Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. However, there are other (sometimes conflicting) 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 (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy. 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.
Etymology The English word empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empatheia, meaning "physical affection or passion"). That word derives from ἐν (en, "in, at") and πάθος (pathos, "passion" or "suffering"). The German philosopher Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term Einfühlung ("feeling into") to psychology in 1903. The English psychologist Edward B. Titchener subsequently translated Einfühlung into English as "empathy", in 1909.
Definitions Since its introduction into the English language, empathy has had a wide range of (sometimes conflicting) 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 Compassion 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 (which overlap with some definitions of empathy). 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 (especially an infant or a member of a mob) 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 (unlike empathy which is about someone else's emotions).
Classification Empathy has two major components:
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