffman 1981). He conceives of empathy as being due to various modes of arousal allowing us to respond empathically in light of a variety of distress cues from another person. Hoffman mentions mimicry, classical conditioning, and direct association—where one empathizes because the other's situation reminds one of one's own painful experience—as “fast acting and automatic” mechanisms producing an empathic response. As more cognitively demanding modes, Hoffman lists mediated association—where the cues for an empathic response are provided in a linguistic medium—and role taking.

Hoffman also distinguishes between five developmental stages of empathic responses ranging from the reactive newborn cry, egocentric empathic distress, quasi-ego-centric empathic distress, to veridical distress and empathy for another beyond the immediate situation. He conceives of full blown empathy on a developmental continuum that ranges from emotional contagion (as in the case of a reactive newborn cry) to empathy proper reached at the fourth stage. At the developmentally later stages, the child is able to emotionally respond to the distress of another in a more sophisticated manner due to an increase of cognitive capacities, particularly due to the increased cognitive ability to distinguish between self and other and by becoming aware of the fact that others have mental states that are independent from its own. Only at the fourth stage of empathic development (after the middle of the second year) do children acquire such abilities. They do no longer try to comfort themselves, when emotionally responding to another child's distress—like seeking comfort from their own mother—, or use helping strategies that are more appropriate to comfort themselves than the other person—like using their own teddy-bear in trying to comfort the other child. Only at the fourth stage does empathy become also transformed or associated with sympathy leading to appropriate prosocial behavior. Hoffman's developmental view is further supported by Preston and DeWaal's account of empathy as a phenomenon to be observed across species at various levels of complexities related to different degrees of cognitive development. (Preston and DeWaal 2002a,b. For a discussion of the philosophical relevance of DeWaal's view see also DeWaal 2006).

Significantly, Hoffman combines his developmental explication of empathy with a sophisticated analysis of its importance for moral agency. Since Hoffman is acutely aware of the limitations of empathy (some of which have been mentioned above), he does not regard the moral realm as being exclusively circumscribed by our ability to empathize with other people. Besides empathic abilities, moral agency requires also knowledge of abstract moral principles, such as the principles of caring and justice. Hoffman seems to conceive of those principles as being derived from cognitive sources that are independent from our empathic abilities. For him, stable and effective moral agency requires empathy in order for moral principles to have a motivational basis in an agent's psychology. Knowledge of abstract moral principles is however needed in order to overcome the limits and biases of an emotional and empathic response to seeing others in distress.

Hoffman's remarks about the centrality of empathy for moral agency and his account of the relation between empathy and universal moral rules are certainly suggestive. However, they are in need of further empirical confirmation and philosophical clarification, so that one can more fully understand how empathy/sympathy as a non-moral emotional phenomenon provides a motivational basis for moral principles. In recent years, some additional, even if contested, evidence for the importance of empathy and the philosophically central question of whether one should conceive of moral judgments and moral motivation in a broadly Humean sentimentalist or in a Kantian rationalist manner has come from an empirical investigation into the causes of psychopathy and autism; both of which are seen as involving a deficit in some dimensions of empathy. Blair, for example, argues that psychopaths' inability to behave morally is related to a deficit in empathy or a reduced ability to emotionally respond to the observation of distress in others (Blair, Mitchel, and Blair 2005). Autistic persons on the other hand behave morally because they still are able to appropriately respond to the distress of others, despite their generally reduced mindreading abilities (Blair 1996). Other philosophers, however, link the moral shortcomings of psychopaths to a deficit in their rational capacities. It has also been argued that evidence from autistic individuals, whose imaginative role-playing and thus empathic capacities are diminished, does not support the claim that empathy is necessary for moral agency. It rather suggests that empathy plays a contingent role in the normal development of a moral agent in making it easier to live up to moral standards. (For a position understanding psychopathy as rational deficit see Maibom 2005. For claiming that empathy is not essential for moral agency based on an interpretation of research on autism see Kennett 2002. See Nichols 2004 for understanding psychopathy as an affective deficit and for emphasizing the role of affects for moral agency. See Deigh 1996 for an interesting attempt to recognize the importance of empathy within a Kantian framework).

The discussion of empathy within the context of moral psychology has to be regarded as an on-going debate that would benefit from further conceptual clarification and an empirical investigation of the underlying neurobiological mechanism of empathy (See particularly the research by Decety and his collaborators; for example, Decety and Jackson 2004, 2006 and Decety and Lamm 2006). Moreover, in order to fully delineate the role and necessity of empathy for moral agency, one should not only focus one's investigation on empathy. One should also take into account all of the factors potentially contributing to moral behavior as, for example, the whole range of moral emotions like shame and guilt (Eisenberg 2000b and Bierhoff 2002).

This entry has delineated some of the main domains of traditional and more recent philosophical discussion within which empathy has played an important role. It has also analyzed various areas of psychological empathy research, particularly if they intersect with philosophical interests. At the end, it is important to emphasize that empathy is the topic of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project that has transcended the disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries, which have characterized empathy research so far. Specifically, the addition of a neuroscientific perspective has been crucial in recent years. Such interdiciplinarity has also alleviated and helped in overcoming the conceptual confusions hindering and unnecessarily compartmentalizing the scientific study of empathy. For that very reason, researchers in psychology nowadays tend no longer to conceive of empathy exclusively either in affective or cognitive terms but as encompassing both. Such a unified conception of empathy is further supported by the above mentioned neuroscientific research on mirror neurons. If mirror neurons are indeed the primary underlying causal mechanisms for cognitively recognizing certain emotional states in others by looking at their facial expressions, then it is quite understandable how such an observation could also lead to the feeling of an emotion that is more congruent with the situation of the other; that is, to empathy in the affective sense. Such affective responses are due to the fact that the perception of another person activates similar neurons in the subject and the target. Moreover, the above research would also suggest that empathy is indeed a phenomenon to be found across various species—given the fact that neuronal mirror systems are found across species—and a phenomenon at various levels of complexity starting with the capacity for emotional contagion to proper affective empathy and sympathy in light of increased cognitive capacities and abilities to distinguish between self and other (Preston and DeWaal 2002a, b). In thinking of empathy in such a unified manner, current empathy research in psychology and neuroscience connects again with the philosophical tradition from the beginning of the 20 th century. It is to be hoped that further interdisciplinary research—freed from the limitations of the framework of psychological research of the middle of the 20 th century—will enable us to acquire a better understanding of empathy's importance for understanding other agents. It should do so by enabling us to conceive of empathy in a conceptually concise and differentiated manner and by providing us with an even more detailed picture of its underlying mechanisms.

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Collingwood, Robin George | folk psychology: as mental simulation | hermeneutics | Husserl, Edmund | moral psychology: empirical approaches | other minds | phenomenology

Essays About Empathy: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

If you’re writing essays about empathy, check out our essay examples and prompts to get started. 

Empathy is the ability to understand and share other people’s emotions. It is the very notion which To Kill a Mockingbird character Atticus Finch was driving at when he advised his daughter Scout to “climb inside [other people’s] skin and walk around in it.” 

Being able to feel the joy and sorrow of others and see the world from their perspective are extraordinary human capabilities that shape our social landscape. But beyond its effect on personal and professional relationships, empathy motivates kind actions that can trickle positive change across society. 

If you are writing an article about empathy, here are five insightful essay examples to inspire you: 

1. Do Art and Literature Cultivate Empathy? by Nick Haslam

2. empathy: overrated by spencer kornhaber, 3. in our pandemic era, why we must teach our children compassion by rebecca roland, 4. why empathy is a must-have business strategy by belinda parmar, 5. the evolution of empathy by frans de waal, 1. teaching empathy in the classroom., 2. how can companies nurture empathy in the workplace, 3. how can we develop empathy, 4. how do you know if someone is empathetic, 5. does empathy spark helpful behavior , 6. empathy vs. sympathy., 7. empathy as a winning strategy in sports. , 8. is there a decline in human empathy, 9. is digital media affecting human empathy, 10. your personal story of empathy..

“Exposure to literature and the sorts of movies that do not involve car chases might nurture our capacity to get inside the skins of other people. Alternatively, people who already have well-developed empathic abilities might simply find the arts more engaging…”

Haslam, a psychology professor, laid down several studies to present his thoughts and analysis on the connection between empathy and art. While one study has shown that literary fiction can help develop empathy, there’s still lacking evidence to show that more exposure to art and literature can help one be more empathetic. You can also check out these essays about character .

“Empathy doesn’t even necessarily make day-to-day life more pleasant, they contend, citing research that shows a person’s empathy level has little or no correlation with kindness or giving to charity.”

This article takes off from a talk of psychology experts on a crusade against empathy. The experts argue that empathy could be “innumerate, parochial, bigoted” as it zooms one to focus on an individual’s emotions and fail to see the larger picture. This problem with empathy can motivate aggression and wars and, as such, must be replaced with a much more innate trait among humans: compassion.

“Showing empathy can be especially hard for kids… Especially in times of stress and upset, they may retreat to focusing more on themselves — as do we adults.”

Roland encourages fellow parents to teach their kids empathy, especially amid the pandemic, where kindness is needed the most. She advises parents to seize everyday opportunities by ensuring “quality conversations” and reinforcing their kids to view situations through other people’s lenses. 

“Mental health, stress and burnout are now perceived as responsibilities of the organization. The failure to deploy empathy means less innovation, lower engagement and reduced loyalty, as well as diluting your diversity agenda.”

The spike in anxiety disorders and mental health illnesses brought by the COVID-19 pandemic has given organizations a more considerable responsibility: to listen to employees’ needs sincerely. Parmar underscores how crucial it is for a leader to take empathy as a fundamental business strategy and provides tips on how businesses can adjust to the new norm. 

“The evolution of empathy runs from shared emotions and intentions between individuals to a greater self/other distinction—that is, an “unblurring” of the lines between individuals.”

The author traces the evolutionary roots of empathy back to our primate heritage — ultimately stemming from the parental instinct common to mammals. Ultimately, the author encourages readers to conquer “tribal differences” and continue turning to their emotions and empathy when making moral decisions.

10 Interesting Writing prompts on Essays About Empathy

Check out below our list of exciting prompts to help you buckle down to your writing:

This essay discuss teaching empathy in the classroom. Is this an essential skill that we should learn in school? Research how schools cultivate children’s innate empathy and compassion. Then, based on these schools’ experiences, provide tips on how other schools can follow suit. 

An empathetic leader is said to help boost positive communication with employees, retain indispensable talent and create positive long-term outcomes. This is an interesting topic to research, and there are plenty of studies on this topic online with data that you can use in your essay. So, pick these best practices to promote workplace empathy and discuss their effectiveness.

Write down a list of deeds and activities people can take as their first steps to developing empathy. These activities can range from volunteering in their communities to reaching out to a friend in need simply. Then, explain how each of these acts can foster empathy and kindness. 

Based on studies, list the most common traits, preferences, and behaviour of an empathetic person. For example, one study has shown that empathetic people prefer non-violent movies. Expound on this list with the support of existing studies. You can support or challenge these findings in this essay for a compelling argumentative essay. Make sure to conduct your research and cite all the sources used. 

Empathy is a buzzword closely associated with being kind and helpful. However, many experts in recent years have been opining that it takes more than empathy to propel an act of kindness and that misplaced empathy can even lead to apathy. Gather what psychologists and emotional experts have been saying on this debate and input your analysis. 

Empathy and sympathy have been used synonymously, even as these words differ in meaning. Enlighten your readers on the differences and provide situations that clearly show the contrast between empathy and sympathy. You may also add your take on which trait is better to cultivate.

Empathy has been deemed vital in building cooperation. A member who empathizes with the team can be better in tune with the team’s goals, cooperate effectively and help drive success. You may research how athletic teams foster a culture of empathy beyond the sports fields. Write about how coaches are integrating empathy into their coaching strategy. 

Several studies have warned that empathy has been on a downward trend over the years. Dive deep into studies that investigate this decline. Summarize each and find common points. Then, cite the significant causes and recommendations in this study. You can also provide insights on whether this should cause alarm and how societies should address the problem. 

There is a broad sentiment that social media has been driving people to live in a bubble and be less empathetic — more narcissistic. However, some point out that intensifying competition and increasing economic pressures are more to blame for reducing our empathetic feelings. Research and write about what experts have to say and provide a personal touch by adding your experience. 

Acts of kindness abound every day. But sometimes, we fail to capture or take them for granted. Write about your unforgettable encounters with empathetic people. Then, create a storytelling essay to convey your personal view on empathy. This activity can help you appreciate better the little good things in life. 

Check out our general resource of essay writing topics and stimulate your creative mind! 

See our round-up of the best essay checkers to ensure your writing is error-free.

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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The Heartbeat of Humanity: Deciphering the Essence of Empathy

This essay about the profound essence of empathy, portraying it as a vital force shaping human connections and societal dynamics. It emphasizes empathy’s role in fostering understanding, compassion, and solidarity across diverse domains, including healthcare, education, and social justice activism. Through empathic engagement, individuals bridge the gaps of isolation, cultivate inclusive communities, and advocate for justice and equity. Empathy emerges as a guiding principle that enriches human relationships, inspires positive change, and nurtures a more compassionate and interconnected world.

How it works

Empathy, akin to a subtle melody woven into the fabric of human existence, reveals itself as a beacon illuminating the pathways of connection and understanding. Its essence, akin to a delicate dance of emotions, transcends the confines of language, culture, and circumstance. To unravel the intricacies of empathy is to embark on a journey of profound discovery, one that unveils the depths of human consciousness and the power of compassionate resonance.

At its core, empathy emerges as a radiant force, igniting flames of understanding and solidarity amidst the tumultuous landscapes of human relationships.

It is more than a fleeting sentiment or a fleeting act of kindness; rather, it embodies a profound recognition of the shared human experience, where joy and sorrow intertwine, and the boundaries between self and other blur into insignificance. In essence, empathy serves as a bridge that spans the chasm of isolation, inviting individuals to traverse the terrain of emotional connection and forge bonds that transcend the constraints of individuality.

The tapestry of empathy, woven from the threads of understanding and compassion, finds expression in myriad forms across diverse domains of human endeavor. From the hallowed halls of healthcare institutions to the bustling corridors of corporate boardrooms, its presence permeates every facet of societal interaction, shaping attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes in profound ways. Within the realm of healthcare, empathy emerges as a guiding principle, informing the practices of physicians, nurses, and caregivers as they navigate the complexities of human suffering and healing. Through empathic engagement, healthcare professionals not only alleviate physical pain but also tend to the emotional and spiritual needs of their patients, fostering a sense of dignity, respect, and trust in the healing process.

Moreover, empathy assumes paramount importance within the realm of education, where it serves as a cornerstone of effective teaching and learning. Educators endowed with empathic attunement possess a unique ability to connect with their students on a deeper level, fostering a nurturing environment where curiosity is cultivated, creativity is unleashed, and potential is realized. By recognizing and validating the diverse experiences and perspectives of their students, empathic educators create inclusive learning communities where every voice is heard and every individual is valued.

In the realm of social justice and activism, empathy emerges as a powerful catalyst for change, inspiring individuals to advocate for the rights and dignity of marginalized communities. Through acts of solidarity, compassion, and allyship, empathic individuals challenge oppressive systems and work towards building a more just and equitable society. By bearing witness to the struggles and triumphs of others, they amplify marginalized voices, dismantle barriers to inclusion, and foster a culture of empathy and understanding.

In conclusion, empathy stands as a testament to the boundless capacity of the human spirit to connect, to understand, and to uplift one another in times of need. It is a guiding light that illuminates the darkest corners of the human experience, offering solace, compassion, and hope in the face of adversity. As we cultivate empathy within ourselves and within our communities, we sow the seeds of a more compassionate and inclusive world, where understanding reigns supreme and the bonds of human connection transcend the barriers of fear and division.

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Definition of empathy

Did you know.

Sympathy vs. Empathy

Sympathy and empathy both refer to a caring response to the emotional state of another person, but a distinction between them is typically made: while sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful, empathy involves actively sharing in the emotional experience of the other person.

Sympathy has been in use since the 16th century, and its greater age is reflected in its wider breadth of meanings, including “a feeling of loyalty” and “unity or harmony in action or effect.” It comes ultimately from the Greek sympathēs , meaning “having common feelings, sympathetic,” which was formed from syn- (“with, together with”) and páthos , “experience, misfortune, emotion, condition.” Empathy was modeled on sympathy ; it was coined in the early 20th century as a translation of the German Einfühlung (“feeling-in” or “feeling into”). First applied in contexts of philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology, empathy continues to have technical use in those fields that sympathy does not.

What is the difference between empathy and compassion ?

Compassion and empathy both refer to a caring response to someone else’s distress. While empathy refers to an active sharing in the emotional experience of the other person, compassion adds to that emotional experience a desire to alleviate the person’s distress.

… the story of Nellie Bly, the first female investigative reporter, who not only demanded justice from powerful institutions, but also insisted on dignity and compassion for the most vulnerable citizens. — The Christian Science Monitor , 17 Aug. 2022 Blonde clearly wants us to feel for Norma Jeane, but it dwells on her pain so obsessively … that the movie's empathy feels like another form of exploitation. — Justin Chang, NPR , 23 Sept. 2022

The distinction between compassion and empathy is frequently a topic of exploration.

By empathy I mean feeling the feelings of other people. So if you’re in pain and I feel your pain—I am feeling empathy toward you. If you’re being anxious, I pick up your anxiety. If you’re sad and I pick up your sadness, I’m being empathetic. And that’s different from compassion. Compassion means I give your concern weight, I value it. I care about you, but I don’t necessarily pick up your feelings. … [I]f I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better. — Paul Bloom, quoted in Vox , 16 Jan. 2019

Compassion is a much older word; it’s been part of the language since the 14th century, and comes ultimately from Latin com- and pati , meaning “to bear, suffer.” Empathy is a 20th century coinage modeled on sympathy as a translation of the German Einfühlung (“feeling-in” or “feeling into”). It was first applied in contexts of philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology and continues to have technical use in those fields.

Examples of empathy in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'empathy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Greek empatheia , literally, passion, from empathēs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion — more at pathos

1909, in the meaning defined at sense 2

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“Empathy.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy. Accessed 14 May. 2024.

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Kids definition of empathy, medical definition, medical definition of empathy, more from merriam-webster on empathy.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Emotions & Feelings — Empathy

Empathy Essays

Hook examples for empathy essays, anecdotal hook.

"As I witnessed a stranger's act of kindness towards a struggling neighbor, I couldn't help but reflect on the profound impact of empathy—the ability to connect with others on a deeply human level."

Rhetorical Question Hook

"What does it mean to truly understand and share in the feelings of another person? The concept of empathy prompts us to explore the complexities of human connection."

Startling Statistic Hook

"Studies show that empathy plays a crucial role in building strong relationships, fostering teamwork, and reducing conflicts. How does empathy contribute to personal and societal well-being?"

"'Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.' This profound quote encapsulates the essence of empathy and its significance in human interactions."

Historical Hook

"From ancient philosophies to modern psychology, empathy has been a recurring theme in human thought. Exploring the historical roots of empathy provides deeper insights into its importance."

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"Join me on a journey through personal stories of empathy, where individuals bridge cultural, social, and emotional divides. This narrative captures the essence of empathy in action."

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"How does empathy impact mental health, emotional well-being, and interpersonal relationships? Analyzing the psychological aspects of empathy adds depth to our understanding."

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The Choice of Compassion: Cultivating Empathy

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The Importance of Promoting Empathy in Children

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The Role of Empathy in Justice System

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Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.

Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.

Empathy-based socialization differs from inhibition of egoistic impulses through shaping, modeling, and internalized guilt. Empathetic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, especially in the long-term. Empathy-induced altruism can improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups, and to improve racial attitudes, and actions toward people with AIDS, the homeless, and convicts. It also increases cooperation in competitive situations.

Empathetic people are quick to help others. Painkillers reduce one’s capacity for empathy. Anxiety levels influence empathy. Meditation and reading may heighten empathy.

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Empathy and Its Development Essay

Introduction, the meaning of empathy, connection between empathy and life in richmond, virginia, importance of empathy, works cited.

The rising economic hardships have forced many people to spend more time on hobbies and careers with little attention to other people’s lives. This means that they have no time left to listen to the woes of other people, to comfort those who are in pain, and to help them come of the problems surrounding them. Clearly, there is no doubt that we as human beings, ought to exercise empathy to the feelings, concerns, problems and predicaments facing other people. This article examines the meaning of empathy, the connection between empathy and life, and the importance of expressing empathy. It shows what it means to have empathy as a human being. The article will also examine the effects of expressing empathy and those of not expressing empathy.

We can define empathy as the ability to identify with a situation that another person is going through. In other words, empathy is the ability to put oneself in somebody’s situation as a way of expressing concern on what the other person is experiencing. When a person identifies with another person’s situation and tries to alleviate or mitigate the stressing factor in the situation, then one can say that he or she is expressing empathy. Acts of empathy may therefore include such actions as giving food to the needy in the society or providing shelter to those who are homeless. Generally, empathy has much to do with acts of kindness directed to people faced with situations, which are hostile. Thus, empathy is a form of kindness directed to people who need it based on how the donor or the person giving has perceived the situation at hand. For example, if a person living in Richmond loses a family member through death, the neighbors and relatives to come and comfort the family for the loss. In this way, they are expressing their empathies to those who affected (Eisenberg 3-7).

Most importantly, for a person to express empathy there must be bad scenarios that brings fear, discomfort, pain, and suffering. These scenarios must have created a clear psychological difference between the person being empathetic and the one who is the subject of empathy. Generally, two persons in the same unfortunate situation may not manifest empathy feelings towards each other. This is because of undergoing the same situation and neither of them may be in a position to help the other. However, if two people are experiencing different unfortunate circumstances at the same time, they may be able console each other thus, they may show empathy to each other. For instance, a bereaved person living in Richmond, Virginia may show empathy to another person who has lost his or her house to fire.

The word “empathy” is synonymous to “awareness” meaning that people who show empathy to others are sympathetic and would love to help those in trouble. For example, a youth living in Richmond, Virginia can express empathy to his or her friend experiencing loneliness by visiting the friend, and even watching a movie together. In some instances, some students offer to help others who are weak in math and sciences. Some people also show empathy by listening to the woes affecting other people while sharing a cup of coffee. In fact, empathy dwells more on emotional development than just being aware of the problems facing other people. For instance, in college, I have found some of my friends depressed just because they did not score good grades in the test. All they needed was sympathy and someone to encourage them that there is always another time to perform better. Somebody to make them understand that they need to change their reading habits or change some tactics in order to score good grades (Gallese 175-176).

As we have seen above, empathy is the ability to express feelings towards troubles, problems, and challenging times facing another person by showing sympathy and understanding. Sometimes, life can fix. When I first came to Richmond, I experienced homesick for a long period. A simple thing can cause me cry and I felt so much depressed. I had no friends at that time. Luckily, I met a colleague friend of mine who had noticed my depression. After lecture, he will invite me to accompany him to a restaurant where he could tell me the history of Richmond, studies, and his hobbies as we took coffee. With time, the homesick I used to experience disappeared. Indeed this is a classic example of empathy involving two people. Definitely, I was in a hostile situation and that friend came to assist me come out of that situation. It is worth noting that acts of empathy or helping others who are a hostile situation or in a position that need assistance should be on a voluntary basis. In other words, if someone wants to help a disadvantaged person, it should be voluntary and he or she should not expect something in return. Therefore, empathy has everything to do with the willingness to help out of one’s own volition or free will (Vincent 16-19).

Empathy is an important virtue possessed by human beings. People can express empathy in different ways. There is no doubt that people of all classes live in the city. There are those who are rich, while others are less privileged. Those who privileged should help those living in deplorable conditions. For instance, we have very many organizations in Richmond that assist the less privileged. We have also seen people visit children homes where they donate clothing and food to the children. Most of the children in these homes are orphans, and therefore, they do not have someone to cater for their needs. By spending time with them, playing and talking with them, they feel part of the community. This is important as it enables them to develop self-confidence and enhance their self-esteem. Apart from spending time with them, people also have time to educate them on necessary issues. By talking to them, the children also feel cared for and they can go on with their lives as if they have their biological parents (Slote 57-73).

Just like in any other society, people in Richmond also fall sick. Once admitted in hospital, they experience psychological stress, as they stand separated from their family members. It is the prerogative of the members of the family and friends to visit patients in hospitals, say encouragement words to them, and wish them quick recovery. This will definitely make them feel happy (Hojat 15-24).

Nobody should underestimate the importance of empathy to the community. In Richmond, many primary schools emphasize the importance of empathy to pupils, and they encourage them to help always their classmates, family members, and other people who may be in problems. Additionally, people should learn that indifference and insensitivity do not help at all, and they should express sympathy to those facing difficulties in life.

Eisenberg, Nancy. Empathy and Its Development . New York: CUP Archive, 1990. Print.

Gallese, Vittorio. “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity”. Psychopathology 36.4(2003): 171–180. Print.

Hojat, Mohammad. Empathy in Patient Care: Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and Outcomes . New York: Springer, 2007. Print.

Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Vincent, Steve. Being Empathic: A Companion for Counselors and Therapists . New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2005. Print.

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The Difference Between Empathy And Sympathy

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Sympathy and empathy are two closely related but distinct emotions. Sympathy involves feeling sorry or pity for someone, whereas empathy involves understanding and sharing someone’s feelings. Sympathy is more of an external expression of emotion, while empathy is an internal emotional response.

Simply put, sympathy is feeling for someone, while empathy is feeling with someone. Understanding the difference between these two emotions can help us communicate and connect with others on a deeper level.

Definitions

The words sympathy, empathy, and compassion are closely related terms that are often used interchangeably.

However, they are different. The definitions of these terms often demonstrate different aspects of intersubjective experience.

• Sympathy is an emotion experienced in reaction to something that happens to others. When someone understands what another person is going through and feels sorrow or pity toward them, this is sympathy. 
• Empathy is the ability to intimately feel and see another’s suffering, not just through understanding what they are going through but by being able to put themselves in another’s shoes. When expressing empathy, a person may use their personal experience to relate to another’s suffering. 
• Compassion means ‘to suffer together,’ which is an expression of caring and warmth. Someone who expresses compassion recognizes the pain in another person and is motivated to help them. 

What’s the difference between Empathy and Sympathy?

While sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, there are crucial differences that lead to different outcomes. 

Emotion is the main difference

While sympathy means that someone understands someone else’s suffering, it is more cognitive and keeps a certain distance between the sufferer and the listener.

Being able to emphasize means being able to experience another’s feelings. It requires an emotional component of really feeling what the other person is feeling. 

Difference in levels of understanding

Another difference between empathy and sympathy lies in the desire to understand the experience of a person who is suffering, not necessarily in the drive to stop their suffering.

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of another person. In contrast, sympathy is often utilized when a person does not necessarily relate to or fully understand the circumstances that someone is suffering. 

Sympathy does not translate as understanding since the listener may shift focus away from the person in distress to focus on themselves instead. 

The relationship matters

With empathy and sympathy, there is often a difference in the relationship between the listener and the sufferer. 

In certain settings, such as when a co-worker or boss is suffering from loss, sympathy may be more appropriate to maintain particular social dynamics when there is not an intimate connection. 

However, if a lifelong friend experiences a loss, sending a card or flowers may be inadequate. Empathy is usually expected more when the relationship between the sufferer and listener is close and strong. 

Sympathy drives disconnection

Empathy is thought to drive connection, while sympathy is thought to drive disconnection, according to social psychologist Brené Brown.

Thus, while empathy brings people together and builds on strong connections, sympathy can create a divide between people. 

Sympathetic statements such as ‘I’m sorry you feel like that’ or ‘It could have been worse’ can come across as patronizing.

Likewise, statements such as ‘I feel bad for you’ can come across as pitying, which can make the sufferer feel unsupported. 

How do sympathy and empathy relate to compassion?

It is thought that empathy and sympathy can be sensations and open expressions of compassion.

This is based on the condition that empathy and sympathy come from a place of sincerity. 

Compassion and empathy are fueled by an understanding of another human’s emotions. They both come with a desire and ability to connect to someone else and experience their pain.

Compassion, which arises from sincere empathy, can come from sharing similar experiences of suffering with another person.

Equally, compassion, which arises from sympathy, can be just as useful. For instance, someone may research and thus be knowledgeable on the types of abuse people can suffer.

They can then use this to increase their sympathy for people who have been abused , regardless of whether they have ever experienced abuse themselves.

Compassion often goes a step further as someone recognizes the pain in another and is motivated to help them, even if they cannot relate to the pain on a personal level.

To be able to extend emotions beyond an individual’s own personal experience is useful since this compassion allows humans to be motivated to reduce the pain that they have not personally experienced. 

Actively promoting compassion can allow a listener in one situation to be a force for change in many others. Compassionate people can be socially impactful and ignite activism in the service of a cause that one cares about.

Types of Empathy

There are thought to be three parts to empathy that should be increased to become a better empathetic listener. These are: cognitive empathy, emotive empathy, and empathic action. 

Cognitive empathy

This is the thinking part of empathy and a good starting point for becoming a better empathetic listener. This is where one can imagine themselves in the distressing situation of another and think about what that would feel like.

However, if this part is used without the following two parts of empathy, this may only become sympathy.

Emotive empathy

This is the feeling part of empathy. With emotive empathy, an individual stands alongside the person who is suffering and feels distressed with them. This is not feeling from a place outside or apart from the person, but together with them.

Empathic action

This is often the part that is difficult for many to cultivate. Empathic action often means sitting in silence and not doing anything. Many people may default to offering someone advice, solutions, or a diversion to ease their suffering; however, empathy is the opposite.

Acting on empathy by offering an empathic presence to someone is one of the most powerful actions there is. 

How to increase empathy to be an empathetic listener

Below are some other tips for cultivating empathy:

Actively listen

When someone actively listens , they are not just listening to the words that are being said.

They are paying close attention to what the other person is saying, getting a sense of the feelings that the speaker is expressing, and looking out for non-verbal cues. 

Listen patiently instead of focusing on what the response should be. When the person is finished speaking, take a moment to process the information before responding. 

Understand what the other person needs

Resist the urge to leap to conclusions about what someone needs when they tell you what they are going through. 

Use listening skills to figure out what they need, but if this is unclear, it is better to ask the other person what they need rather than provide the wrong kind of support. 

Repeating back to someone what was heard is a good way to find out what someone needs.

For instance, saying, ‘What I am hearing is that you don’t feel valued when X happens, is that right?’ can get to the point of what the other person needs. 

Prioritize emotional intelligence 

Those who have high emotional intelligence tend to be more self-aware, are better able to manage themselves, are aware of social cues, and are more capable of managing relationships.

Practicing ways of being more emotionally intelligent can therefore go hand-in-hand with being an empathic listener. 

What not to do

• Avoid asking direct questions, arguing with what is being said, and disputing facts. This can only drive a barrier between the listener and the sufferer. Instead, fully concentrate on what is being said and how the speaker feels
• Do not give your own judgments and opinions unless the speaker has asked for them. Let go of these and focus on the other person’s perspective. The listener does not need to agree with everything the other person says. Rather, it is about letting the speaker know that they are cared for and that they matter.
• Do not be afraid of silence in the conversation. Sometimes all someone needs is to feel heard and to know that the other person is there to listen. The speaker may be considering what to say next or may need a few silent moments to process their emotions. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is stronger: sympathy or empathy.

Sympathy is essentially telling someone, ‘I know how you feel,’ whereas empathy is saying, ‘I feel how you feel.’

Empathy is deeper and more intense than sympathy. It is about acknowledging a person’s feelings and genuinely imaging and trying to feel what it’s like to be in their situation. 

Can you be empathetic without being sympathetic?

Empathy is the ability to feel someone else’s emotions, whereas sympathy means feeling and/or showing a reaction such as sorrow or pity. 

In the same way that sympathy can occur without empathy, it is possible to understand another person’s emotions without being sympathetic. For example, someone who is a narcissist may be able to perceive what others are feeling but lack the sympathy to care about another person. 

Is empathy the same as altruism?

These two terms are related emotions; therefore, many tend to consider them as the same thing. However, someone who is altruistic can practice selfless concern for others’ welfare.

It is the charitable emotion to help others without expecting anything in return. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another’s emotions and to share their feelings. 

Empathy and altruism are related since both trigger acts of generosity in someone towards another. Empathy can also be the reason why someone is altruistic. 

What is a dark empath?

Not all empaths have good intentions. Someone who is a dark empath is highly attuned to others’ emotions, but they use their empathic abilities as a weapon.

A dark empath knows how to connect with another person but can use their knowledge to manipulate or take advantage of another person. 

A dark empath can give a false sense of trust to others when first getting to know them since they can portray their empathy in a positive light. This can lead to others thinking highly of them since they clearly show displays of empathy.

This makes it more dangerous later down the line when the dark empath uses their empathy to manipulate others for personal gain, but it may not be recognized until others get hurt.  

Can you have compassion without empathy? 

Compassion is not the same as empathy, although the concepts are related. Empathy refers more generally to the ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another person, whereas compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help.

It is possible to display kindness and compassion for practical reasons without any real empathy for others’ suffering. Someone may have the desire to help people in need without attaching deeper emotions and understanding of the suffering they are going through. 

What is more important: empathy or compassion? 

Empathy and compassion are needed in everyday life, especially when interacting with others. Without them, it can be difficult to maintain healthy relationships.

Empathy and compassion can help people to exhibit kind and loving behavior toward people they care about, which helps reinforce relationships.  

As previously mentioned, dark empaths and narcissists can use empathy to manipulate others. A time when empathy may be dangerous on its own is when it comes to leadership .

In times of crisis, having a leader who is only empathetic may understand others’ suffering, but this does not mean they will do anything about it. Being a compassionate leader, on the other hand, can cultivate positive change and unify people. 

References 

Breyer, T. (2020). Empathy, sympathy and compassion. In  The Routledge handbook of phenomenology of emotion  (pp. 429-440). Routledge.

Brown, B., Davis, K., Stephenson, A., & Francis-Sears, A. (2013). Brené Brown on empathy.

Heym, N., Kibowski, F., Bloxsom, C. A., Blanchard, A., Harper, A., Wallace, L., Firth, J. & Sumich, A. (2021). The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy.  Personality and individual differences ,  169 , 110172.

Jeffrey, D. (2016). Empathy, sympathy and compassion in healthcare: Is there a problem? Is there a difference? Does it matter?.  Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine ,  109 (12), 446-452.

Salem, R. (2003). Empathic listening.  Beyond intractability . 

Further information

An animated video that discusses the differences between sympathy and empathy, narrated by Dr Brené Brown

The Self in Empathy: Self-Empathy

Noticing, recognizing, and working with self in order to empathize with others..

Posted July 13, 2020 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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When most people think of empathy, they think of empathizing with someone else. It's no wonder, considering the many circumstances, in both personal and work life where you find yourself caught between people or groups of people expecting you to "understand."

These circumstances require you to manage, mediate, or facilitate amongst different individuals as well as maintain some form of personal connection with each of them. If not maintained with care and attention , interpersonal relations may become sources of stress and can get in the way of doing what needs to be done.

When interpersonal dynamics get in the way

At work, you may experience pressure both from the task you need to accomplish, as well as from the interpersonal dynamics. Task-related pressures can vary from the need to provide care to others, to completing budget plans, having to reach a sales target, or having to solve a design problem.

The interpersonal difficulties are something else, often more complex and less clear. Despite the fact that they seem rather invisible, they can have a powerful effect on your well-being and your ability to function in the world.

Empathy helps to avoid misunderstanding

Take, for instance, misunderstandings. When people start to feel threatened, small cliques or alliances quickly form. Amongst those alliances, one starts to speak behind each other’s backs. Sometimes it even progresses to gossip and backstabbing.

Whether you are in the group that is doing the backstabbing or are the one that feels gossiped about, the experience can be quite disconcerting. Trying to get a job done under these circumstances, you will probably find that it overshadows your ability to concentrate on the task at hand. In order to move forward and find solutions, you will need to engage with empathy.

Engaging with empathy will help you to understand the people you are working with and to know more about their thoughts, feelings, and actions. It will also help you to get an experience and understanding of the deeper motivations behind their thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Empathizing means you are taking the first step to avoid misunderstandings from happening. When done skillfully and attentively, you will be able to communicate in both an efficient and effective way.

The first step to empathy is self-empathy

But when you are feeling challenged and misunderstood yourself, empathizing with someone else is difficult. And if you are not aware of your own inner experience, and emotional and mental state, how can you be sure that that which you perceive to be part of the other, is not rather a projection of your own self upon them? That is why the first step towards empathizing with someone else is to empathize with yourself (Barrett-Lennard, 1997) .

Self-empathy observes and integrates experiences

We’re not talking about feeling sorry for yourself or bringing love to your own experiences. Self-empathy is not the same as self-compassion. Self-compassion involves treating yourself with the same kindness, concern, and support you’d show to a good friend ( Neff & Dahm, 2015) .

Self-empathy means that an aspect of yourself observes, in an empathic manner, the aspect of yourself that experiences. This is done with an attitude of suspended judgment and openness towards yourself ( Jordan, 1994 ).

Self-empathy simply requires you to notice and recognise what is happening in you. Attentive self-empathy provides both affective and cognitive empathic access to your own lifeworld. It provides an opportunity for you to integrate aspects of your current and past experiences and doesn’t necessarily require reinvention or radical conversion of those experiences ( Sherman, 2014) .

Self-empathy skills and its practice

Although there is some literature on self-empathy and its supposed effects in psychoanalysis ( Jordan, 1994 , Sherman, 2014) , surprisingly little is written on the skill itself. How does one empathize with oneself? What blocks to self-empathy can prevent us from doing so? How does self-empathy differ from related commonly used terms like self-awareness and mindfulness ?

In this series of six posts on self-empathy, we will tackle these and other questions. We will try to clearly define self-empathy and more importantly, we will look at the practice of it itself. How can one notice with self-empathy? How do we practice it with ethical responsibility and centeredness? What is the role of suspension of assumptions, opinions, or judgments in self-empathy? How do we set personal intentions and attend to oneself and how does self-empathy serve as a tool to empathize with others?

We will dive into the nitty-gritty of this crucial and embodied skill. Because empathy without self-empathy can lead to projection, emotional contagion, and even a complete failure of connection. All empathy begins, and is maintained, with self-empathy.

Barrett-Lennard, G. (1997). The recovery of empathy: Toward others and self. In Bohart, A. & Greenberg, L. , Empathy reconsidered: New directions in psychotherapy (pp. 103–121). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. doi:10.1037/10226-004

Jordan, Judith. (1997). Relational development through mutual empathy. doi:10.1037/10226-015.

Neff, K. D., & Dahm, K. A. (2015). Self-compassion: What it is, what it does, and how it relates to mindfulness. In Handbook of mindfulness and self-regulation (pp. 121-137). Springer, New York, NY.

Sherman, N. (2014) Recovering lost goodness: Shame, guilt, and self-empathy. Psychoanalytic Psychology 31: 217–235.

Lidewij Niezink, Ph.D., and Katherine Train, Ph.D., are the co-founders of Empathic Intervision.

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What is Empathy?

A definition of empathy in simple words for children

Empathy is being able to understand how someone else is feeling.

What is empathy? Empathy is being able to know how someone else is feeling, even when you aren't in the same situation. Sometimes, in more simple words, we call empathy being able to "put yourself in someone's shoes" and see things from their view. Why is empathy important? Empathy is the first step in having positive relationships because it helps us understand and relate to others. Empathy has two parts, shared emotion and seeing other perspectives. Both parts of empathy are ways in which we make the effort to understand other people and share an emotion with them.

Empathy is being able to understand how someone else feels.

• when you feel an emotion with someone, even if you're not in the same situation
• when you see things from someone else's perspective

For more about empathy, scroll down:

• Empathy- Shared Emotion and Seeing other people's views
• Why empathy is important
• How do you build your ability to feel empathy
• What's the difference between empathy and sympathy

Empathy Definition Part 1: Shared Emotion

First, empathy is about sharing an emotion with someone, or feeling the way they feel, even if you aren’t in the same situation. When you feel an emotion along with someone, even if you aren’t directly affected by whatever is causing their situation, that’s empathy. Empathy Example 1: Have you ever felt sad with a friend just because he was sad? That’s empathy! So for example, if you feel sad with your friend because he didn’t make the soccer team (even though you aren’t affected by him not making the team)… that’s empathy. Sharing his sadness is a kind of empathy. Empathy Example 2: Have you ever been with a friend who just got a new toy and she’s so excited about it and you get super excited too? If you are feeling excited because you know how great it can feel to get a new toy (even though you didn’t get a toy and you aren’t playing with the toy)… that’s empathy. Being excited with your friend is a kind of empathy.

Empathy Definition Part Two: Understanding someone else’s way of seeing something

The second part of a definition of empathy is about being able to understand someone else’s way of looking at a situation, even if you see it differently. We often call this “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” and it means you see things from their point of view, or from their perspective. Having empathy means you can step back from the way you see a situation and think about how someone else might feel from their side of the story. Empathy Example 1: Have you ever thought a game was really fun but your friend felt it wasn’t fair? If you saw your friend was bothered by the game and understood she wasn’t having a good time even though you were… that’s empathy. You showed empathy by understanding how things felt from her side of the situation. Empathy Example 2: Have you ever noticed that your dad is frustrated while he’s tidying up some of your toys? You had fun playing with the toys and don’t mind them laying on the floor. But you think about it from your dad’s perspective and realize that he doesn’t like how it feels to have a messy space and he feels frustrated at having the extra work of tidying it up. When you look at the situation from your dad’s side of the story (from his perspective) and understand how he might be feeling… that’s empathy.

Why is empathy important

Empathy is really important for how we get along with people. Whether you can be a good friend, get hired for a job, be successful with a team of others… all of those things depend on being able to understand how other people might see a situation and how they are feeling. Empathy is at the root of all healthy relationships. It helps you know how your actions affect others, what actions you need to take to be a good friend or teammate, and it helps you understand more about the people and the world around you.

How do you build your ability to feel empathy?

If you want to understand empathy and build your ability to understand others, here are some great tools to start. (Try this free printable Empathy Lesson Plan .)

1. Understand the concept of empathy.

These videos about empathy show people expressing empathy in real life situations.

2. Develop the ability to read facial expressions and body language.

To understand how someone else is feeling, we need to read the cues that they give us. What does it mean if someone is frowning? What if his arms are crossed? What if someone’s eyebrows are high on her forehead? A great way to build empathy is to read picture books and look at the illustrations. What cues do the characters give that reveal how they are feeling?

3. Practice putting yourself in someone else’s shoes

Find something you and a friend don’t agree on. Try having a discussion about it as if you are the other person. What might that friend say to convince you of his point of view?

What's the difference between empathy and sympathy?

You may be wondering, “What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy?” Empathy is when you feel someone’s emotions along with them. Sympathy is when you care that someone is in a difficult situation and offer them comfort, but you don’t necessarily feel anything about it yourself. For example, if your friend loses her iPad and you feel really sad along with her… that’s empathy. If your friend loses her iPad and you tell her “Wow, that's a bummer,” but you don’t feel bad yourself, that’s showing sympathy. With empathy, you have a more personal understanding or share someone else's emotions. With sympathy you are offering comfort even though you aren’t personally feeling emotion along with them.

More Definitions

•   What is Conscience?
•   What is Empathy?
•   What is Honesty?
•   What is Grit?
•   What is Perseverance?
•   What is Respect?
•   What is Responsibility?
•   What is Self-esteem?
•   What is Character?
•   What are Social Skills?

Colleen Doyle Bryant

Colleen Doyle Bryant is the author of five books and more than 50 learning resources about making good choices for the right reasons. Her Talking with Trees series for elementary students and Truth Be Told Quotes series for teens are used in curricula around the world. Rooted in Decency , Colleen’s most recent release, written for an adult audience, explores how the decline in common decency is affecting wellbeing, and how we can build more trust and cooperation. Learn more at ColleenDoyleBryant.com

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Roger Ebert’s Essay on Death and Dying: ‘Go Gentle Into That Good Night’

Friends Read Free

Ebert’s prefix “Go gentle” and Thomas’s “Do not go gentle” suggest contrary approaches to death, but Ebert isn’t as contrarian as his essay seems. Ebert feigns indifference to life, as if his life is as inconsequential as his death. He seems to ask: Why fight for life or defy death? If he was “perfectly content” before his birth, he’ll be no different after his death. Good fortune seems to be a part of this.

Most people assume that, if born poor, one would want more during life and hold it dearly. Yet the poor man can’t fear losing what he doesn’t have. The more the rich man appreciates the treasure he has in life, the more he dreads losing it. It isn’t the beggar who dreads dying with nothing—a zero balance, so to speak—it’s the billionaire.

The value placed on life decides how one will part with it. Death may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it’s as desirable as life. Refusing to resignedly accept annihilation is the most articulate argument for more life, not less. It’s a farewell vote, cast in favor of another baby being born somewhere else, to someone else. It’s a final act of sharing, even when one is lulled into believing that there’s nothing left to share. To “go gentle,” then, is to abjectly agree that if there were a little less of life, it wouldn’t matter; it is to meekly admit that were someone else not offered the chance to live, it would be fine.

Ebert claims he doesn’t fear death; he claims there’s “nothing on the other side to fear.” But those who love life deeply always die or greet someone else’s death with a bit of fear, and a bit of reluctance because they value what they or others are going to be denied.

The Gift of Life

We may live long enough to find some truths, but not long enough to find others. Does that mean these truths don’t exist, or merely that they’ve not been discovered yet? That Ebert found some truths late in life suggests that, had he lived longer, he may have discovered even more truths.

Without his saying so, Ebert is admitting that it’s not we who discover truth, but it is truth that, through living and dying, reveals itself to us. As his colleagues admiringly acknowledged, Ebert’s discoveries transformed him from the haughty young man he was, to his gentler, sweeter, older self.

Little Commandments

But for someone who smarts at insistence, Ebert is awfully insistent himself. He says to a woman he has long known: “You'd better cry at my memorial service.” On faith, he insists it’s neutral: “All depends on what is believed in.” On happiness, he declares: “To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.” By whose law? He doesn’t say.

Contradictions and Uncertainties

The empathy machine.

True empathy, not the easy, performative kind for photo ops, is the defiance of the lazy embrace of only those we agree with. It embraces the person—flaws and all—to understand, not judge. The lives of good people are well-lived, not because they didn’t do bad things—all too many did—and not because they won or lost, but because they acted. Their “fierce tears” and “frail deeds” (Thomas’s words) chose, not to curse, but to bless and embrace someone else’s.

Ebert once wrote that the movies he liked best were about “good people,” whether they ended up happy or sad, did bad things or good things, or won or lost. That’s where Ebert comes into his own and applauds Thomas’s defiance.

That’s Ebert, with Chaz’s prayerful help, echoing Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night. ... Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” If we see life, as Ebert did, as one big opportunity to be kind, and to make ourselves and others happy, the scope for goodness also expands severalfold with each new baby born. Ebert ends up saluting Thomas, whose hope and love of life, has its own excuse to defy death.

Thomas would’ve been proud. Ebert’s essay here is, after all, more a side path to the same destination than a road to a different place. Both essay and poem ponder death and dying, but their gaze is firmly on life and living.

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Guest Essay

The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn’t Closing

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?

A partial answer: Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.

Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.

The happiness gap has been with us for at least 50 years, and most research seeking to explain it has focused on conservatives. More recently, however, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent — not only unhappiness but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.

One of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.

There is, in addition, a parallel phenomenon taking place on the right as Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists angrily complain of oppression by liberals who engage in a relentless vendetta to keep Trump out of the White House.

There is a difference in the way the left and right react to frustration and grievance. Instead of despair, the contemporary right has responded with mounting anger, rejecting democratic institutions and norms.

In a 2021 Vox article, “ Trump and the Republican Revolt Against Democracy ,” Zack Beauchamp described in detail the emergence of destructive and aggressive discontent among conservatives.

Citing a wide range of polling data and academic studies, Beauchamp found:

More than twice as many Republicans (39 percent) as Democrats (17 percent) believed that “if elected leaders won’t protect America, the people must act — even if that means violence.”

Fifty-seven percent of Republicans considered Democrats to be “enemies,” compared with 41 percent of Democrats who viewed Republicans as “enemies.”

Among Republicans, support for “the use of force to defend our way of life,” as well as for the belief that “strong leaders bend rules” and that “sometimes you have to take the law in your own hands,” grows stronger in direct correlation with racial and ethnic hostility.

Trump has repeatedly warned of the potential for political violence. In January he predicted bedlam if the criminal charges filed in federal and state courts against him damaged his presidential campaign:

I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes. It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. As we said, it’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.

Before he was indicted in New York, Trump claimed there would be “potential death and destruction” if he was charged.

At an Ohio campaign rally in March, Trump declared, “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole country.”

In other words, Trump and his allies respond to adversity and what they see as attacks from the left with threats and anger, while a segment of the left often but not always responds to adversity and social inequity with dejection and sorrow.

There are significant consequences for this internalization.

Jamin Halberstadt , a professor of psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand and a co-author of “ Outgroup Threat and the Emergence of Cohesive Groups : A Cross-Cultural Examination,” argued in his emailed reply to my inquiry that because “a focus on injustice and victimhood is, by definition, disempowering (isn’t that why we talk of ‘survivors’ rather than ‘victims’?), loss of control is not good for self-esteem or happiness.”

But, he pointed out:

this focus, while no doubt a part of the most visible and influential side of progressive ideology, is still just a part. Liberalism is a big construct, and I’m reluctant to reduce it to a focus on social justice issues. Some liberals have this view, but I suspect their influence is outsized because (a) they have the social media megaphone and (b) we are in a climate in which freedom of expression and, in particular, challenges to the worldview you characterize have been curtailed.

Expanding on this line of argument, Halberstadt wrote:

I’m sure some self-described liberals have views that are counterproductive to their own happiness. One sub-ideology associated with liberalism is, as you describe, a sense of victimhood and grievance. But there is more than one way to respond to structural barriers. Within that group of the aggrieved, some probably see systemic problems that cannot be overcome, and that’s naturally demoralizing and depressing. But others see systemic problems as a challenge to overcome.

Taking Halberstadt’s assessment of the effects of grievance and victimhood a step farther, Timothy A. Judge , the chairman of the department of management and human resources at Notre Dame, wrote in a 2009 paper, “ Core Self-Evaluations and Work Success ”:

Core self-evaluations (C.S.E.) is a broad, integrative trait indicated by self-esteem, locus of control, generalized self-efficacy and (low) neuroticism (high emotional stability). Individuals with high levels of C.S.E. perform better on their jobs, are more successful in their careers, are more satisfied with their jobs and lives, report lower levels of stress and conflict, cope more effectively with setbacks and better capitalize on advantages and opportunities.

I asked Judge and other scholars a question: Have liberal pessimists fostered an outlook that spawns unhappiness as its adherents believe they face seemingly insurmountable structural barriers?

Judge replied by email:

I do share the perspective that a focus on status, hierarchies and institutions that reinforce privilege contributes to an external locus of control. And the reason is fairly straightforward. We can only change these things through collective and, often, policy initiatives — which tend to be complex, slow, often conflictual and outside our individual control. On the other hand, if I view “life’s chances” (Virginia Woolf’s term) to be mostly dependent on my own agency, this reflects an internal focus, which will often depend on enacting initiatives largely within my control.

Judge elaborated on his argument:

If our predominant focus in how we view the world is social inequities, status hierarchies, societal unfairness conferred by privilege, then everyone would agree that these things are not easy to fix, which means, in a sense, we must accept some unhappy premises: Life isn’t fair; outcomes are outside my control, often at the hands of bad, powerful actors; social change depends on collective action that may be conflictual; an individual may have limited power to control their own destiny, etc. These are not happy thoughts because they cause me to view the world as inherently unfair, oppressive, conflictual, etc. It may or may not be right, but I would argue that these are in fact viewpoints of how we view the world, and our place in it, that would undermine our happiness.

Last year, George Yancey , a professor of sociology at Baylor University, published “ Identity Politics, Political Ideology, and Well-Being : Is Identity Politics Good for Our Well-Being?”

Yancey argued that recent events “suggest that identity politics may correlate to a decrease in well-being, particularly among young progressives, and offer an explanation tied to internal elements within political progressiveness.”

By focusing on “political progressives, rather than political conservatives,” Yancey wrote, “a nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between political ideology and well-being begins to emerge.”

Identity politics, he continued, focuses “on external institutional forces that one cannot immediately alleviate.” It results in what scholars call the externalization of one’s locus of control, or viewing the inequities of society as a result of powerful if not insurmountable outside forces, including structural racism, patriarchy and capitalism, as opposed to believing that individuals can overcome such obstacles through hard work and collective effort.

As a result, Yancey wrote, “identity politics may be an important mechanism by which progressive political ideology can lead to lower levels of well-being.”

Conversely, Yancey pointed out, “a class-based progressive cognitive emphasis may focus less on the group identity, generating less of a need to rely on emotional narratives and dichotomous thinking and may be less likely to be detrimental to the well-being of a political progressive.”

Yancey tested this theory using data collected in the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey of 1,232 respondents.

“Certain types of political progressive ideology can have contrasting effects on well-being,” Yancey wrote. “It is plausible that identity politics may explain the recent increase well-being gap between conservatives and progressives.”

Oskari Lahtinen , a senior researcher in psychology at the University of Turku in Finland, published a study in March, “ Construction and Validation of a Scale for Assessing Critical Social Justice Attitudes ,” that reinforces Yancey’s argument.

Lahtinen conducted two surveys of a total of 5,878 men and women to determine the share of Finnish citizens who held “critical social justice attitudes” and how those who held such views differed from those who did not.

Critical social justice proponents, on Lahtinen’s scale,

point out varieties of oppression that cause privileged people (e.g., male, white, heterosexual, cisgender) to benefit over marginalized people (e.g., woman, Black, gay, transgender). In critical race theory, some of the core tenets include that (1) white supremacy and racism are omnipresent and colorblind policies are not enough to tackle them, (2) people of color have their own unique standpoint and (3) races are social constructs.

What did Lahtinen find?

The critical social justice propositions encountered

strong rejection from men. Women expressed more than twice as much support for the propositions. In both studies, critical social justice was correlated modestly with depression, anxiety, and (lack of) happiness, but not more so than being on the political left was.

In an email responding to my inquiries about his paper, Lahtinen wrote that one of the key findings in his research was that “there were large differences between genders in critical social justice advocacy: Three out of five women but only one out of seven men expressed support for the critical social justice claims.”

In addition, he pointed out, “there was one variable in the study that closely corresponded to external locus of control: ‘Other people or structures are more responsible for my well-being than I myself am.’”

The correlation between agreement with this statement and unhappiness was among the strongest in the survey:

People on the left endorsed this item (around 2 on a scale of 0 to 4) far more than people on the right (around 0.5). Endorsing the belief was determined by political party preference much more than by gender, for instance.

Such measures as locus of control, self-esteem, a belief in personal agency and optimism all play major roles in daily life.

In a December 2022 paper, “ The Politics of Depression : Diverging Trends in Internalizing Symptoms Among U.S. Adolescents by Political Beliefs,” Catherine Gimbrone , Lisa M. Bates , Seth Prins and Katherine M. Keyes , all at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, noted that “trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms, especially in the context of demographic risk factors, including parental education.”

“These findings,” they added, “indicate a growing mental health disparity between adolescents who identify with certain political beliefs. It is therefore possible that the ideological lenses through which adolescents view the political climate differentially affect their mental well-being.”

Gimbrone and her co-authors based their work on studies of 85,000 teenagers from 2005 to 2018. They found that

while internalizing symptom scores worsened over time for all adolescents, they deteriorated most quickly for female liberal adolescents. Beginning in approximately 2010 and continuing through 2018, female liberal adolescents reported the largest changes in depressive affect, self-esteem, self-derogation and loneliness.

In conclusion, the authors wrote, “socially underprivileged liberals reported the worst internalizing symptom scores over time, likely indicating that the experiences and beliefs that inform a liberal political identity are ultimately less protective against poor mental health than those that inform a conservative political identity.”

From another vantage point, Nick Haslam , a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, argued in his 2020 paper “ Harm Inflation: Making Sense of Concept Creep ” that recent years have seen “a rising sensitivity to harm within at least some Western cultures, such that previously innocuous or unremarked phenomena were increasingly identified as harmful and that this rising sensitivity reflected a politically liberal moral agenda.”

As examples, Haslam wrote that the definition of “trauma” has been

progressively broadened to include adverse life events of decreasing severity and those experienced vicariously rather than directly. “Mental disorder” came to include a wider range of conditions, so that new forms of psychopathology were added in each revision of diagnostic manuals and the threshold for diagnosing some existing forms was lowered. “Abuse” extended from physical acts to verbal and emotional slights and incorporated forms of passive neglect in addition to active aggression.

Haslam described this process as concept creep and argued that “some examples of concept creep are surely the work of deliberate actors who might be called expansion entrepreneurs.”

Concept expansion, Haslam wrote, “can be used as a tactic to amplify the perceived seriousness of a movement’s chosen social problem.” In addition, “such expansion can be effective means of enhancing the perceived seriousness of a social problem or threat by increasing the perceived prevalence of both ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators.’”

Haslam cited studies showing that strong “correlates of holding expansive concepts of harm were compassion-related trait values, left-liberal political attitudes and forms of morality associated with both.” Holding expansive concepts of harm was also “associated with affective and cognitive empathy orientation and most strongly of all with endorsement of harm- and fairness-based morality.” Many of these characteristics are associated with the political left.

“The expansion of harm-related concepts has implications for acceptable self-expression and free speech,” Haslam wrote. “Creeping concepts enlarge the range of expressions judged to be unacceptably harmful, thereby increasing calls for speech restrictions. Expansion of the harm-related concepts of hate and hate speech exemplifies this possibility.”

While much of the commentary on the progressive left has been critical, Haslam takes a more ambivalent position: “Sometimes concept creep is presented in an exclusively negative frame,” he wrote, but that fails to address the “positive implications. To that end, we offer three positive consequences of the phenomenon.”

The first is that expansionary definitions of harm “can be useful in drawing attention to harms previously overlooked. Consider the vertical expansion of abuse to include emotional abuse.”

Second, “concept creep can prevent harmful practices by modifying social norms.” For example, “changing definitions of bullying that include social exclusion and antagonistic acts expressed horizontally rather than only downward in organizational hierarchies may also entrench norms against the commission of destructive behavior.”

And finally:

The expansion of psychology’s negative concepts can motivate interventions aimed at preventing or reducing the harms associated with the newly categorized behaviors. For instance, the conceptual expansion of addiction to include behavioral addictions (e.g., gambling and internet addictions) has prompted a flurry of research into treatment options, which has found that a range of psychosocial treatments can be successfully used to treat gambling, internet and sexual addictions.

Judge suggested an approach to this line of inquiry that he believed might offer a way for liberalism to regain its footing:

I would like to think that there is a version of modern progressivism that accepts many of the premises of the problem and causes of inequality but does so in a way that also celebrates the power of individualism, of consensus and of common cause. I know this is perhaps naïve. But if we give in to cynicism (that consensus can’t be found), that’s self-reinforcing, isn’t it? I think about the progress on how society now views sexual orientation and the success stories. The change was too slow, painful for many, but was there any other way?

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @ edsall