What is Empathy?

Feeling into and what makes us human

In the previous post, I discuss some of the lifelong health outcomes associated with a lack of appropriate understanding and care during early development. In other words, when an individual is deprived of caregiver empathy.

So what is this crucial capacity and why does it matter for our highly social species? Early attempts at explaining how it is we distinguish between “warm” versus “cold” colours, why we cry during “sad” songs, and by what mechanism we experience artworks as either “soulless” or “inspired”, eventually led to the introduction of empathy to the English language in 1909¹. This habit of attributing human traits and states to creative objects, was initially considered a special kind of aesthetic perception, however, the concept of empathy has since come to encompass how we construct and know not only our environment but the other minds we encounter within it.

Despite a number of brain regions and behaviours now linked with human empathy, it’s a distinct phenomenon made up of intersubjective processes, uniquely allowing us to know what other people are thinking and feeling; to emotionally engage with them; to share their feelings; and to care for their well–being². Technical definitions usually stress (1) a cognitive capacity to take the perspective of another, by accurately perceiving them within their own frame of reference (2) an affective capacity to feel or demonstrate congruent emotions, whilst remaining well regulated and other-focused³.

Probably nowhere are the real-world value and challenges inherent to developing empathy better appreciated than in the helping professions. In fields like medicine, psychotherapy and social work, both empathic listening and communication have long been taught among the core competencies that exemplify superior practice⁴. There's abundant research supporting the positive effect of physician empathy on a range of key outcomes; from improvements in diagnostics, to treatment adherence, patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes, this kind of empathy has proven to be both theoretically and empirically vital to patient health⁵. Within a surprising host of arenas including politics, business leadership and conservation science, high empathy is regularly listed among most desirable traits and often named as a key ingredient for both efficiency and effectiveness in a world that's volatile and complex.

In practice, however, the multidimensional nature of empathy and its linkage with sophisticated management of human individual and collective crises, presents a double-edged sword. On one hand, empathy no doubt constitutes one of humanity’s most valuable superordinate categories of behaviour–like Reason and Language. Also known as everyday mind-reading⁶, empathy denotes a complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others⁷. By contrast, in some contexts empathy-demanding work has been tied to emotional exhaustion and occupational burnout; it’s also generally agreed that empathic ability is an individually variable yet stable personality trait, meaning it can reflect differences in development, personality type and brain health.

Viewed both in terms of it's social benefits and physiological costs, being empathic is indeed a complex, demanding and strong – yet also subtle and gentle – way of being⁸. Even so, the skilled therapist’s finely wrought empathy, developed by countless hours of practice and critical self reflection, feels far removed from the day to day interactions of most people. After all, affective states e.g., happy, sad, afraid, and the neural circuitry for interpreting them, evolved broadly to facilitate communication and regulate interaction⁹. Thus in humans, the capacity for emotional resonance emerges in early infancy; meanwhile some features of empathy, like mirroring, concern and helping behaviours, have been observed in other mammals too¹⁰.

The evolutionary roots of empathy are undeniably far-reaching, as such our need for understanding begins at birth. In findings from human longitudinal studies, responsive and nurturing parenting has been positively related to greater child attachment security and later socioemotional competence. Experiencing mothers’ and fathers’ empathic caregiving essentially provides children with a core relational skillset¹¹, shown to predict their ability to forge and maintain supportive peer relationships in adolescence, which in turn translates into similarly high levels of parental caregiving competence in adulthood.

Clearly, empathy’s knock-on effects are profound. Extending far beyond their origins in the parent-child relationship, they continue shaping every stage of our social development. Out of this ancient drive to ensure the safety and survival of offspring, is therefore believed to have emerged another crucial dimension of human empathy, (3) aversion to the suffering of others and motivation towards prosocial behaviour within the wider community¹². In various ways, it seems, the wellbeing of self and society hinges, not on our accumulated resources and technologies, but on each member’s initiation into connecting-with and caring-for.

We’re yet to definitively know whether, as two major theories suggest, our varying ability to explain and predict human behaviour arises from innate mechanisms for constructing mirror-like internal representations of other agents, or for attributing to them independent psychological states¹³ ¹⁴. Amidst the many neurobiological unknowns, however, two distinguishing properties of human empathy still clearly shine through: firstly, it can be activated by anything; direct appreciation of nature and poetic transportation through the arts and humanities, together provide us with some of the most powerful ways of experiencing, expressing and developing empathy. Secondly, empathizing plays a part in how we maintain and promote wellbeing; without it, the quality and outcomes of our parenting and social structures are jeopardised; potentially as are important group-level, humanising effects had by traditions, cultures and collective intelligence.

From simpler ones like facial mimicry, to more demanding forms like perspective taking – empathic processes appear to underlie much of what might be argued makes us human. Honed within a variety of relational and professional contexts, self-other awareness remains an essential catalyst in our search for critical solutions to humanity’s complex problems. Thinking back to the term’s original function, the study of empathy perhaps holds the promise of revealing ever-more connections between the most worthwhile of human endeavour and accomplishment, and this special kind of perception, allowing us to go beyond the surface, by feeling into¹⁵ nature, art and other minds.

1. Titchener, E.B. (1909) Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of Thought Processes. New York, Macmillan

2. Stueber, K., “Empathy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

3. Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004) The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioural and cognitive neuroscience reviews, 3(2), 84-88.

4. Charon, R. (1993) The narrative road to empathy. In: Spiro H, Curnen MGM, Peschel E, St. James D, eds. Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press,147-159.

5. Hojat, M. (2007) Empathy in patient care: antecedents, development, measurement, and outcomes (Vol. 77). New York: Springer.

6. Ickes, W. (2003) Everyday mind reading. New York: Prometheus.

7. Ickes, W. (1997) Empathic accuracy. New York: Guilford.

8. Rogers, C. R. (1975) Empathic: An unappreciated way of being. The Counseling Psychologist, 5(2), 2–10.

9. Andersen, P. A., & Guerrero, L. K. (1996) Principles of communication and emotion in social interaction. In Handbook of communication and emotion (pp. 49-96). Academic Press.

10. De Waal, F. B., & Preston, S. D. (2017) Mammalian empathy: behavioural manifestations and neural basis. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(8), 498-509.

11. Stern, J. A., Bailey, N. A., Costello, M. A., Hellwig, A. F., Mitchell, J., & Allen, J. P. (2024) Empathy across three generations: From maternal and peer support in adolescence to adult parenting and child outcomes.

12. Decety, J., Bartal, I. B. A., Uzefovsky, F., & Knafo-Noam, A. (2016) Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1686), 20150077.

13. Preston, S. D., & De Waal, F. B. (2002) Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and brain sciences, 25(1), 1-20.

14. Frith, C., & Frith, U. (2005) Theory of mind. Current biology, 15(17), R644-R645.

15. Lipps, T. (1903) Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst (vol. 1: Grundlegung der Ästhetik). Leopold Voss: Leipzig