Empathy

Definition

Empathy has many different definitions, some with multiple parts. However, most definitions share the idea of one person's response to his or her perceptions of another person's current experience. Use of the word in English is relatively new, appearing at the beginning of the 20th century, often in discussions of art. Its origins are traced to the German word Einfühlung, which translates literally as “feeling into” (as in projecting oneself into something else). Besides generating research within the field of social psychology, the study of empathy has also figured prominently in client-centered psychotherapy.

Much has been made of the distinction between empathy and sympathy, but the two terms are often used interchangeably. When a distinction is made (particularly in philosophical contexts), empathy is often defined as understanding another person's experience by imagining oneself in that other person's situation: One understands the other person's experience as if it were being experienced by the self, but without the self actually experiencing it. A distinction is maintained between self and other. Sympathy, in contrast, involves the experience of being moved by, or responding in tune with, another person. Another common distinction is to use sympathy when referring specifically to the emotional side of empathy.

Emotional and Cognitive Empathy

Within social psychology, empathy may refer to an emotional or cognitive response—or both. On the emotional side, there are three commonly studied components of empathy. The first is feeling the same emotion as another person (sometimes attributed to emotional contagion, e.g., unconsciously “catching” someone else's tears and feeling sad oneself). The second component, personal distress, refers to one's own feelings of distress in response to perceiving another's plight. This distress may or may not mirror the emotion that the other person is actually feeling. For example, one may feel distress, but not specifically depression, when another person says he or she is so depressed he or she wants to kill himself; similarly, one feels distress, but not actual pain, when one sees someone fall. The third emotional component, feeling compassion for another person, is the one most frequently associated with the study of empathy in psychology. It is often called empathic concern and sometimes sympathy. Empathic concern is thought to emerge later developmentally and to require more self-control than either emotional contagion or personal distress, although these earlier components (along with the ability to imitate) probably lay the groundwork for later, more sophisticated forms of empathy.

[Page 297]Empathic concern merits special attention for its role in triggering prosocial and helping behaviors. Research consistently finds a positive correlation between how much empathic concern individuals report feeling for another person (or group of people) and their willingness to help those people, even when helping requires some sacrifice (e.g., time, effort, or money). Many of the most noble examples of human behavior, including aiding strangers and stigmatized people, are thought to have empathic roots (although humans are not the only species that helps others in distress). Research on empathic helping has prompted an animated (and perhaps never-to-be-resolved) debate about whether empathic helping is truly altruistic (motivated by an ultimate goal to benefit the other person) or whether it is motivated by selfish rewards, such as reducing one's own distress caused by seeing another person's situation, saving one's kin (and thus some portion of one's genes), or securing public respect or the promise of reciprocal help in the future. Attempts to decide whether the helping behavior is selfless or selfish are complicated by the fact that selfinterest and benefits to the other person may overlap.

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