Empathy

Empathy refers to the capacity to put ourselves in the place of others and thereby vicariously experience and understand their emotions, experiences, and values. In this sense, it describes an activity of communication and knowledge. In everyday usage, the term often carries the connotation of sympathizing with another's pain.

The concept of empathy was popularized in late19th-century German aesthetics by Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps, who used the term Einfühlung(“to feel one's way into”) to help explain how people were able to respond emotionally to nature and art through a sympathetic inner imitation of an object. The term Einfühlung was translated as “empathy” by the American experimental psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909, a translation that added the connotations of suffering and sympathy.

In some systems empathy is ...