Empathy
Empathy is the visceral experience of another person's thoughts and feelings from their point of view rather than one's own.
It's the ability to step into another person's shoes, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives and use that understanding to guide our actions.
Empathy facilitates prosocial or helping behaviors from within rather than being forced, so people behave more compassionately.
Empathy stands in contrast to sympathy, which is the ability to cognitively understand a person's point of view or experience without the emotional overlay.
Empathy should also be distinguished from compassion, even though the terms are often interchangeable. Compassion is an empathic understanding of a person's feelings, plus a desire to act on that person's behalf.
There are differences in empathy between individuals and certain conditions in which empathy is blunted or absent. Psychopaths are capable of empathic accuracy or correctly inferring thoughts and feelings, but they have no experiential referent: a true psychopath does not feel empathy.
Too much empathy, sometimes known as empathy fatigue or compassion fatigue, can be detrimental to one's well-being and can interfere with rational decision-making, causing people to lead with their hearts rather than their heads and lose a broader perspective or ignore potential long-term consequences of overly empathic behavior.
Affective/Emotional Empathy
Affective empathy involves understanding another person's emotions and responding 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.
Emotional empathy, also known as 'personal distress' or 'emotional contagion,' is when you feel the other person's emotions alongside them as if you had 'caught' the feelings.
This is closer to the usual understanding of the word 'empathy' but more emotional.
Emotional empathy can be good because you can readily understand and feel other people's emotions.
It means that we can respond to others when they are distressed. However, on the other hand, it is possible to become overwhelmed by those emotions and, therefore, unable to respond. This is known as empathy overload.
Those who become overwhelmed need to work on self-regulation, particularly self-control, to manage their emotions better. Good self-control helps doctors and nurses to avoid possible burnout from empathizing too much. There is a danger, however, that they can become 'hardened' and not respond appropriately.
Compassionate Empathy
Compassionate empathy is what we usually understand by compassion: feeling someone’s pain and taking action to help.
The name compassionate empathy is consistent with what we usually understand by compassion.
Like sympathy, compassion is about concern for someone, but with an additional move towards action to mitigate the problem.
Compassionate empathy is the type of empathy that is usually most appropriate.
As a general rule is that people who want or need your empathy don’t just need you to understand (cognitive empathy). They certainly don’t require you to feel their pain or, worse, to burst into tears alongside them (the emotional heart).
Somatic Empathy
People sometimes physically experience what another person is feeling. Somatic empathy involves a physical reaction to what someone else is experiencing.
For example, when you see someone else feeling embarrassed, you might blush or have an upset stomach. Or for example, if you see someone hurt, you too might feel physical pain.
You can see an echo of somatic empathy, for example, if someone is hit in the stomach with a ball during a sports game and one or two spectators may double over as if they, too, had been shot.
Anecdotally, identical twins sometimes report knowing when the other has been hurt, which might be an example of somatic empathy.
Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive empathy is putting yourself into someone else's place and seeing their perspective. It involves understanding another person's mental state and thoughts in response to the situation.
This relates to what psychologists call the theory of mind, or thinking about what other people think.
Cognitive empathy, also known as 'perspective-taking,' is not what most people consider empathy.
Benefits of Empathy
There are several benefits of being able to experience empathy.
Some of these include:
- Empathy allows people to build social connections with others.
- By understanding people's thoughts and feelings, people can respond appropriately in social situations.
- Empathizing with others helps you learn to regulate your own emotions.
- Emotional regulation is important because it allows you to manage what you feel, 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 others are also more likely to help you when they experience empathy.
What Influences your Empathy
Not everyone experiences empathy in every situation.
Some people may be more naturally empathetic in general, but people also tend to feel more compassionate towards some people and less so toward others.
Some of the different factors that play a role in this tendency include:
- How you perceive the other person.
- How you perceive their behavior.
- How you perceive their predicament.
- Your past experiences and expectations.
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 your 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 and how they feel about others often reflects the beliefs and values instilled at a very young age.
Why People Lack Empathy
There are a few reasons why people sometimes lack empathy:
They fall victim to cognitive biases
- Sometimes, the way people perceive several cognitive biases influence the world around them.
- For example, people often attribute other people's failures to internal characteristics while blaming their shortcomings on external factors.
- These biases can make it difficult to see all the factors that contribute to a situation and make it less likely that people will be able to see a situation from the perspective of another.
- Many also fall victim to the trap of thinking that people who are different from them also don't feel and behave the same as they do.
- This is particularly common when other people are physically distant.
- 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 they are.
- Sometimes, when another person has suffered a terrible experience, people blame the victim for their circumstances.
- This is why 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 fair and just.
- People want to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get — it fools them into thinking that such terrible things could never happen to them.
Balance your Empathy
Cognitive empathy can often be considered under-emotional.
It involves terrible feelings and, therefore, perhaps too much logical analysis. As a result, it may be perceived as an unsympathetic response by those in distress.
Emotional empathy, by contrast, is over-emotional. Too much emotion or feeling can be unhelpful.
Feeling strong emotions, especially distress, take us back to childhood.
More or less, by definition, that makes us less able to cope and certainly less able to think and apply reason to the situation.
It is tough to help anyone else if your own emotions overcome you.
We can find the right balance between logic and emotion in exercising compassionate empathy.
We can feel another person’s pain as if it were happening to us and express the appropriate amount of sympathy.
At the same time, we can remain in control of our emotions and apply reason to the situation.
This means we can make better decisions and provide appropriate support to them when and where necessary.