Empathy


Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. There are other definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others. Empathy is often considered to be a broad term, and can be divided into more specific concepts and categories, such as cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.
Empathy is still a topic being studied. The major areas of research include the development of empathy, the genetics and neuroscience of empathy, cross-species empathy, and the impairment of empathy. Some researchers have attempted to quantify empathy through different methods, such as questionnaires that participants can fill out and then be scored on their answers.
The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated process. However, the basic capacity to recognize emotions in others may be innate and may be achieved unconsciously. Empathy exists on a spectrum, an individual can be more or less empathetic toward another individual and empirical research supports a variety of interventions that are able to improve empathy.
The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια. That word derives from ἐν and πάθος. Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term Einfühlung to psychology in 1903, and Edward B. Titchener translated Einfühlung into English as "empathy" in 1909. In modern Greek εμπάθεια may mean depending on the context, prejudice, malevolence, malice, or hatred.

Definitions

Since its introduction into the English language, empathy has had a wide range of definitions among both researchers and laypeople. Empathy definitions encompass a broad range of phenomena, including caring for other people and having a desire to help them, experiencing emotions that match another person's, discerning what another person is thinking or feeling, and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.
Since empathy involves understanding the emotional states of other people, the way it is characterized derives from the way emotions are characterized. For example, if emotions are characterized by bodily feelings, then understanding the bodily feelings of another will be considered central to empathy. On the other hand, if emotions are characterized by a combination of beliefs and desires, then understanding those beliefs and desires will be more essential to empathy.
Paradigmatically, a person exhibits empathy when they communicate an accurate recognition of the significance of another person's ongoing intentional actions, associated emotional states, and personal characteristics in a manner that seems accurate and tolerable to the recognized person. This is a nuanced perspective on empathy which assists in the understanding of complex human emotions and interactions. Acknowledging subjective experiences highlights the need for balance and understanding when engaging in empathy.
One's ability to recognize the bodily feelings or emotions of another is related to one's imitative capacities, and seems to be grounded in an innate capacity to associate the bodily movements and facial expressions one sees in another with the proprioceptive feelings of producing those corresponding movements or expressions oneself.

Distinctions between empathy and related concepts

and sympathy are terms associated with empathy. A person feels compassion when they notice others are in need, and this feeling motivates that person to help. Like empathy, compassion has a wide range of definitions and purported facets. Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need. Some include in sympathy an empathic concern for another person, and the wish to see them better off or happier.
Empathy is also related to pity and emotional contagion. One feels pity towards others who might be in trouble or in need of help. This feeling is described as "feeling sorry" for someone. Emotional contagion is when a person imitatively "catches" the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognizing this is happening.
Alexithymia describes a deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing one's own emotions.

Classification

Empathy has two major components:
  1. ', also called emotional empathy, is the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states. Our ability to empathize emotionally is based on emotional contagion: being affected by another's emotional or arousal state. Affective empathy can be subdivided into the following scales:
  2. * Empathic concern: sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.
  3. * Personal distress: feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering. There is no consensus regarding whether personal distress is a form of empathy or instead is something distinct from empathy. There may be a developmental aspect to this subdivision. Infants respond to the distress of others by getting distressed themselves; only when they are two years old do they start to respond in other-oriented ways: trying to help, comfort, and share.
  4. * Affective mentalizing: uses clues like body language, facial expressions, knowledge about the other's beliefs & situation, and context to understand more about what one is empathizing with.
  5. ' is the ability to understand another's perspective or mental state. The terms empathic accuracy, social cognition, perspective-taking, theory of mind, and mentalizing are often used synonymously, but due to a lack of studies comparing theory of mind with types of empathy, it is unclear whether these are equivalent. Although measures of cognitive empathy include self-report questionnaires and behavioral measures, a 2019 meta-analysis found only a negligible association between self-report and behavioral measures, suggesting that people are generally not able to accurately assess their own cognitive empathy abilities. Cognitive empathy can be subdivided into the following scales:
  6. * Perspective-taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt others' psychological perspectives.
  7. * Fantasy: the tendency to identify with fictional characters.
  8. * Tactical empathy: the deliberate use of perspective-taking to achieve certain desired ends.
  9. * Emotion regulation: a damper on the emotional contagion process that allows you to empathize without being overwhelmed by the emotion you are empathizing with.
The scientific community has not coalesced around a precise definition of these constructs, but there is consensus about this distinction. Affective and cognitive empathy are also independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another's perspective.
Additional constructs that have been proposed include behavioral empathy, social empathy, and ecological empathy.
In addition, Fritz Breithaupt emphasizes the importance of empathy suppression mechanisms in healthy empathy.

Empathic anger

Empathic anger is an emotion, a form of empathic distress. Empathic anger is felt in a situation where someone else is being hurt by another person or thing.
Empathic anger affects desires to help and to punish. Two sub-categories of empathic anger are state empathic anger and trait empathic anger.
The higher a person's perspective-taking ability, the less angry they are in response to a provocation. Empathic concern does not, however, significantly predict anger response, and higher personal distress is associated with increased anger.

Empathic distress

Empathic distress is feeling the perceived pain of another person. This feeling can be transformed into empathic anger, feelings of injustice, or guilt. These emotions can be perceived as pro-social; however, views differ as to whether they serve as motives for moral behavior.
Stoic philosophers believed that to condition your emotional disposition on the emotions or fortunes of someone else is foolish. Cicero said that someone who feels distress at another's misfortune is committing as much of an error as an envious person who feels distress at another's good fortune.

Measurement

Efforts to measure empathy go back to at least the mid-twentieth century. Researchers approach the measurement of empathy from a number of perspectives.
Behavioral measures normally involve raters assessing the presence or absence of certain behaviors in the subjects they are monitoring. Both verbal and non-verbal behaviors have been captured on video by experimenters. Other experimenters required subjects to comment upon their own feelings and behaviors, or those of other people involved in the experiment, as indirect ways of signaling their level of empathic functioning to the raters.
Physiological responses tend to be captured by elaborate electronic equipment that has been physically connected to the subject's body. Researchers then draw inferences about that person's empathic reactions from the electronic readings produced.
Bodily or "somatic" measures can be seen as behavioral measures at a micro level. They measure empathy through facial and other non-verbally expressed reactions. Such changes are presumably underpinned by physiological changes brought about by some form of "emotional contagion" or mirroring. These reactions, while they appear to reflect the internal emotional state of the empathizer, could also, if the stimulus incident lasted more than the briefest period, reflect the results of emotional reactions based on cognitions associated with role-taking.
Picture or puppet-story indices for empathy have been adopted to enable even very young, pre-school subjects to respond without needing to read questions and write answers. Dependent variables for younger subjects have included self reporting on a seven-point smiley face scale and filmed facial reactions.
In some experiments, subjects are required to watch video scenarios and to make written responses which are then assessed for their levels of empathy; scenarios are sometimes also depicted in printed form.