Have you ever experienced someone else’s emotions as your own?
Has a book, film, or photograph ever driven you to tears?
Or have you ever felt driven to ease someone else’s emotions?
If you have answered yes to at least one of these, then you have experienced empathy.
Empathy is a complex psychological process that allows us to form bonds with other people. Through empathy, we cry when our friends go through hard times, celebrate their successes, and rage during their times of hardship. Empathy also allows us to feel guilt, shame, and embarrassment, as well as understand jokes and sarcasm.
In this article, we explore empathy, its benefits, and useful ways to measure it. We also look at empathy fatigue – a common experience among clinicians and people in the caring professions – and provide beneficial resources.
Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free. These science-based exercises will not only enhance your ability to understand and work with your emotions but will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students, or employees.
In psychology, empathy is loosely defined as an ability to understand and experience someone else’s feelings and to adopt someone else’s viewpoint (Colman, 2015). The term ‘empathy’ comes from the German word Einfuhlung, which means “projecting into” (Ganczarek, Hünefeldt, & Belardinelli, 2018) and may explain why empathy is considered the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Defining empathy clearly and exhaustively enough to be studied in psychology is difficult. For example, is empathy the ability to understand or feel or share or interpret someone else’s feelings?
Each of these verbs differs slightly, providing a different meaning to empathy. As a result, the underlying psychological mechanism and part of the brain responsible for empathy also differ.
Part of the difficulty defining empathy is that it comprises multiple components. For example, Hoffman (1987) argued that empathy in children develops across four different stages and that each stage lays down the foundation for the next.
These four stages are:
Fletcher-Watson and Bird (2020) provide an excellent overview of the challenges associated with defining and studying empathy. They argue that empathy results from a four-step process:
Empathy is not achieved if any of these four steps fail.
This multi-component conception of empathy is echoed across other research. For example, Decety and Cowell (2014) also posit that empathy arises from multiple processes interacting with each other.
These processes are:
The terms “empathy,” “Empathy Quotient,” and “emotional intelligence” are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same construct.
Part of this confusion stems from their corresponding definitions.
Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s emotions and perspectives. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, interpret, and manage other people’s emotions, as well as your own. This last inclusion – your own emotions – is what distinguishes emotional intelligence from empathy.
The Empathy Quotient is a measurement of empathy (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). It is akin to the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) but is a measure of empathy rather than intelligence. Like IQ, higher scores of the Empathy Quotient are meant to represent higher abilities of empathy.
Importantly, the Empathy Quotient differs from the Emotional Quotient. Emotional Quotient is measured using the BarOn Emotional Quotient-Inventory (Bar-On, 2004) and aims to measure emotional intelligence rather than empathy. It’s easy to confuse them because “EQ” is used to refer to both.
To determine whether the Empathy Quotient is a suitable test of empathy, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004) administered the measurement to a group of neurotypical people and a group of people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and compared their scores.
On average, individuals with Asperger syndrome scored significantly lower than neurotypical people. From this study, a score of 30 was determined to be a critical cut-off mark. Scores less than 30 were typically found among the participants with Asperger syndrome. Furthermore, the test-retest reliability of the Empathy Quotient was high, suggesting that the test reliably measures empathy.
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Since empathy is so complex and involved in so many social interactions, there are many examples of empathy in the real world.
In a discussion with a friend, have you ever felt so moved that you experienced the same emotion that they did? Or maybe a friend shared a cringe-worthy story of sheer humiliation, and that feeling was mirrored in you.
These situations when you experienced the same emotions as your friends are examples of empathy. Other examples of empathy include understanding someone else’s point of view during an argument, feeling guilty when you realize why someone might have misunderstood what you said, or realizing something you said was a faux pas. These scenarios require you to take someone else’s viewpoint.
Some of the best examples of empathy can be found in the work by Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande. Sacks was a neurologist who had a profound impact through his thoughtful, patient-driven books on the field of psychiatry and neuropsychology.
Atul Gawande is a surgeon who worked with the World Health Organization and has published several books on improving healthcare and healthcare systems. Both authors address their patients in a sensitive, thoughtful manner that evokes a lot of empathy in the reader.
The following books are highly recommended:
We do not exist in a vacuum.
We participate in many scenarios in which we convey and receive information with other people, verbally and nonverbally.
Regardless of whether or not these interactions are important, we have to perceive, interpret, and respond to numerous cues.
Empathy is more than ‘just’ the ability to feel what someone else is feeling. Empathy is an essential skill that allows us to effectively engage with other people in social contexts (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004).
Without empathy, we would struggle to:
The ability to respond appropriately to someone else’s emotions is extremely important for forming bonds. Empathy underlines the bond that forms between parent and child (Decety & Cowell, 2014).
Some researchers even consider some aspects of empathy to be a defining feature of humans. Our ability to consider another person’s viewpoint is considered uniquely human (Decety & Cowell, 2014).
Jean Decety and Jason Cowell (2014) argue that empathy is one process that contributes to understanding and engaging in complex social behavior, such as prosocial behavior, which includes volunteering as well as providing care for people who are terminally ill.
Earlier in this article, we mentioned the studies by Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004) in which they compared Empathy Quotient scores between people with Asperger syndrome and neurotypical people.
People on the autism–Asperger spectrum are believed to have a diminished capacity for empathy and, as a result, struggle with social contexts. However, their lower empathy scores do not mean that they are without feeling or should be considered psychopaths (who also have lower scores of empathy).
People on the autism spectrum often report that their intention is not to hurt other people’s feelings, and they feel guilty if they caused someone else’s hurt feelings (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004).
Furthermore, people on the autism spectrum often report that they want human connections; however, they struggle to make them because they are not aware of how their behavior affects how other people perceive them (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). This shows how important empathy is in developing relationships and interpreting subtle social cues.
