introduction about empathy essay

Essays About Empathy: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

If you’re writing essays about empathy, check out our essay examples and prompts to get started. 

Empathy is the ability to understand and share other people’s emotions. It is the very notion which To Kill a Mockingbird character Atticus Finch was driving at when he advised his daughter Scout to “climb inside [other people’s] skin and walk around in it.” 

Being able to feel the joy and sorrow of others and see the world from their perspective are extraordinary human capabilities that shape our social landscape. But beyond its effect on personal and professional relationships, empathy motivates kind actions that can trickle positive change across society. 

If you are writing an article about empathy, here are five insightful essay examples to inspire you: 

1. Do Art and Literature Cultivate Empathy? by Nick Haslam

2. empathy: overrated by spencer kornhaber, 3. in our pandemic era, why we must teach our children compassion by rebecca roland, 4. why empathy is a must-have business strategy by belinda parmar, 5. the evolution of empathy by frans de waal, 1. teaching empathy in the classroom., 2. how can companies nurture empathy in the workplace, 3. how can we develop empathy, 4. how do you know if someone is empathetic, 5. does empathy spark helpful behavior , 6. empathy vs. sympathy., 7. empathy as a winning strategy in sports. , 8. is there a decline in human empathy, 9. is digital media affecting human empathy, 10. your personal story of empathy..

“Exposure to literature and the sorts of movies that do not involve car chases might nurture our capacity to get inside the skins of other people. Alternatively, people who already have well-developed empathic abilities might simply find the arts more engaging…”

Haslam, a psychology professor, laid down several studies to present his thoughts and analysis on the connection between empathy and art. While one study has shown that literary fiction can help develop empathy, there’s still lacking evidence to show that more exposure to art and literature can help one be more empathetic. You can also check out these essays about character .

“Empathy doesn’t even necessarily make day-to-day life more pleasant, they contend, citing research that shows a person’s empathy level has little or no correlation with kindness or giving to charity.”

This article takes off from a talk of psychology experts on a crusade against empathy. The experts argue that empathy could be “innumerate, parochial, bigoted” as it zooms one to focus on an individual’s emotions and fail to see the larger picture. This problem with empathy can motivate aggression and wars and, as such, must be replaced with a much more innate trait among humans: compassion.

“Showing empathy can be especially hard for kids… Especially in times of stress and upset, they may retreat to focusing more on themselves — as do we adults.”

Roland encourages fellow parents to teach their kids empathy, especially amid the pandemic, where kindness is needed the most. She advises parents to seize everyday opportunities by ensuring “quality conversations” and reinforcing their kids to view situations through other people’s lenses. 

“Mental health, stress and burnout are now perceived as responsibilities of the organization. The failure to deploy empathy means less innovation, lower engagement and reduced loyalty, as well as diluting your diversity agenda.”

The spike in anxiety disorders and mental health illnesses brought by the COVID-19 pandemic has given organizations a more considerable responsibility: to listen to employees’ needs sincerely. Parmar underscores how crucial it is for a leader to take empathy as a fundamental business strategy and provides tips on how businesses can adjust to the new norm. 

“The evolution of empathy runs from shared emotions and intentions between individuals to a greater self/other distinction—that is, an “unblurring” of the lines between individuals.”

The author traces the evolutionary roots of empathy back to our primate heritage — ultimately stemming from the parental instinct common to mammals. Ultimately, the author encourages readers to conquer “tribal differences” and continue turning to their emotions and empathy when making moral decisions.

10 Interesting Writing prompts on Essays About Empathy

Check out below our list of exciting prompts to help you buckle down to your writing:

This essay discuss teaching empathy in the classroom. Is this an essential skill that we should learn in school? Research how schools cultivate children’s innate empathy and compassion. Then, based on these schools’ experiences, provide tips on how other schools can follow suit. 

An empathetic leader is said to help boost positive communication with employees, retain indispensable talent and create positive long-term outcomes. This is an interesting topic to research, and there are plenty of studies on this topic online with data that you can use in your essay. So, pick these best practices to promote workplace empathy and discuss their effectiveness.

Write down a list of deeds and activities people can take as their first steps to developing empathy. These activities can range from volunteering in their communities to reaching out to a friend in need simply. Then, explain how each of these acts can foster empathy and kindness. 

Based on studies, list the most common traits, preferences, and behaviour of an empathetic person. For example, one study has shown that empathetic people prefer non-violent movies. Expound on this list with the support of existing studies. You can support or challenge these findings in this essay for a compelling argumentative essay. Make sure to conduct your research and cite all the sources used. 

Empathy is a buzzword closely associated with being kind and helpful. However, many experts in recent years have been opining that it takes more than empathy to propel an act of kindness and that misplaced empathy can even lead to apathy. Gather what psychologists and emotional experts have been saying on this debate and input your analysis. 

Empathy and sympathy have been used synonymously, even as these words differ in meaning. Enlighten your readers on the differences and provide situations that clearly show the contrast between empathy and sympathy. You may also add your take on which trait is better to cultivate.

Empathy has been deemed vital in building cooperation. A member who empathizes with the team can be better in tune with the team’s goals, cooperate effectively and help drive success. You may research how athletic teams foster a culture of empathy beyond the sports fields. Write about how coaches are integrating empathy into their coaching strategy. 

Several studies have warned that empathy has been on a downward trend over the years. Dive deep into studies that investigate this decline. Summarize each and find common points. Then, cite the significant causes and recommendations in this study. You can also provide insights on whether this should cause alarm and how societies should address the problem. 

There is a broad sentiment that social media has been driving people to live in a bubble and be less empathetic — more narcissistic. However, some point out that intensifying competition and increasing economic pressures are more to blame for reducing our empathetic feelings. Research and write about what experts have to say and provide a personal touch by adding your experience. 

Acts of kindness abound every day. But sometimes, we fail to capture or take them for granted. Write about your unforgettable encounters with empathetic people. Then, create a storytelling essay to convey your personal view on empathy. This activity can help you appreciate better the little good things in life. 

Check out our general resource of essay writing topics and stimulate your creative mind! 

See our round-up of the best essay checkers to ensure your writing is error-free.

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What Is Empathy?

How it helps strengthen our relationships

Verywell / Bailey Mariner

• Influential Factors
• Lack of Empathy

Empathizing with others is essential for healthy relationships and communication. After all, it's hard to know how to relate to others if you can't understand their feelings.

Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else's position and feeling what they are feeling.

The term empathy was first introduced in 1909 by psychologist Edward B. Titchener as a translation of the German term einfühlung (meaning "feeling into").

Empathy means that when you see another person suffering, such as after they've lost a loved one , you can envision yourself going through that same experience and feel what they are going through.

While people can be well-attuned to their feelings and emotions, getting into someone else's head can be more difficult. The ability to feel empathy allows people to "walk a mile in another's shoes," so to speak. It permits people to understand the emotions that others are feeling.

Press Play for Advice on Empathy

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast , featuring empathy expert Dr. Kelsey Crowe, shares how you can show empathy to someone who is going through a hard time. Click below to listen now.

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Signs of Empathy

For many, seeing another person in pain and responding with indifference or even outright hostility seems utterly incomprehensible. But the fact that some people do respond in such a way clearly demonstrates that empathy is not necessarily a universal response to the suffering of others.

If you are wondering whether you are an empathetic person, here are some signs that show that you have this tendency:

• You are good at really listening to what others have to say.
• People often tell you about their problems.
• You are good at picking up on how other people are feeling.
• You often think about how other people feel.
• Other people come to you for advice.
• You often feel overwhelmed by tragic events.
• You try to help others who are suffering.
• You are good at telling when people aren't being honest .
• You sometimes feel drained or overwhelmed in social situations.
• You care deeply about other people.
• You find it difficult to set boundaries in your relationships.

Are You an Empath? Take the Quiz!

Our fast and free empath quiz will let you know if your feelings and behaviors indicate high levels of traits commonly associated with empaths.

Types of Empathy

Empathy can come in different forms, depending on the situations. Some of the different types of empathy that you might experience are:

Affective Empathy

Affective empathy involves the ability to understand another person's emotions and respond appropriately. Such emotional understanding may lead to someone feeling concerned for another person's well-being, or it may lead to feelings of personal distress.

Somatic Empathy

Somatic empathy involves having a physical reaction in response to what someone else is experiencing. People sometimes physically experience what another person is feeling. When you see someone else feeling embarrassed, for example, you might start to blush or have an upset stomach.

Cognitive Empathy

Cognitive empathy involves being able to understand another person's mental state and what they might be thinking in response to the situation. This is related to what psychologists refer to as the theory of mind or thinking about what other people are thinking.

Empathy vs. Sympathy vs. Compassion

While sympathy and compassion are related to empathy, there are important differences. Compassion and sympathy are often thought to be more of a passive connection, while empathy generally involves a much more active attempt to understand another person.

The Many Benefits of Empathy

Being able to experience empathy has many beneficial uses. It's the ability that helps us see and feel what others might be experiencing. Because we relate to them, we can then respond in ways that foster stronger relationships.

It Strengthens your Relationships

Empathy allows you to build social connections with others. By understanding what people are thinking and feeling, you are able to respond appropriately in social situations. Research has shown that having social connections is important for both physical and psychological well-being.

It Helps You Regulate Your Emotions

Empathizing with others helps you learn to regulate your own emotions. Emotional regulation is important in that it allows you to manage what you are feeling, even in times of great stress, without becoming overwhelmed.

Research also suggests that our ability to regulate our own emotions influences how we respond to other people's emotions. Strengthening your self-regulation skills may be helpful if you want to boost your ability to empathize.

It Compels Us to Help Others

Empathy promotes helping behaviors. Not only are you more likely to engage in helpful behaviors when you feel empathy for other people, but other people are also more likely to help you when they experience empathy.

Research supports the idea that empathy is a key driver of prosocial behavior. Empathy helps us notice other people's needs, understand their distress, and inspire us to alleviate their suffering.

Impact of Empathy

Your ability to experience empathy can impact your relationships. Studies involving siblings have found that when empathy is high, siblings have less conflict and more warmth toward each other. In romantic relationships, having empathy increases your ability to extend forgiveness .

Can You Have Too Much Empathy?

Having a great deal of empathy makes you concerned for the well-being and happiness of others. It also means, however, that you can sometimes get overwhelmed, burned out , or even overstimulated from always thinking about other people's emotions. This can lead to empathy fatigue.

Empathy fatigue, also known as compassion fatigue , refers to the emotional and physical exhaustion you might feel after repeatedly being exposed to stressful or traumatic events . You might also feel numb or powerless, isolate yourself, and have a lack of energy.

Empathy fatigue is a concern in certain situations, such as when acting as a caregiver . Studies also show that if healthcare workers can't balance their feelings of empathy (affective empathy, in particular), it can result in compassion fatigue as well.

Other research has linked higher levels of empathy with a tendency toward emotional negativity , potentially increasing your risk of empathic distress. It can even affect your judgment, causing you to go against your morals based on the empathy you feel for someone else.

Factors That Can Influence Empathy

Not everyone experiences empathy in every situation. Some people may be more naturally empathetic in general, but people also tend to feel more empathetic toward some people and less so toward others. Some of the factors that play a role in this tendency include:

• How you perceive the other person
• How you attribute the other individual's behaviors
• What you blame for the other person's predicament
• Your past experiences and expectations

Research has found that there are gender differences in the experience and expression of empathy, although these findings are somewhat mixed. Women score higher on empathy tests, and studies suggest that women tend to feel more cognitive empathy than men.  

At the most basic level, there appear to be two main factors that contribute to the ability to experience empathy: genetics and socialization. Essentially, it boils down to the age-old relative contributions of nature and nurture .

Parents pass down genes that contribute to overall personality, including the propensity toward sympathy, empathy, and compassion. For example, research indicates that key traits known as the Big Five personality traits are between 31% and 41% heritable. Being high in traits like conscientiousness and agreeableness can contribute to increased feelings of empathy for others.

On the other hand, people are also socialized by their parents, peers, communities, and society. How people treat others and how they feel about others often reflect the beliefs and values that were instilled at a very young age. 

Reasons People Sometimes Lack Empathy

Some people lack empathy and, therefore, aren't able to understand what another person may be experiencing or feeling. This can result in behaviors that seem uncaring or sometimes even hurtful. For instance, people with low affective empathy have higher rates of cyberbullying .

A lack of empathy is also one of the defining characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder . Though, it is unclear whether this is due to a person with this disorder having no empathy at all or having more of a dysfunctional response to others.

A few reasons why people sometimes lack empathy include cognitive biases, dehumanization, and victim-blaming.

Cognitive Biases

Sometimes the way people perceive the world around them is influenced by cognitive biases . For example, people often attribute other people's failures to internal characteristics, while blaming their own shortcomings on external factors.

These biases can make it difficult to see all the factors that contribute to a situation. They also make it less likely that people will be able to see a situation from the perspective of another.

Dehumanization

Many also fall into the trap of thinking that people who are different from them don't feel and behave the same as they do. This is particularly common when other people are physically distant.

Othering is a way of excluding people from the in-group, which can then contribute to dehumanization. For example, when they watch reports of a disaster or conflict in a foreign land, people might be less likely to feel empathy if they think those suffering are fundamentally different from themselves.

Victim Blaming

Sometimes, when another person has suffered a terrible experience, people make the mistake of blaming the victim for their circumstances. This is the reason that victims of crimes are often asked what they might have done differently to prevent the crime.

This tendency stems from the need to believe that the world is a fair and just place. It is the desire to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get—and it can fool you into thinking that such terrible things could never happen to you.

What Causes Empathy?

Human beings are certainly capable of selfish, even cruel, behavior. A quick scan of the news quickly reveals numerous unkind, selfish, and heinous actions. The question, then, is why don't we all engage in such self-serving behavior all the time? What is it that causes us to feel another's pain and respond with kindness ?

Several different theories have been proposed to explain why people experience empathy.

Neuroscientific Explanations

Studies have shown that specific areas of the brain play a role in how empathy is experienced. More recent approaches focus on the cognitive and neurological processes that lie behind empathy. Researchers have found that different regions of the brain play an important role in empathy, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula.

Research suggests that there are important neurobiological components to the experience of empathy.   The activation of mirror neurons in the brain plays a part in the ability to mirror and mimic the emotional responses that people would feel if they were in similar situations.

Functional MRI research also indicates that an area of the brain known as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) plays a critical role in the experience of empathy. Studies have found that people who have damage to this area of the brain often have difficulty recognizing emotions conveyed through facial expressions .  

Emotional Explanations

Some of the earliest explorations into the topic of empathy centered on how feeling what others feel allows people to have a variety of emotional experiences. The philosopher Adam Smith suggested that it allows us to experience things that we might never otherwise be able to fully feel.

This can involve feeling empathy for both real people and imaginary characters. Experiencing empathy for fictional characters allows people to have a range of emotional experiences that might otherwise be impossible.

Prosocial Explanations

Sociologist Herbert Spencer proposed that empathy served an adaptive function and aided in the survival of the species. Empathy leads to helping behavior, which benefits social relationships. Humans are naturally social creatures. Things that aid in our relationships with other people benefit us as well.

When people experience empathy, they are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors that benefit other people. Things such as altruism and heroism are also connected to feeling empathy for others.

Tips for Practicing Empathy

Fortunately, empathy is a skill that you can learn and strengthen. If you would like to build your empathy skills, there are a few things that you can do:

• Work on listening to people without interrupting and utilize empathic listening
• Pay attention to body language and other types of nonverbal communication
• Try to understand people, even when you don't agree with them
• Ask people questions to learn more about them and their lives
• Imagine yourself in another person's shoes
• Strengthen your connection with others to learn more about how they feel
• Seek to identify biases you may have and how they affect your empathy for others
• Look for ways in which you are similar to others versus focusing on differences
• Be willing to be vulnerable , opening up about how you feel
• Engage in new experiences, giving you better insight into how others in that situation may feel
• Get involved in organizations that push for social change

While empathy might be lacking in some, most people are able to empathize with others in a variety of situations. This ability to see things from another person's perspective and empathize with another's emotions plays an important role in our social lives. Empathy allows us to understand others and, quite often, compels us to take action to relieve another person's suffering.

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Thompson NM, Uusberg A, Gross JJ, Chakrabarti B. Empathy and emotion regulation: An integrative account .  Prog Brain Res . 2019;247:273-304. doi:10.1016/bs.pbr.2019.03.024

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Chikovani G, Babuadze L, Iashvili N, Gvalia T, Surguladze S. Empathy costs: Negative emotional bias in high empathisers . Psychiatry Res . 2015;229(1-2):340-346. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2015.07.001

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Song Y, Shi M. Associations between empathy and big five personality traits among Chinese undergraduate medical students .  PLoS One . 2017;12(2):e0171665. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171665

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Adam Smith's moral and political philosophy .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Understanding others’ feelings: what is empathy and why do we need it?

Senior Lecturer in Social Neuroscience, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Pascal Molenberghs receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award: DE130100120) and Heart Foundation (Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship: 1000458).

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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This is the introductory essay in our series on understanding others’ feelings. In it we will examine empathy, including what it is, whether our doctors need more of it, and when too much may not be a good thing.

Empathy is the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. It is a construct of multiple components, each of which is associated with its own brain network . There are three ways of looking at empathy.

First there is affective empathy. This is the ability to share the emotions of others. People who score high on affective empathy are those who, for example, show a strong visceral reaction when watching a scary movie.

They feel scared or feel others’ pain strongly within themselves when seeing others scared or in pain.

Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand the emotions of others. A good example is the psychologist who understands the emotions of the client in a rational way, but does not necessarily share the emotions of the client in a visceral sense.

Finally, there’s emotional regulation. This refers to the ability to regulate one’s emotions. For example, surgeons need to control their emotions when operating on a patient.

Another way to understand empathy is to distinguish it from other related constructs. For example, empathy involves self-awareness , as well as distinction between the self and the other. In that sense it is different from mimicry, or imitation.

Many animals might show signs of mimicry or emotional contagion to another animal in pain. But without some level of self-awareness, and distinction between the self and the other, it is not empathy in a strict sense. Empathy is also different from sympathy, which involves feeling concern for the suffering of another person and a desire to help.

That said, empathy is not a unique human experience. It has been observed in many non-human primates and even rats .

People often say psychopaths lack empathy but this is not always the case. In fact, psychopathy is enabled by good cognitive empathic abilities - you need to understand what your victim is feeling when you are torturing them. What psychopaths typically lack is sympathy. They know the other person is suffering but they just don’t care.

Research has also shown those with psychopathic traits are often very good at regulating their emotions .

Why do we need it?

Empathy is important because it helps us understand how others are feeling so we can respond appropriately to the situation. It is typically associated with social behaviour and there is lots of research showing that greater empathy leads to more helping behaviour.

However, this is not always the case. Empathy can also inhibit social actions, or even lead to amoral behaviour . For example, someone who sees a car accident and is overwhelmed by emotions witnessing the victim in severe pain might be less likely to help that person.

Similarly, strong empathetic feelings for members of our own family or our own social or racial group might lead to hate or aggression towards those we perceive as a threat. Think about a mother or father protecting their baby or a nationalist protecting their country.

People who are good at reading others’ emotions, such as manipulators, fortune-tellers or psychics, might also use their excellent empathetic skills for their own benefit by deceiving others.

Interestingly, people with higher psychopathic traits typically show more utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas such as the footbridge problem. In this thought experiment, people have to decide whether to push a person off a bridge to stop a train about to kill five others laying on the track.

The psychopath would more often than not choose to push the person off the bridge. This is following the utilitarian philosophy that holds saving the life of five people by killing one person is a good thing. So one could argue those with psychopathic tendencies are more moral than normal people – who probably wouldn’t push the person off the bridge – as they are less influenced by emotions when making moral decisions.

How is empathy measured?

Empathy is often measured with self-report questionnaires such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) or Questionnaire for Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE).

These typically ask people to indicate how much they agree with statements that measure different types of empathy.

The QCAE, for instance, has statements such as, “It affects me very much when one of my friends is upset”, which is a measure of affective empathy.

Cognitive empathy is determined by the QCAE by putting value on a statement such as, “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.”

Using the QCAE, we recently found people who score higher on affective empathy have more grey matter, which is a collection of different types of nerve cells, in an area of the brain called the anterior insula.

This area is often involved in regulating positive and negative emotions by integrating environmental stimulants – such as seeing a car accident - with visceral and automatic bodily sensations.

We also found people who score higher on cognitive empathy had more grey matter in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

This area is typically activated during more cognitive processes, such as Theory of Mind, which is the ability to attribute mental beliefs to yourself and another person. It also involves understanding that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives different from one’s own.

Can empathy be selective?

Research shows we typically feel more empathy for members of our own group , such as those from our ethnic group. For example, one study scanned the brains of Chinese and Caucasian participants while they watched videos of members of their own ethnic group in pain. They also observed people from a different ethnic group in pain.

The researchers found that a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is often active when we see others in pain, was less active when participants saw members of ethnic groups different from their own in pain.

Other studies have found brain areas involved in empathy are less active when watching people in pain who act unfairly . We even see activation in brain areas involved in subjective pleasure , such as the ventral striatum, when watching a rival sport team fail.

Yet, we do not always feel less empathy for those who aren’t members of our own group. In our recent study , students had to give monetary rewards or painful electrical shocks to students from the same or a different university. We scanned their brain responses when this happened.

Brain areas involved in rewarding others were more active when people rewarded members of their own group, but areas involved in harming others were equally active for both groups.

These results correspond to observations in daily life. We generally feel happier if our own group members win something, but we’re unlikely to harm others just because they belong to a different group, culture or race. In general, ingroup bias is more about ingroup love rather than outgroup hate.

Yet in some situations, it could be helpful to feel less empathy for a particular group of people. For example, in war it might be beneficial to feel less empathy for people you are trying to kill, especially if they are also trying to harm you.

To investigate, we conducted another brain imaging study . We asked people to watch videos from a violent video game in which a person was shooting innocent civilians (unjustified violence) or enemy soldiers (justified violence).

While watching the videos, people had to pretend they were killing real people. We found the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, typically active when people harm others, was active when people shot innocent civilians. The more guilt participants felt about shooting civilians, the greater the response in this region.

However, the same area was not activated when people shot the soldier that was trying to kill them.

The results provide insight into how people regulate their emotions. They also show the brain mechanisms typically implicated when harming others become less active when the violence against a particular group is seen as justified.

This might provide future insights into how people become desensitised to violence or why some people feel more or less guilty about harming others.

Our empathetic brain has evolved to be highly adaptive to different types of situations. Having empathy is very useful as it often helps to understand others so we can help or deceive them, but sometimes we need to be able to switch off our empathetic feelings to protect our own lives, and those of others.

Tomorrow’s article will look at whether art can cultivate empathy.

• Theory of mind
• Emotional contagion
• Understanding others' feelings

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The concept of empathy is used to refer to a wide range of psychological capacities that are thought of as being central for constituting humans as social creatures allowing us to know what other people are thinking and feeling, to emotionally engage with them, to share their thoughts and feelings, and to care for their well–being. Ever since the eighteenth century, due particularly to the influence of the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith, those capacities have been at the center of scholarly investigations into the underlying psychological basis of our social and moral nature. Yet, the concept of empathy is of relatively recent intellectual heritage. Moreover, since researchers in different disciplines have focused their investigations on very specific aspects of the broad range of empathy-related phenomena, one should probably not be surprised by a certain amount of conceptual confusion and a multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. The purpose of this entry is to clarify the empathy concept by surveying its history in various philosophical and psychological discussions and by indicating why empathy was and should be regarded to be of such central importance in understanding human agency in ordinary contexts, in the human sciences, and for the constitution of ourselves as social and moral agents. More specifically, after a short historical introduction articulating the philosophical context within which the empathy concept was coined, the second and third sections will discuss the epistemic dimensions associated with our empathic capacities. They will address the contention that empathy is the primary epistemic means for knowing other minds and that it should be viewed as the unique method distinguishing the human from the natural sciences. Sections 4 and 5 will then focus on claims that view empathy as the fundamental social glue and that understand empathy as the main psychological mechanism enabling us to establish and maintain social relations and taking an evaluative stance towards each other.

1. Historical Introduction

2.1 mirror neurons, simulation, and the discussion of empathy in the contemporary theory of mind debate, 3.1 the critique of empathy in the context of a hermeneutic conception of the human sciences, 3.2 the critique of empathy within the context of a naturalist conception of the human sciences, 4. empathy as a topic of scientific exploration in psychology, 5.1 empathy and altruistic motivation, 5.2 empathy, its partiality, susceptibility to bias, and moral agency, 5.3 empathy, moral judgment, and the authority of moral norms, other internet resources, related entries.

Before the psychologist Edward Titchener (1867–1927) introduced the term “empathy” in 1909 into the English language as the translation of the German term “Einfühlung” (or “feeling into”), “sympathy”was the term commonly used to refer to empathy-related phenomena. If one were to point to a conceptual core for understanding these phenomena, it is probably best to point to David Hume’s dictum that “the minds of men are mirrors to one another,”(Hume 1739–40 [1978], 365) since in encountering other persons, humans can resonate with and recreate that person’s thoughts and emotions on different dimensions of cognitive complexity. While, as we will see, not everybody shares such resonance conception of empathy(some philosophers in the phenomenological tradition emphatically reject it), it certainly constitutes the center of Theodor Lipps’s understanding, who Titchener had in mind in his translation of “Einfühlung” as “empathy.”

Theodor Lipps (1851–1914)was also very familiar with the work of David Hume (see the introduction to Coplan and Goldie 2011 in this respect). More importantly, it was Theodor Lipps, whose work transformed empathy/Einfühlung from a concept of nineteenth century German aesthetics into a central category of the philosophy of the social and human sciences. To understand this transformation we first need to appreciate the reasons why philosophers of the nineteenth century thought it necessary to appeal to empathy in order to account for our ability to appreciate natural objects and artefacts in an aesthetic manner. According to the dominant (even though not universally accepted) positivistic and empiricist conception, sense data constitute the fundamental basis for our investigation of the world. Yet from a phenomenological perspective, our perceptual encounter with aesthetic objects and our appreciation of them as being beautiful—our admiration of a beautiful sunset, for example—seems to be as direct as our perception of an object as being red or square. By appealing to the psychological mechanisms of empathy, philosophers intended to provide an explanatory account of the phenomenological immediacy of our aesthetic appreciation of objects. More specifically, for Lipps, our empathic encounter with external objects trigger inner “processes” that give rise to experiences similar to ones that I have when I engage in various activities involving the movement of my body. Since my attention is perceptually focused on the external object, I experience them—or I automatically project my experiences—as being in the object. If those experiences are in some way apprehended in a positive manner and as being in some sense life-affirming, I perceive the object as beautiful, otherwise as ugly. In the first case, Lipps speaks of positive; in the later of negative empathy. Lipps also characterizes our experience of beauty as “objectified self-enjoyment,” since we are impressed by the “vitality” and “life potentiality” that lies in the perceived object (Lipps 1906, 1903 a,b. For the contemporary discussion of empathy’s role in aesthetics see particularly Breithaupt 2009; Coplan and Goldie 2011 (Part II); Curtis & Koch 2009; and Keen 2007. For a recent history of the empathy concept see also Lanzoni 2018).

In his Aesthetik, Lipps closely links our aesthetic perception and our perception of another embodied person as a minded creature. The nature of aesthetic empathy is always the “experience of another human” (1905, 49) . We appreciate another object as beautiful because empathy allows us to see it in analogy to another human body. Similarly, we recognize another organism as a minded creature because of empathy. Empathy in this context is more specifically understood as a phenomenon of “inner imitation,” where my mind mirrors the mental activities or experiences of another person based on the observation of his bodily activities or facial expressions. Empathy is ultimately based on an innate disposition for motor mimicry, a fact that is well established in the psychological literature and was already noticed by Adam Smith (1853). Even though such a disposition is not always externally manifested, Lipps suggests that it is always present as an inner tendency giving rise to similar kinaesthetic sensations in the observer as felt by the observed target. In seeing the angry face of another person we instinctually have a tendency of imitating it and of “imitating” her anger in this manner. Since we are not aware of such tendencies, we see the anger in her face (Lipps 1907). Despite the fact that Lipps’s primary examples of empathy focus on the recognition of emotions expressed in bodily gestures or facial expressions, his conception of empathy should not be understood as being limited to such cases. As his remarks about intellectual empathy suggest (1903b/05), he regards our recognition of all mental activities—insofar as they are activities requiring human effort—as being based on empathy or on inner imitation (See also the introductory chapter in Stueber 2006).

2. Empathy and the Philosophical Problem of Other Minds

It was indeed Lipps’s claim that empathy should be understood as the primary epistemic means for gaining knowledge of other minds that was the focus of a lively debate among philosophers at the beginning of the 20 th century (Prandtl 1910, Stein 1917, Scheler 1973). Even philosophers, who did not agree with Lipps’s specific explication, found the concept of empathy appealing because his argument for his position was closely tied to a thorough critique of what was widely seen at that time as the only alternative for conceiving of knowledge of other minds, that is, Mill’s inference from analogy. Traditionally, the inference from analogy presupposes a Cartesian conception of the mind according to which access to our own mind is direct and infallible, whereas knowledge of other minds is inferential, fallible, and based on evidence about other persons’ observed physical behavior. More formally one can characterize the inference from analogy as consisting of the following premises or steps.

i.) Another person X manifests behavior of type B . ii.) In my own case behavior of type B is caused by mental state of type M . iii.) Since my and X ’s outward behavior of type B is similar, it has to have similar inner mental causes. (It is thus assumed that I and the other persons are psychologically similar in the relevant sense.) Therefore: The other person’s behavior ( X ’s behavior) is caused by a mental state of type M .

Like Wittgenstein, but predating him considerably, Lipps argues in his 1907 article “Das Wissen von fremden Ichen” that the inference from analogy falls fundamentally short of solving the philosophical problem of other minds. Lipps does not argue against the inference from analogy because of its evidentially slim basis, but because it does not allow us to understand its basic presupposition that another person has a mind that is psychologically similar to our own mind. The inference from analogy thus cannot be understood as providing us with evidence for the claim that the other person has mental states like we do because, within its Cartesian framework, we are unable to conceive of other minds in the first place. For Lipps, analogical reasoning requires the contradictory undertaking of inferring another person’s anger and sadness on the basis of my sadness and anger, yet to think of that sadness and anger simultaneously as something “absolutely different” from my anger and sadness. More generally, analogical inference is a contradictory undertaking because it entails “entertaining a completely new thought about an I, that however is not me, but something absolutely different” (Lipps 1907, 708, my translation).

Yet while Lipps diagnoses the problem of the inference of analogy within the context of a Cartesian conception of the mind quite succinctly, he fails to explain how empathy is able to provide us with an epistemically sanctioned understanding of other minds or why our “feeling into” the other person’s mind is more than a mere projection. More importantly, Lipps does not sufficiently explain why empathy does not encounter similar problems to the ones diagnosed for the inference from analogy and how empathy allows us to conceive of other persons as having a mind similar to our own if we are directly acquainted only with our own mental states(See Stueber 2006). Wittgenstein’s critique of the inference from analogy is in the end more penetrating because he recognizes that its problem depends on a Cartesian account of mental concepts. If my grasp of a mental concept is exclusively constituted by me experiencing something in a certain way, then it is impossible for me to conceive of how that very same concept can be applied to somebody else, given that I cannot experience somebody else’s mental states. I therefore cannot conceive of how another person can be in the same mental state as I am because that would require that I can conceive of my mental state as something, which I do not experience. But according to the Cartesian conception this seems to be a conceptually impossible task. Moreover, if one holds on to a Cartesian conception of the mind, it is not clear how appealing to empathy, as conceived of by Lipps, should help us in conceiving of mental states as belonging to another mind.

Within the phenomenological tradition, the above shortcomings of Lipps’s position of empathy were quite apparent (see for example Stein 1917, 24 and Scheler 1973, 236). Yet despite the fact that they did not accept Lipps’s explication of empathy as being based on mechanisms of inner resonance and projection, authors within the phenomenological tradition of philosophy were persuaded by Lipps’s critique of the inference from analogy. For that very reason, Husserl and Stein, for example, continued using the concept of empathy and regarded empathy as an irreducible “type of experiential act sui generis” (Stein 1917, 10), which allows us to view another person as being analogous to ourselves without this “analogizing apprehension” constituting an inference of analogy (Husserl 1931 [1963], 141). Scheler went probably the furthest in rejecting the Cartesian framework in thinking about the apprehension of other minds, while keeping committed to something like the concept of empathy. [ 1 ] (In order to contrast his position from Lipps, Scheler however preferred to use the term “nachfühlen” rather than “einfühlen.”) For Scheler, the fundamental mistake of the debate about the apprehension of other minds consists in the fact that it does not take seriously certain phenomenological facts. Prima facie, we do not encounter merely the bodily movements of another person. Rather, we are directly recognizing specific mental states because they are characteristically expressed in states of the human body; in facial expressions, in gestures, in the tone of voice, and so on. Empathy within the phenomenological tradition then is not conceived of as a resonance phenomenon requiring the observer to recreate the mental states of the other person in his or her own mind but as a special perceptual act (See Scheler 1973, particularly 232–258; For a succinct explication of the debate about empathy in the phenomenological tradition consult Zahavi 2010)

The idea that empathy understood as inner imitation is the primary epistemic means for understanding other minds has however been revived in the 1980’s by simulation theorists in the context of the interdisciplinary debate about folk psychology; an empirically informed debate about how best to describe the underlying causal mechanisms of our folk psychological abilities to interpret, explain, and predict other agents. (See Davies and Stone 1995). In contrast to theory theory, simulation theorists conceive of our ordinary mindreading abilities as an ego-centric method and as a “knowledge–poor” strategy, where I do not utilize a folk psychological theory but use myself as a model for the other person’s mental life. It is not the place here to discuss the contemporary debate extensively, but it has to be emphasized that contemporary simulation theorists vigorously discuss how to account for our grasp of mental concepts and whether simulation theory is committed to Cartesianism. Whereas Goldman (2002, 2006) links his version of simulation theory to a neo-Cartesian account of mental concepts, other simulation theorists develop versions of simulation theory that are not committed to a Cartesian conception of the mind. (Gordon 1995a, b, and 2000; Heal 2003; and Stueber 2006, 2012).

Moreover, neuroscientific findings according to which so called mirror neurons play an important role in recognizing another person’s emotional states and in understanding the goal-directedness of his behavior have been understood as providing empirical evidence for Lipps’ idea of empathy as inner imitation. With the help of the term “mirror neuron,” scientists refer to the fact that there is significant overlap between neural areas of excitation that underlie our observation of another person’s action and areas that are stimulated when we execute the very same action. A similar overlap between neural areas of excitation has also been established for our recognition of another person’s emotion based on his facial expression and our experiencing the emotion. (For a survey on mirror neurons see Gallese 2003a and b, Goldman 2006, chap. 6; Keysers 2011; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; and particularly Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008). Since the face to face encounter between persons is the primary situation within which human beings recognize themselves as minded creatures and attribute mental states to others, the system of mirror neurons has been interpreted as playing a causally central role in establishing intersubjective relations between minded creatures. For that very reason, the neuroscientist Gallese thinks of mirror neurons as constituting what he calls the “shared manifold of intersubjectivity” (Gallese 2001, 44). Stueber (2006, chap. 4)—inspired by Lipps’s conception of empathy as inner imitation—refers to mirror neurons as mechanisms of basic empathy; [ 2 ] as mechanisms that allow us to apprehend directly another person’s emotions in light of his facial expressions and that enable us to understand his bodily movements as goal-directed actions, that is, as being directed towards an external object like a person reaching for the cup. The evidence from mirror neurons—and the fact that in perceiving other people we use very different neurobiological mechanisms than in the perception of physical objects—does suggest that in our primary perceptual encounter with the world we do not merely encounter physical objects. Rather, even on this basic level, we distinguish already between mere physical objects and objects that are more like us (See also Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). The mechanisms of basic empathy have to be seen as Nature’s way of dissolving one of the principal assumptions of the traditional philosophical discussion about other minds shared by opposing positions such as Cartesianism and Behaviorism; that is, that we perceive other people primarily as physical objects and do not distinguish already on the perceptual level between physical objects like trees and minded creatures like ourselves. Mechanisms of basic empathy might therefore be interpreted as providing us with a perceptual and non-conceptual basis for developing an intersubjectively accessible folk psychological framework that is applicable to the subject and observed other (Stueber 2006, 142–45).

It needs to be acknowledged however that this interpretation of mirror neurons crucially depends on the assumption that the primary function of mirror neurons consists in providing us with a cognitive grasp of another person’s actions and emotions. This interpretation has however been criticized by researchers and philosophers who think that neural resonance presupposes rather than provides us with an understanding of what is going on in the minds of others (Csibra 2007, Hickok 2008 and 2014). They have also pointed out that in observing another person’s emotion or behavior, we never fully “mirror” another person’s neural stimulation. The neuroscientist Jean Decety has argued that in observing another person’s pain our vicariously stimulated pain matrix is not sensitive to the phenomenal quality of pain. Rather it is sensitive to pain as an indicator of “aversion and withdrawal when exposed to danger and threats”(Decety and Cowell 2015, 6 and Decety 2010). At least as far as empathy for pain is concerned, our neural resonance is also modulated by a variety of contextual factors, such as how close we feel to the observed subject, whether we regard the pain to be morally justified (as in the case of punishment, for example) or whether we regard it as unavoidable and necessary, such as in a medical procedure (Singer and Lamm 2009; but see also Allen 2010, Borg 2007, Debes 2010, Gallese 2016, Goldman 2009, Iacoboni 2011, Jacob 2008, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2016, and Stueber 2012a).

Yet it should be noted that everyday mindreading is not restricted to the realm of basic empathy. Ordinarily we not only recognize that other persons are afraid or that they are reaching for a particular object. We understand their behavior in more complex social contexts in terms of their reasons for acting using the full range of psychological concepts including the concepts of belief and desire. Evidence from neuroscience shows that these mentalizing tasks involve very different neuronal areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal cortex, and the cingulate cortex. (For a survey see Kain and Perner 2003; Frith and Frith 2003; Zaki and Ochsner 2012). Low level mindreading in the realm of basic empathy has therefore to be distinguished from higher levels of mindreading (Goldman 2006). It is clear that low level forms of understanding other persons have to be conceived of as being relatively knowledge– poor as they do not involve a psychological theory or complex psychological concepts. How exactly one should conceive of high level mindreading abilities, whether they involve primarily knowledge–poor simulation strategies or knowledge–rich inferences is controversially debated within the contemporary debate about our folk psychological mindreading abilities(See Davies and Stone 1995, Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997, Gordon 1995, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, Heal 2003, Nichols and Stich 2003, Goldman 2006, and Stueber 2006). Simulation theorists, however, insist that even more complex forms of understanding other agents involve resonance phenomena that engage our cognitively intricate capacities of imaginatively adopting the perspective of another person and reenacting or recreating their thought processes (For various forms of perspective-taking see Coplan 2011 and Goldie 2000). Accordingly, simulation theorists distinguish between different types of empathy such as between basic and reenactive empathy (Stueber 2006) or between mirroring and reconstructive empathy (Goldman 2011). Interestingly, the debate about how to conceive of these more complex forms of mindreading resonates with the traditional debate about whether empathy is the unique method of the human sciences and whether or not one has to strictly distinguish between the methods of the human and the natural sciences. Equally noteworthy is the fact that in the contemporary theory of mind debate voices have grown louder that assert that the contemporary theory of mind debate fundamentally misconceives of the nature of social cognition. In light of insights from the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions in philosophy, they claim that on the most basic level empathy should not be conceived of as a resonance phenomenon but as a type of direct perception. (See particularly Zahavi 2010; Zahavi and Overgaard 2012, but Jacob 2011 for a response). More complex forms of social cognition are also not to be understood as being based on either theory or empathy/simulation, rather they are better best conceived of as the ability to directly fit observed units of actions into larger narrative or cultural frameworks (For this debate see Gallagher 2012, Gallagher and Hutto 2008, Hutto 2008, and Seemann 2011, Stueber 2011 and 2012a, and various articles in Matravers and Waldow 2018). For skepticism about empathic perspective-taking understood as a complete identification with the perspective of the other person see also Goldie 2011). Regardless of how one views this specific debate it should be clear that ideas about mindreading developed originally by proponents of empathy at the beginning of the 20 th century can no longer be easily dismissed and have to be taken seriously.

3. Empathy as the Unique Method of the Human Sciences

At the beginning of the 20 th century, empathy understood as a non-inferential and non-theoretical method of grasping the content of other minds became closely associated with the concept of understanding (Verstehen); a concept that was championed by the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy concerned with explicating the methods used in grasping the meaning and significance of texts, works of arts, and actions. (For a survey of this tradition see Grondin 1994). Hermeneutic thinkers insisted that the method used in understanding the significance of a text or a historical event has to be fundamentally distinguished from the method used in explaining an event within the context of the natural sciences. This methodological dualism is famously expressed by Droysen in saying that “historical research does not want to explain; that is, derive in a form of an inferential argument, rather it wants to understand” (Droysen 1977, 403), and similarly in Dilthey’s dictum that “we explain nature, but understand the life of the soul” (Dilthey 1961, vol. 5, 144). Yet Droysen and authors before him never conceived of understanding solely as an act of mental imitation or solely as an act of imaginatively “transporting” oneself into the point of view of another person. Such “psychological interpretation” as Schleiermacher (1998) used to call it, was conceived of as constituting only one aspect of the interpretive method used by historians. Other tasks mentioned in this context involved critically evaluating the reliability of historical sources, getting to know the linguistic conventions of a language, and integrating the various elements derived from historical sources into a consistent narrative of a particular epoch. The differences between these various aspects of the interpretive procedure were however downplayed in the early Dilthey. For him, grasping the significance of any cultural fact had to be understood as a mental act of “transposition.” (See for example Dilthey 1961, vol. 5, 263–265). .

Ironically, the close association of the concepts of empathy and understanding and the associated claim that empathy is the sole and unique method of the human sciences also facilitated the decline of the empathy concept and its almost utter disregard by philosophers of the human and social sciences later on, in both the analytic and continental/hermeneutic traditions of philosophy. Within both traditions, proponents of empathy were—for very different reasons—generally seen as advocating an epistemically naïve and insufficiently broad conception of the methodological proceedings in the human sciences. As a result, most philosophers of the human and social sciences maintained their distance from the idea that empathy is central for our understanding of other minds and mental phenomena. Notable exceptions in this respect are R.G. Collingwood and his followers, who suggested that reenacting another person’s thoughts is necessary for understanding them as rational agents (Collingwood 1946, Dray 1957 and 1995). Notice however that in contrast to the contemporary debate about folk psychology, the debate about empathy in the philosophy of social science is not concerned with investigating underlying causal mechanisms. Rather, it addresses normative questions of how to justify a particular explanation or interpretation.

Philosophers arguing for a hermeneutic conception of the human and social sciences insist on a strict methodological division between the human and the natural sciences. [ 3 ] Yet they nowadays favor the concept of understanding (Verstehen) and reject the earlier identification of understanding and empathy for two specific reasons. First, empathy is no longer seen as the unique method of the human sciences because facts of significance, which a historian or an interpreter of literary and non-literary texts are interested in, do not solely depend on facts within the individual mind. A historian, for example, is not bound by the agent’s perspective in telling the story of a particular historical time period(Danto 1965). Similarly, philosophers such as Hans Georg Gadamer, have argued that the significance of a text is not tied to the author’s intentions in writing the text. In reading a text by Shakespeare or Plato we are not primarily interested in finding out what Plato or Shakespeare said but what these texts themselves say.(Gadamer 1989; for a critical discussion see Skinner (in Tully 1988); “Introduction” in Kögler and Stueber 2000; and Stueber 2002).

The above considerations, however, do not justify the claim that empathy has no role to play within the context of the human sciences. It justifies merely the claim that empathy cannot be their only method, at least as long as one admits that recognizing the thoughts of individual agents has to play some role in the interpretive project of the human sciences. Accordingly, a second reason against empathy is also emphasized. Conceiving of understanding other agents as being based on empathy is seen as an epistemically extremely naïve conception of the interpretation of individual agents, since it seems to conceive of understanding as a mysterious meeting of two individual minds outside of any cultural context. Individual agents are always socially and culturally embedded creatures. Understanding other agents thus presupposes an understanding of the cultural context within which an agent functions. Moreover, in the interpretive situation of the human sciences, the cultural background of the interpreter and the person, who has to be interpreted, can be very different. In that case, I can not very easily put myself in the shoes of the other person and imitate his thoughts in my mind. If understanding medieval knights, to use an example of Winch (1958), requires me to think exactly as the medieval knight did, then it is not clear how such a task can be accomplished from an interpretive perspective constituted by very different cultural presuppositions. Making sense of other minds has, therefore, to be seen as an activity that is a culturally mediated one; a fact that empathy theorists according to this line of critique do not sufficiently take into account when they conceive of understanding other agents as a direct meeting of minds that is independent of and unaided by information about how these agents are embedded in a broader social environment. (See Stueber 2006, chap.6, Zahavi 2001, 2005; for the later Dilthey see Makreel 2000. For a critical discussion of whether the concept of understanding without recourse to empathy is useful for marking an epistemic distinction between the human and natural sciences consult also Stueber 2012b. Within the context of anthropology, Hollan and Throop argue that empathy is best understood as a dynamic, culturally situated, temporally extended, and dialogical process actively involving not only the interpreter but also his or her interpretee. See Hollan 20012; Hollan and Throop 2008, 2001; Throop 2010).).

Philosophers, who reject the methodological dualism between the human and the natural sciences as argued for in the hermeneutic context, are commonly referred to as naturalists in the philosophy of social science. They deny that the distinction between understanding and explanation points to an important methodological difference. Even in the human or social sciences, the main point of the scientific endeavor is to provide epistemically justified explanations (and predictions) of observed or recorded events (see also Henderson 1993). At most, empathy is granted a heuristic role in the context of discovery. It however can not play any role within the context of justification. As particularly Hempel (1965) has argued, to explain an event involves—at least implicitly—an appeal to law-like regularities providing us with reasons for expecting that an event of a certain kind will occur under specific circumstances. Empathy might allow me to recognize that I would have acted in the same manner as somebody else. Yet it does not epistemically sanction the claim that anybody of a particular type or anybody who is in that type of situation will act in this manner.

Hempel’s argument against empathy has certainly not gone unchallenged. Within the philosophy of history, Dray (1957), following Collingwood, has argued that empathy plays an epistemically irreducible role, since we explain actions in terms of an agent’s reasons. For him, such reason explanations do not appeal to empirical generalizations but to normative principles of actions outlining how a person should act in a particular situation. Similar arguments have been articulated by Jaegwon Kim (1984, 1998). Yet as Stueber (2006, chap. 5) argues such a response to Hempel would require us to implausibly conceive of reason explanations as being very different from ordinary causal explanations. It would imply that our notions of explanation and causation are ambiguous concepts. Reasons that cause agents to act in the physical world would be conceived of as causes in a very different sense than ordinary physical causes. Moreover, as Hempel himself suggests, appealing to normative principles explains at most why a person should have acted in a certain manner. It does not explain why he ultimately acted in that way. Consequently, Hempel’s objection against empathy retain their force as long as one maintains that reason explanations are a form of ordinary causal explanations and as long as one conceives of the epistemic justification of such explanations as implicitly appealing to some empirical generalizations (For Kim’s recent attempt to account for the explanatory character of action explanations by acknowledging the centrality of the first person perspective see also Kim 2010).

Despite these concessions to Hempel, Stueber suggests that empathy (specifically reenactive empathy) has to be acknowledged as playing a central role even in the context of justification. For him, folk psychological explanations have to be understood as being tied to the domain of rational agency. In contrast to explanations in terms of mere inner causes, folk psychological explanations retain their explanatory force only as long as agents’ beliefs and desires can also be understood as reasons for their actions. The epistemic justification of such folk psychological explanations implicitly relies on generalizations involving folk psychological notions such as belief and desire. Yet the existence of such generalizations alone does not establish specific beliefs and desires as reasons for a person’s actions. Elaborating on considerations by Heal (2003) and Collingwood (1946), Stueber suggests that recognizing beliefs and desires as reasons requires the interpreter to be sensitive to an agent’s other relevant beliefs and desires. Individual thoughts function as reasons for rational agency only relative to a specific framework of an agent’s thoughts that are relevant for consideration in a specific situation. Most plausibly—given our persistent inability to solve the frame problem—recognizing which of another agent’s thoughts are relevant in specific contexts requires the practical ability of reenacting another person’s thoughts in one’s own mind. Empathy’s central epistemic role has to be admitted, since beliefs and desires can be understood only in this manner as an agent’s reasons (See Stueber 2006, 2008, 2013. For a related discussion about the role of understanding in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science see Grimm 2016 and Grimm, Baumberger, and Ammon 2017).

The discussion of empathy within psychology has been largely unaffected by the critical philosophical discussion of empathy as an epistemic means to know other minds or as the unique method of the human sciences. Rather, psychologists’ interest in empathy–related phenomena harks back to eighteenth century moral philosophy, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith (See also Wispe 1991). Here empathy, or what was then called sympathy, was regarded to play a central role in constituting human beings as social and moral creatures allowing us to emotionally connect to our human companions and care for their well-being. Throughout the early 20 th century, but particularly since the late 1940’s, empathy has, therefore, been an intensively studied topic of psychological research.

More broadly one can distinguish two psychological research traditions studying empathy–related phenomena; that is, the study of what is currently called empathic accuracy and the study of empathy as an emotional phenomenon in the encounter of others. The first area of study defines empathy primarily as a cognitive phenomenon and conceives of empathy in general terms as “the intellectual or imaginative apprehension of another’s condition or state of mind,” to use Hogan’s (1969) terminology. Within this area of research, one is primarily interested in determining the reliability and accuracy of our ability to perceive and recognize other persons’ enduring personality traits, attitudes and values, and occurrent mental states. One also investigates the various factors that influence empathic accuracy. One has, for example, been interested in determining whether empathic ability depends on gender, age, family background, intelligence, emotional stability, the nature of interpersonal relations, or whether it depends on specific motivations of the observer. (For a survey see Ickes 1993 and 2003; and Taft 1955). A more detailed account of the research on empathic accuracy and some of its earlier methodological difficulties can be found in the

Supplementary document on the Study of Cognitive Empathy and Empathic Accuracy .

Philosophically more influential has been the study of empathy defined primarily as an emotional or affective phenomenon, which psychologists in the middle of the 1950’s started to focus on. In this context, psychologists have also addressed issues of moral motivation that have been traditionally topics of intense discussions among moral philosophers. They were particularly interested in investigating (i) the development of various means for measuring empathy as a dispositional trait of adults and of children and as a situational response in specific situations, (ii) the factors on which empathic responses and dispositions depend, and (iii) the relation between empathy and pro-social behavior and moral development. Before discussing the psychological research on emotional empathy and its relevance for moral philosophy and moral psychology in the next section, it is vital to introduce important conceptual distinctions that one should keep in mind in evaluating the various empirical studies.

Anyone reading the emotional empathy literature has to be struck by the fact that empathy tended to be incredibly broadly defined in the beginning of this specific research tradition. Stotland, one of the earliest researcher who understood empathy exclusively as an emotional phenomenon, defined it as “an observer’s reacting emotionally because he perceives that another is experiencing or is about to experience an emotion” (1969, 272). According to Stotland’s definition very diverse emotional responses such as feeling envy, feeling annoyed, feeling distressed, being relieved about, feeling pity, or feeling what Germans call Schadenfreude (feeling joyful about the misfortune of another) have all to be counted as empathic reactions. Since the 1980’s however, psychologists have fine tuned their understanding of empathy conceptually and distinguished between different aspects of the emotional reaction to another person; thereby implicitly acknowledging the conceptual distinctions articulated by Max Scheler (1973) almost a century earlier. In this context, it is particularly useful to distinguish between the following reactive emotions that are differentiated in respect to whether or not such reactions are self or other oriented and whether they presuppose awareness of the distinction between self and others. (See also the survey in the Introduction to Eisenberg/Strayer 1987 and Batson 2009)

Emotional contagion: Emotional contagion occurs when people start feeling similar emotions caused merely by the association with other people. You start feeling joyful, because other people around you are joyful or you start feeling panicky because you are in a crowd of people feeling panic. Emotional contagion however does not require that one is aware of the fact that one experiences the emotions because other people experience them, rather one experiences them primarily as one’s own emotion (Scheler 1973, 22). A newborn infant’s reactive cry to the distress cry of another, which Hoffman takes as a “rudimentary precursor of empathic distress” (Hoffman 2000, 65), can probably be understood as a phenomenon of emotional contagion, since the infant is not able to properly distinguish between self and other.

Affective and proper Empathy: More narrowly and properly understood, empathy in the affective sense is the vicarious sharing of an affect. Authors however differ in how strictly they interpret the phrase of vicariously sharing an affect. For some, it requires that the empathizers and the persons they empathize with need to be in very similar affective states (Coplan 2011; de Vignemont and Singer 2006; Jacob 2011). For Hoffman, on the other hand, it is an emotional response requiring only “the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own situation” (Hoffman 2000, 30). According to this definition, empathy does not necessarily require that the subject and target feel similar emotions (even though this is most often the case). Rather the definition also includes cases of feeling sad when seeing a child who plays joyfully but who does not know that it has been diagnosed with a serious illness (assuming that this is how the other person himself or herself would feel if he or she would fully understand his or her situation). In contrast to mere emotional contagion, genuine empathy presupposes the ability to differentiate between oneself and the other. It requires that one is minimally aware of the fact that one is having an emotional experience due to the perception of the other’s emotion, or more generally due to attending to his situation. In seeing a sad face of another and feeling sad oneself, such feeling of sadness should count as genuinely empathic only if one recognizes that in feeling sad one’s attention is still focused on the other and that it is not an appropriate reaction to aspects of one’s own life. Moreover, empathy outside the realm of a direct perceptual encounter involves some appreciation of the other person’s emotion as an appropriate response to his or her situation. To be happy or unhappy because one’s child is happy or sad should not count necessarily as an empathic emotion. It cannot count as a vicarious emotional response if it is due to the perception of the outside world from the perspective of the observer and her desire that her children should be happy. My happiness about my child being happy would therefore not be an emotional state that is more congruent to his situation. Rather, it is an emotional response appropriate to my own perspective on the world. In order for my happiness or unhappiness to be genuinely empathic it has to be happiness or unhappiness about what makes the other person happy. Accordingly, if I share another person’s emotion vicariously I do not merely have to be in an affective state with a similar phenomenal quality. Rather my affective state has to be directed toward the same intentional object. (See Sober and Wilson 1998, 231–237 and Maibom 2007. For a critical discussion of how and whether such vicarious sharing is possible see also Deonna 2007 and Matravers 2018). It should be noted, however, that some authors conceive of proper empathy more broadly as not merely being concerned with the vicarious reenactment of affective states but more comprehensively as including non-affective states such as beliefs and desires. This is especially true if they are influenced by the discussion of of empathy as an epistemic means such as Goldman (2011) and Stueber (2006). However, already Adam Smith (1853) constitutes a good example for such broad understanding of proper empathy. Finally, others suggest that it is best to distinguish between affective sharing and perspective taking (Decety and Cowell 2015).

Sympathy: In contrast to affective empathy, sympathy—or what some authors also refer to as empathic concern—is not an emotion that is congruent with the other’s emotion or situation such as feeling the sadness of the other person’s grieving for the death of his father. Rather, sympathy is seen as an emotion sui generis that has the other’s negative emotion or situation as its object from the perspective of somebody who cares for the other person’s well being (Darwall 1998). In this sense, sympathy consists of “feeling sorrow or concern for the distressed or needy other,” a feeling for the other out of a “heightened awareness of the suffering of another person as something that needs to be alleviated.” (Eisenberg 2000a, 678; Wispe 1986, 318; and Wispe 1991).

Whereas it is quite plausible to assume that empathy—that is, empathy with negative emotions of another or what Hoffman (2000) calls “veridical empathic distress”—under certain conditions (and when certain developmental markers are achieved) can give rise to sympathy, it should be stressed that the relation between affective empathy and sympathy is a contingent one; the understanding of which requires further empirical research. First, sympathy does not necessarily require feeling any kind of congruent emotions on part of the observer, a detached recognition or representation that the other is in need or suffers might be sufficient. (See Scheler 1973 and Nichols 2004). Second, empathy or empathic distress might not at all lead to sympathy. People in the helping professions, who are so accustomed to the misery of others, suffer at times from compassion fatigue. It is also possible to experience empathic overarousal because one is emotionally so overwhelmed by one’s empathic feelings that one is unable to be concerned with the suffering of the other (Hoffman 2000, chap. 8). In the later case, one’s empathic feeling are transformed or give rise to mere personal distress, a reactive emotional phenomenon that needs to be distinguished from emotional contagion, empathy, and sympathy.

Personal Distress: Personal distress in the context of empathy research is understood as a reactive emotion in response to the perception/recognition of another’s negative emotion or situation. Yet, while personal distress is other-caused like sympathy, it is, in contrast to sympathy, primarily self-oriented . In this case, another person’s distress does not make me feel bad for him or her, it just makes me feel bad, or “alarmed, grieved, upset, worried, disturbed, perturbed, distressed,and troubled;” to use the list of adjectives that according to Batson’s research indicates personal distress (Batson et al. 1987 and Batson 1991). And, in contrast to empathic emotions as defined above, my personal distress is not any more congruent with the emotion or situation of another. Rather it wholly defines my own outlook onto the world.

While it is conceptually necessary to differentiate between these various emotional responses, it has to be admitted that it is empirically not very easy to discriminate between them, since they tend to occur together. Think or imagine yourself attending the funeral of the child of a friend or good acquaintance. This is probably one reason why early researchers tended not to distinguish between the above aspects in their study of empathy related phenomena. Yet since the above distinctions refer to very different psychological mechanisms, it is absolutely central to distinguish between them when empirically assessing the impact and contribution of empathy to an agent’s pro-social motivation and behavior. Given the ambiguity of the empathy concept within psychology—particularly in the earlier literature—in evaluating and comparing different empirical empathy studies, it is always crucial to keep in mind how empathy has been defined and measured within the context of these studies. For a more extensive discussion of the methods used by psychologists to measure empathy see the

Supplementary document on Measuring Empathy .

5. Empathy, Moral Philosophy, and Moral Psychology

Moral philosophers have always been concerned with moral psychology and with articulating an agent’s motivational structure in order to explicate the importance of morality for a human life. After all, moral judgments supposedly make demands on an agent’s will and are supposed to provide us with reasons and motivations for acting in a certain manner. Yet moral judgments, at least in the manner in which we conceive of them in modern times, are also regarded to be based on normative standards that, in contrast to mere conventional norms, have universal scope and are valid independent of the features of specific social practices that agents are embedded in. One only needs to think of statements such as “cruelty to innocent children or slavery is morally wrong,” which we view as applying also to social practices where the attitude of its population seem to condone such actions. Moral judgements thus seem to address us from the perspective of the moral stance where we leave behind the perspective of self-love and do not conceive of each other either as friends or foes (see Hume 1987, 75) or as belonging to the in–group or out–group, but where we view each other all to be equal part of a moral community. Finally, and relatedly, in order to view morality as something that is possible for human beings we also seem to require that our motivations based on or associated with moral reasons have a self-less character. Given to charity for merely selfish reasons, for example, seems to clearly diminish its moral worth and implicitly deny the universal character of a moral demand. Philosophically explicating the importance of morality for human life then has to do the following: It has to explain how it is that we humans as a matter of fact do care about morality thusly conceived, it has to address the philosophically even more pertinent question of why it is that we should care about morality or why it is that we should regard judgments issued from the perspective of the moral stance to have normative authority over us; and it has to allow us to understand how it is that we can act self-lessly in a manner that correspond to the demands made on us from the moral stance. Answering all of these questions however necessitates at one point to explain how our moral interests are related to our psychological constitution as human beings and how moral demands can be understood as being appropriately addressed to agents who are psychologically structured in that manner.

Prima facie, the difficulty of this enterprise consists in squaring a realistic account of human psychology with the universal scope and intersubjective validity of moral judgments, since human motivation and psychological mechanisms seem to be always situational, local, and of rather limited scope. Moreover, as evolutionary psychologists tell us in–group bias seems to be a universal trait of human psychology. One of the most promising attempts to solve this problem is certainly due to the tradition of eighteenth century moral philosophy associated with the names of David Hume and Adam Smith who tried to address all of the above philosophical desiderata by pointing to the central role that our empathic and sympathetic capacities have for constituting us as social and moral agents and for providing us with the psychological capacities to make and to respond to moral judgments. While philosophers in the Kantian tradition, who favor reason over sentiments, have generally been skeptical about this proposal, more recently the claim that empathy is central for morality and a flourishing human life has again been the topic of an intense and controversial debate. On the one hand, empathy has been hailed by researchers from a wide range of disciplines and also by some public figures, President Obama most prominently among them. Slote (2010) champions empathy as the sole foundation of moral judgment, de Waal (2006) conceives of it as the unique evolutionary building block of morality, Rifkin (2009) regards it even as a force whose cultivation has unique revolutionary powers to transform a world in crisis, and Baron-Cohen (2011, 194) views it as a “universal solvent” in that “any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.” On the other hand, such empathy enthusiasm has encountered penetrating criticism by Prinz (2011 a,b) and Bloom (2016), who emphasize its dark side, that is, its tendency to fall prey to so–called “here and now” biases. The following subsections will address these issues by surveying the relevant empirical research on the question whether empathy motivates us in a self-less manner, the question of whether empathy is inherently biased and partial to the in-group, and it will discuss how we might think of the normative character of moral judgments in light of our empathic capacities.(For a survey of other relevant issues from social psychology, specifically social neuroscience, consult also Decety and Lamm 2006; Decety and Ickes 2009, and Decety 20012. For a discussion of the importance empathy for medical practice see Halpern 2001)

In a series of ingeniously designed experiments, Batson has accumulated evidence for what he calls the empathy-altruism thesis. In arguing for this thesis, Batson conceives of empathy as empathic concern or what others would call sympathy. More specifically, he characterized it in terms of feelings of being sympathetic, moved by, being compassionate, tender, warm and soft-hearted towards the other’s plight (Batson et al. 1987, 26) The task of his experiments consists in showing that empathy/sympathy does indeed lead to genuinely altruistic motivation, where the welfare of the other is the ultimate goal of my helping behavior, rather than to helping behavior because of predominantly egoistic motivations. According to the egoistic interpretation of empathy–related phenomena, empathizing with another person in need is associated with a negative feeling or can lead to a heightened awareness of the negative consequences of not helping; such as feelings of guilt, shame, or social sanctions. Alternatively, it can lead to an enhanced recognition of the positive consequences of helping behavior such as social rewards or good feelings. Empathy according to this interpretation induces us to help through mediation of purely egoistic motivations. We help others only because we recognize helping behavior as a means to egoistic ends. It allows us to reduce our negative feelings (aversive arousal reduction hypothesis), to avoid “punishment,” or to gain specific internal or external “rewards” (empathy-specific punishment and empathy-specific reward hypotheses).

Notice however that in arguing for the empathy-altruism thesis, Batson is not claiming that empathy always induces helping behavior. Rather, he argues against the predominance of an egoistic interpretation of an agent’s motivational structure. He argues for the existence of genuinely altruistic motivations and more specifically for the claim that empathy causes such genuinely altruistic motivation. These genuinely altruistic motives (together with other egoistic motives) are taken into account by the individual agent in deliberating about whether or not to help. Even for Batson, the question of whether the agent will act on his or her altruistic motivations depends ultimately on how strong they are and what costs the agent would incur in helping another person.

The basic set up of Batson’s experiments consists in the manipulation of the situation of the experimental subjects (dependent on the egoistic alternative to be argued against) and the manipulation of empathy/sympathy felt for an observed target in need. The decisive evidence for the empathy/sympathy-altruism thesis is always the recorded behavior of the subject, who is in a high empathy condition and in a situation where his helping behavior can not plausibly be seen as a means for the satisfaction of a personal goal. Since here is not the place to extensively describe the details of Batson’s experiments, a brief description of the experimental set up—focusing on Batson’s argument against the aversive arousal interpretation of empathy—and a brief evaluation of the success of his general argumentative strategy has to suffice (for more details see Batson 1991 and 2011). In all of his experiments, Batson assumes—based on Stotland (1969) and others—that empathy/sympathy can be manipulated either by manipulating the perceived similarity between subjects and targets or by manipulating the perspective taking attitude of the subjects. Empathy according to these assumptions can be increased by enhancing the perceived similarity between subject and target or by asking the subject to imagine how the observed person would feel in his or her situation rather than asking the subject to attend carefully to the information provided. [Note also that instructing the subject to imagine how they themselves would feel in the other’s situation, rather than instructing them to imagine how the other feels, is associated with an increase in personal distress and not only sympathetic feelings. (Batson et al. 1997b and Lamm, Batson, and Decety 2007).]

In trying to argue against the aversive arousal reduction interpretation, Batson also manipulates the ease with which a subject can avoid helping another person (in this case taking his place when they see him getting electric shocks). He reasons that if empathy leads to genuinely altruistic motivations, subjects in the high empathy/easy escape condition should still be willing to help. If they were only helping in order to reduce their own negative feelings, they would be expected to leave in this situation, since leaving is the less costly means for reaching an egoistic goal. As Batson was happy to report, the results confirmed his empathy/sympathy-altruism hypothesis, not only in the above experiments but also in experiments testing other alternative interpretations of empathy such as the empathy- specific punishment and the empathy-specific award hypotheses.

Researchers generally agree in finding Batson’s experimental research program and the accumulated evidence for the empathy-altruism thesis to be impressive. Yet they disagree about how persuasive one should ultimately regard his position. In particular it has been pointed out that his experiments have limited value, since they target only very specific egoistic accounts of why empathy might lead to helping behavior. Batson is not able to dismiss conclusively every alternative egoistic interpretation. In addition, it has been claimed that egoism has the resources to account for the result of his experiments. For example, one might challenge the validity of Batson’s interpretation by speculating whether empathy/sympathy leads to a heightened awareness of the fact that one will be troubled by bad memories of seeing another person in need, if one does nothing to help him or her. In this case even an egoistically motivated person would help in the high empathy/easy escape condition. (For this reply and various other egoistic interpretations of Batson’s experiments see Sober and Wilson 1998, 264–271).

Cialdini and his collaborators have suggested an even more elaborate non-altruistic interpretation of helping behavior in high empathy/easy escape conditions. According to their suggestions, conditions of high empathy are also conditions of increased “interpersonal unity, wherein the conception of self and other are not distinct but are merged to some degree” (Cialdini et al. 1997, 490). It is this increased feeling of oneness rather than empathy that is causally responsible for motivating helping behavior (See however Batson et al. 1997a, Neuberg et al. 1997, and Batson 1997 and 2011 for a plausible reply and May 2018, 144–153 for a probing discussion of the relation between empathic concern and oneness). One therefore has to be cautious in claiming that Batson has conclusively proven that the empathy/sympathy-altruism hypothesis is true, if that means one has logically excluded every egoistic alternative in accounting for helping behavior. But it has to be acknowledged that Batson has radically changed the argumentative dialectic of the egoism-altruism debate by forcing the egoistic account of human agency to come up with ever more elaborate alternative interpretations in order to account for helping behavior within its framework. Egoism was supposed to provide a rather unified and relatively simple account of the motivational structure of human agency. In challenging the predominance and simplicity of this framework in an empirically acute fashion, Batson has at least established altruism—claiming that besides egoistic motivations we are also motivated by genuinely altruistic reasons—as an empirically plausible hypothesis. He has shown it to be a hypothesis one is almost persuaded to believe that it is true, as he himself recently has characterized his own epistemic attitude (Batson 1997, 522.) More positively expressed, Batson’s research has at least demonstrated that empathy/sympathy is a causal factor in bringing about helping behavior. Regardless of the question of the exact nature of the underlying motivation for helping or prosocial behavior, psychologists generally assume that in adults and children a positive, even if weak, correlation between empathy—measured in a variety of ways—and prosocial behavior has been established; and this despite the fact that the above aspects of emotional responding to another person have not always been sufficiently distinguished.(For a survey see Eisenberg and Miller 1987; Eisenberg/Fabes 1998, Spinrad and Eisenberg 2014. For a general survey of the various factors contributing to prosocial behavior see Bierhoff 2002).

Regardless of how exactly one views the strength of Batson’s position, his research alone does not validate the thesis, articulated by various traditional moral philosophers, that sympathy or empathy is the basis of morality or that it constitutes the only source for moral motivation. First, nothing in his research has shown that empathy/sympathy is empirically necessary for moral agency. Second, some of Batson’s own research casts doubt on the claim that sympathy/empathy is the foundation of morality as empathy induced altruism can lead to behavior that conflicts with our principles of justice and fairness. One, for example, tends to assign a better job or a higher priority for receiving medical treatment to persons with whom one has actually sympathized, in violation of the above moral principles (See Batson et al. 1995). For that very reason, Batson himself distinguishes between altruistic motivation concerned with the well-being of another person and moral motivation guided by principles of justice and fairness (Batson 2011). Unfortunately we do not always realize this fact when we abstractly contrast moral motivation broadly with egoistic motivation. For that very reason, we also do not realize that we need to be more conscious in “orchestrating” the relationship between altruistic and moral motivations in order to fully utilize the motivational power of altruism for moral purposes (Batson 2014). Finally, the research discussed so far is not relevant for deciding the question of whether sophisticated mindreading abilities are required for full blown moral agency, since Batson understands empathy primarily as an emotional phenomenon. (See Nichols 2001 and Batson et al. 2003 in this respect.)

Within the psychological literature, one of the most comprehensive accounts of empathy and its relation to the moral development of a person is provided by the work of Martin Hoffman (for a summary see his 2000). Hoffman views empathy as a biologically based disposition for altruistic behavior (Hoffman 1981). He conceives of empathy as being due to various modes of arousal allowing us to respond empathically in light of a variety of distress cues from another person. Hoffman mentions mimicry, classical conditioning, and direct association—where one empathizes because the other’s situation reminds one of one’s own painful experience—as “fast acting and automatic” mechanisms producing an empathic response. As more cognitively demanding modes, Hoffman lists mediated association—where the cues for an empathic response are provided in a linguistic medium—and role taking.

Hoffman distinguishes between six (or more) developmental stages of empathic responses ranging from the reactive newborn cry, egocentric empathic distress, quasi-ego-centric empathic distress, to veridical empathy, empathy for another beyond the immediate situation, and empathy for whole groups of people. Accordingly, empathic responses constitute a developmental continuum that ranges from emotional contagion (as in the case of a reactive newborn cry) to various forms of proper empathy reached at the fourth stage. At the developmentally later stages, the child is able to emotionally respond to the distress of another in a more sophisticated manner due to an increase of cognitive capacities, particularly due to the increased cognitive ability to distinguish between self and other and by becoming aware of the fact that others have mental states that are independent from its own. Only at the fourth stage of empathic development (after the middle of the second year) do children acquire such abilities. They do no longer try to comfort themselves, when emotionally responding to another child’s distress—like seeking comfort from their own mother—, or use helping strategies that are more appropriate to comfort themselves than the other person—like using their own teddy-bear in trying to comfort the other child. Only at the fourth stage does empathy become also transformed or associated with sympathy leading to appropriate prosocial behavior. Hoffman’s developmental view is further supported by Preston and DeWaal’s account of empathy as a phenomenon to be observed across species at various levels of complexities related to different degrees of cognitive development. (Preston and DeWaal 2002a,b. For a discussion of the philosophical relevance of DeWaal’s view see also DeWaal 2006).

Significantly, Hoffman combines his developmental explication of empathy with a sophisticated analysis of its importance for moral agency. He is thereby acutely aware of the limitations in our natural capacity to empathize or sympathize with others, particularly what he refers to as “here and now” biases, that is, the fact that we tend to empathize more with persons that are in some sense perceived to be closer to us. (For a neuro-scientific investigation of how racial bias modulates empathic responses see Xuo, Zuo, Wang and Han 2009). Like Batson, Hoffman does not regard the moral realm as being exclusively circumscribed by our ability to empathize with other people. Besides empathic abilities, moral agency requires also knowledge of abstract moral principles, such as the principles of caring and justice. Hoffman seems to conceive of those principles as being derived from cognitive sources that are independent from our empathic abilities. Yet Hoffmann is rather optimistic about the natural compatibility of empathic motivation and our commitment to moral principles. He regards stable and effective moral agency as requiring empathy so that moral principles can have a motivational basis in an agent’s psychology. Within this context, he has lately emphasized a final stage of empathy development or what he calls “witnessing”, an empathic response to the suffering of others that is so intense that we “become fully committed to help”(Hoffman 2014, 82). As he explains—in light of examples from the history of abolitionism, the civil rights movement, serfdom reform in Russia, and various cases before the Supreme Court— it is particularly such witnessing that has contributed towards bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice. Accordingly, and despite our natural limitations in empathizing with others, Hoffman still regards empathy as the “bedrock of morality” and “the glue of society”(Hoffman 2014, 96. Besides Hoffman 2011 and 2014, see also Deigh 2011 for a measured evaluation of empathy in the legal context ).

More recently, such ultimately positive evaluation of empathy’s contributing role in constituting us as moral agents, as agents who address each other from the moral stance, has encountered penetrating criticism, particularly by Prinz (2011a,b) and Bloom (2016). Both emphasize the dark side of empathy, that is, the aforementioned “here and now” biases. More specifically Prinz mentions explicitly the cuteness, salience, and proximity effects—the fact that we tend to empathize more easily with attractive persons, with persons that are in close proximity and only if their suffering is particularly noteworthy— similarity biases and the fact that we tend to be rather selective in choosing whom to empathize with. Empathy is also very easily modulated by a variety of top-down factors that influence our perception of the social world and that let us register social divisions that seem to be prima facie incompatible with the more impartial stance demanded by the moral perspective. Research has documented these biases in a more fine-grained manner and shown that subjects generally “reported experiencing more empathy for the in–group then the out–group targets and more counter–empathy for the out–group than in–group targets”(Cikara et. al. 2014, 120), counter–empathy here being understood as the feeling of pleasure at the misfortune of another (Schadenfreude) or the feeling displeasure at something fortunate happening to another (Glückschmerz). This is particularly true if the other group is viewed to be in competition with one’s own group. Empathy can also be further reduced through various dehumanizing and objectifying strategies, strategies that have certainly employed in the context of the genocides of the twentieth century and the system of racial slavery in the United States (See Fuchs 2019, Kteily and Bruneau 2017). Heightened empathy for perceived wrongs done to members of the in–group can also lead to violent and immoral behavior (Bloom 2016, chap. 5). In addition, empathy tends to focus on the one (particularly if he or she is identifiable) rather than the many, what Bloom refers to as its spotlight feature. Empathy can mislead us particularly in contexts where we need to take into account statistically relevant information when addressing a moral or social problem, such as when thinking about the benefits of vaccination where it is more appropriate to think about the large numbers of children saved rather than empathizing with the bad effects such vaccination might have on one specific child. For all of these reasons, Prinz favors the moral emotions such as anger, guilt and shame as the foundation for morality, while Bloom prefers sympathy guided by reason as a more viable means than empathy to steer us in moral matters.

Here is not the place for a final evaluation of empathy’s contribution in regard to pro-social and moral motivation or moral and pro-social behavior, since this question is still very much the topic of an ongoing empirical investigation. Yet the following observations are certainly justified in light of the empirical evidence so far and might help to further clarify the debate. First, it seems to be pretty well established that however one defines our natural capacity for empathy, it is on its own not sufficient to keep us reliably on the path of morality (See also Decety and Cowell 2015). Whether that ultimately means that we should think of our capacity for empathy as a limited resource or whether it would be better to think of empathy as a motivated phenomenon and its limitations as being due to our reluctance to activate that capacity (Zaki 2014), is certainly another intriguing question for further empirical inquiry. One might also wonder why we should expect that the emotions such as sympathy and anger, which Bloom and Prinz point to, are less prone to bias and less affected by a universal human tendency to favor the in–group. Certainly sympathy within the context of Buddhism, to which Bloom appeals to is a highly regulated emotion, controlled through mindfulness practices or meditation and guided by an intellectual grasp about the detriments of various forms of attachment to this world. Persson and Savulescu (2018) therefore suggest that rather than giving up on empathy completely one should reform empathy by regulating it through one’s reflective capacities in light of our knowledge of its natural shortcomings or focus one’s empathy (cognitive and affective) particularly on another person’s concerns for his or her well-being as such empathy includes sympathy for the other (Simmons 2014). Such suggestions are also very much in line with proposals by David Hume and Adam Smith, who suggested already in the eighteenth century that we need to regulate empathy with the help of certain corrective mechanisms such as “some steady and general points of view” or the perspective of the“impartial spectator” in order to compensate for empathy’s limited scope. (For a good analysis of the philosophical discussion about empathy/sympathy in the eighteenth century see Frazer 2010).

Most importantly, in order to evaluate the empirical discussion about empathy’s role for morality, one needs to be very sensitive to how researchers define and measure empathy in arguing for and against empathy’s relation to moral motivation or moral judgment. Prinz and Bloom are quite explicit in defining empathy merely as an affective phenomenon, as our ability to feel what the other person feels. Evidence suggests indeed that merely sharing another person’s emotion empathically does not increase our concern or motivation for moral or pro-social action. Interestingly, however, perspective–taking and empathic concern/sympathy, which have always been seen as an integral part of empathy-related phenomena, are a slightly different matter. They do seem to be positively related to cooperation and charitable giving (Jordon et. al. 2016), to reducing prejudices against particular groups (Galinski and Morowitz 2011), and to an increase in one’s sensitivity to injustices done to others (Decety and Yoder 2015). Yet even here further research is needed as the effects of such perspective–taking could be modulated by the power differential between groups. It has, for example, been shown that in active intergroup conflicts, positive intergroup interaction can increase empathy for the other group. Yet within such contexts, taking the perspective of a person from the other group while interacting with them might also hinder the development of intergroup empathy if the dominant group is reminded through such perspective–taking of how they might be viewed by the non-dominant group. Even perspective taking by the non–dominant group might increase rather than decrease established negative stereotypes in thinking about the other group (Cikara et. al. 2014). It seems more effective if the non–dominant group is asked to articulate the difficulties of their lives (perspective–giving) and the dominant group is asked to translate that description into their own words (perspective–taking), even if the positive effects of such interaction is relatively short-lived (Bruneau and Saxe 2012).

So far, this entry has discussed mainly research exploring the relation between empathy and prosocial/moral behavior or motivation. Other important areas for considering empathy’s role in moral matters have to do with addressing the questions of how and whether empathy contributes to our ability to distinguish between moral and conventional norms, to the making of moral judgments, and how empathy can be appealed to in explicating the normative authority of such judgments. In considering the first question, psychologists and philosophers have generally followed Turiel in understanding moral norms as expressing concerns for “rights, justice, and the welfare of other people” (Turiel 1983, 3) and as having a very specific “signature response patterns” (Kelly et. al. 2007) associated with it. Moral norms are generally regarded to be more important than conventional norms in that their normative validity is conceived as being independent of social authority or specific social practices and agreements. Their scope is also judged to be much broader—they are thought of to be valid in other countries, for example—, and violation of moral norms is generally understood to be a more serious offense than the violation of other norms. Notice however that in distinguishing between moral and conventional norms subjects do not necessarily associate a strict universality in the Kantian sense with moral norms and view them as applicable to all rational beings. Indeed there is some evidence that 6–9 year old children, for example, view the moral/conventional distinction as being fully applicable only to behavior of individuals in the in-group and view prescription against harming members of the out-group to be more like conventional norms (Rhodes and Chalik 2013). Accordingly, the fact that empathy shows considerable in-group bias, as discussed above, does not automatically count as evidence against it playing a role in allowing humans to distinguish between moral and conventional norms within a social context.

Of central importance for assessing the role of empathy for grasping the moral/conventional distinction has been the research on the nature of psychopathy and autism. Both pathologies are seen as involving deficits in different dimensions of empathy but only psychopaths have great difficulties in living up to moral standards of their societies and only they were originally thought of as having difficulties in appropriately distinguishing between moral and conventional norms (Blair 1995 and 1996). More specifically, psychopaths show a selective deficit in affective or emotional empathy particularly in “processing fearful, sad, and possibly disgusted facial expressions”(Blair 2010, 710). In contrast to persons with autism they however do not show similar deficits in perspective taking or theory of mind capacities. In his 1995 article, Blair therefore blames the absence of what he calls the Violence Inhibition Mechanism(VIM) that allows us to respond appropriately to the observed distress cues in others for the psychopaths’ moral deficits and their inability to draw the moral/conventional distinction. In his later work, he speaks more broadly of a dysfunction of our Integrated Emotion System (IES), caused by a deficit in the amygdala to properly represent negative emotions. (Blair, Mitchel, and Blair 2005, for a recent survey regarding the very specific deficit of psychopaths in feeling and recognizing fear see also Marsh 2014). Yet one has to tread very carefully in drawing definite conclusions about the role of empathy for morality from the empirical research about psychopathy. The results of the empirical investigations are far from unified and do not point in the same direction (For a concise survey see Maibom 2017). Newer studies, for example, seem to suggest that psychopaths, as measured by the overall score of the revised psychopathy checklist (PCL–R), are able to understand the distinction between moral and conventional norms if tested under a forced choice paradigm (Aharoni et. al 2012.)Nevertheless even that study seems to allow for the possibility that emotional deficits are responsible for the psychopath’s shortcomings in accurately drawing the distinction since they are somewhat linked to the affective and antisocial facets of the PCL–R. Given the inconsistent results of the various studies, other researchers prefer to view a psychopath’s immorality not as a specific deficit in empathy, but understand it to be caused by their general inability to feel strong emotions, by their general coldheartedness, or even by shortcomings in their rational and prudential capacities. From that perspective, a psychopath might understand in an abstract manner that certain things are morally wrong to do, but he just does not care for morality, the welfare of another person, or even for himself. (For further discussion see Maibom 2005 and 2009, Nichols 2004, and Prinz 2011a,b). Similar considerations apply also to research regarding subjects with autism. Kennett (2002)has argued that evidence from autistic individuals, whose imaginative role-play and thus empathic capacities are diminished, does not support the claim that empathy is necessary for moral agency. Yet in her arguments she only considers the fact that persons with autism have difficulties with putting themselves in another person’s shoes but does not consider that they seem to have some ability to pick up on the emotional states of other people as revealed by their facial expressions. Moreover, while autistic subjects in general can distinguish between moral and conventional norms they do seem to lack a certain flexibility in evaluating the seriousness of the violation of a moral norm when they reflect on moral dilemmas or when they encounter an accidental or unintentional violation of such norms. (See McGeer 2008, Zalla et. al 2011, but see also Kennett 2011 and Leslie et. al. 2006 in response).

Philosophers have however not been merely be interested in appealing to empathy for explicating the psychological basis for our thinking that certain norms have moral status. Within the general framework of moral sentimentalism, which sees morality generally linked to our emotional responsiveness to the actions of others and ourselves, they have also appealed to empathy in explicating more generally the nature of moral judgments (see also Kauppinen 2014 and 2017a). David Hume, for example, has suggested that moral judgments are based on peculiar sentiments of moral approbations and disapprobation, which are causally mediated by our ability to empathize— or what he called sympathy— with the pain and pleasures of others (See also Sayre-Mcord 1994 and 2014). More specifically, sentiments of moral approbations arise in response to our ability to think about and enliven the pleasure and pain that others feel with the help of our empathic/sympathetic capacities when we consider the benefits (the pleasure and pain) which a person’s character traits and actions provide to himself and others. Yet Hume was already quite aware of some of the above mentioned limitations and biases of our natural willingness and capacity to empathize with others. Accordingly, he insisted that sentiments of approbations can only be conceived of as moral approbation if empathy/sympathy is regulated or corrected by what he refers to as “steady and general points of view” (Hume 1739–40 [1978], 581/2) so that our capacity for sympathy enables us to “touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony” (Hume 1748 [1983], 75). There are certainly a number of issues that can be raised in response to Hume’s proposal. Suffice it here to point out that it is difficult to fully understand how Hume is ultimately able distinguish between judgments about something being bad and something being morally wrong. Certainly natural disasters also cause us to sympathize/empathize with the pain it causes others, yet such sympathy is not mediating any judgments about the moral impermissibility of natural disasters. Hume himself might have thought to have solved this problem by thinking that sentiments of moral approbation have a peculiar or distinct character (see in this respect particularly Debes 2012). Yet pointing to the peculiarity of such sentiments seems to be rather unsatisfying for answering this challenge.

Michael Slote, one of the main contemporary proponents of the claim that empathy plays a constitutive role for moral judgments, does not follow Hume in thinking that empathy plays a moral role in allowing us to pick up on a subject’s pleasure and pain. Rather Slote, who also has been influenced by a feminist ethics of care (Slote 2007, 2010), suggests that empathy is central for moral approval in that we as spectators empathically pick up on whether or not an agent acted out of empathic concern for another subject. Moral approval of an action consists then in the subsequent reflective feeling of warmth when empathizing with an agent’s empathic concern, while moral disapproval is equivalent with a reflective feeling of chill due to our recognition that the agent acted without any empathic concern. Actions are then judged to be morally right or wrong in terms of whether they can be conceived of the actions of an agent we would morally approve of in that they are actions done out of empathic concern. Notice also that while Slote does regard empathy in the above sense to be constitutive of moral approval only if it is fully or well–developed, he does not follow Hume in thinking that empathy needs to be regulated in order to correct for some of its natural partiality. Indeed Slote thinks that this is a virtue of his account since he regards such partiality reflected in our moral intuitions. For example, he thinks that we have a greater moral obligation to help the child in front of us or members of our family rather than people who are more removed from us. Slote certainly deserves credit for reviving the debate about the role of empathy for morality in contemporary metaethics. Yet his conception of the relation between empathy and morality has also encountered some skepticism. First of all, it is questionable that only motivations of empathic concern, rather than the thought that one is doing the right thing, constitute proper moral motivations. Second, in light of the above research on empathy’s bias and natural shortcomings, it is rather questionable to maintain that all aspects of empathy’s partiality are sanctioned by our our moral intuitions. It is therefore hard to see how empathy’s moral role can be justified without appeal to some form of corrective mechanism. Third, phenomenologically speaking, moral disapproval is not necessarily based on a “chilly” feeling. At times we are rather upset and angry in encountering violations of moral norms. Finally, Slote’s proposed empathic mechanism underlying moral approval seems to lack a certain psychological plausibility. For Slote, we approve of an action because we recreate the empathic concern that the agent feels towards his or her subjects and that causes us to feel warmly towards the agent. Yet if a positive moral judgment of an actions is tied to providing us with the motivation or with a reason for doing a specific action, it is hard to see how moral approval, consisting in us feeling warmly towards the agent, should help us accomplish this. If Slote is right, it would rather provide us with a reason for merely praising or being nice towards the agent (See D’Arms 2011, Kauppinen 2014 and 2017a, Prinz 2001a,b, and Stueber 2011c).

There is one additional element to consider when debating empathy’s contribution to morality. Philosophers are not merely interested in answering factual and causal questions of why we care about morality, what causal role empathy plays in this respect, or how empathy causally contributes in allowing us to distinguish between moral and conventional norms and judging what is morally right or wrong. Rather they are also interested in genuinely normative questions in attempting to answer the question of why we should care about morality and why we should regard moral judgments as making normative demands on us. In morally blaming other persons we do assume that we evaluate their behavior according to standards that they as persons are in some sense already committed to. We assume that these standards are their own standards rather than standards that we impose from an external perspective on them. Unfortunately, even if one would agree with either David Hume or Michael’s Slote’s account of the causal role of empathy outlined above, it is doubtful that their account would help us to answer the genuinely normative question appropriately. Why exactly should I take a particular emotional reaction of another person towards me and my action, even if it is a feeling of warmth caused by empathy, as something that is normatively relevant for me. Certainly we all like to be liked and try to fit in with our peer group, but then moral judgments would be nothing more than a glorified form of peer pressure. Hume might respond that we should take them seriously because they are responses from the general point of view, but that in itself seems to be begging the question of why such perspective is articulating the appropriate normative standard for judging our behavior and character. This is also exactly the reason, why philosophers with Kantian inclinations have been in general skeptical about moral sentimentalism and positions that think of empathy as a foundation of morality (for a nice explication of Kant’s critical view of sympathy see Deimling 2017). Contemporary “Kantians” do at times, however, admit that empathy and perspective taking is epistemically relevant for moral deliberations, even if it is not solely constitutive for moral agency (Deigh 1996 and 2018; Darwall 2006, Shermann 1998, For a review see also Oxley 2011). Interestingly, philosophers sympathetic to moral sentimentalism have particularly turned to Adam Smith for inspiration in developing empathy based accounts of morality and in responding to the above normativity problem. In contrast to Hume, Smith conceives of empathy/sympathy not merely as the enlivening of a perceived emotion or feeeling but as imaginative perspective–taking. In taking up another person’s perspective we put ourselves in his situation and imagine how he would respond to the situation, how he would think and feel about it. If in bringing another person’s point of view “home to ourselves” in this manner, we recognize that we ourselves might have felt or acted like the other person, then we approve of the other person’s sentiment or action, otherwise we disapprove. Moreover, such approval constitutes moral approval if we have empathized with the other from the perspective of the impartial spectator, a perspective that Smith, like Hume, appeals to in order to correct for empathy’s natural shortcomings. More importantly, some authors think that within the Smithian framework we also find some answers to the normativity problem. They think that the impartial spectator perspective can be recast as an implicit commitment of our ordinary practice of making sense of each other as rational and emotional creatures with the help of empathic perspective taking (Stueber 2017) or argue that Smithian perspective–taking involves quasi-Kantian commitments to the dignity of a person, including his or her affective dimension. (Debes 2017, but see also Fricke 2005, Kauppinen 2017b, and Roughley 2018).

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Further Important Surveys of Empathy

• Maibom, H. (ed.), 2017. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Empathy , New York: Routledge.
• Matraver, D., 2017. Empathy , Cambridge: Polity Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas , maintained by The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library.

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Empathy Defined

What is empathy.

The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.

Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy : “Affective empathy” refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. “Cognitive empathy,” sometimes called “perspective taking,” refers to our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions. Studies suggest that people with autism spectrum disorders have a hard time empathizing .

Empathy seems to have deep roots in our brains and bodies, and in our evolutionary history . Elementary forms of empathy have been observed in our primate relatives , in dogs , and even in rats . Empathy has been associated with two different pathways in the brain, and scientists have speculated that some aspects of empathy can be traced to mirror neurons , cells in the brain that fire when we observe someone else perform an action in much the same way that they would fire if we performed that action ourselves. Research has also uncovered evidence of a genetic basis to empathy , though studies suggest that people can enhance (or restrict) their natural empathic abilities.

Having empathy doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll want to help someone in need, though it’s often a vital first step toward compassionate action.

For more: Read Frans de Waal’s essay on “ The Evolution of Empathy ” and Daniel Goleman’s overview of different forms of empathy , drawing on the work of Paul Ekman.

What are the Limitations?

When Empathy Hurts, Compassion Can Heal

A new neuroscientific study shows that compassion training can help us cope with other…

Does Empathy Reduce Prejudice—or Promote It?

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton explains how to make sense of conflicting scientific evidence.

How to Avoid the Empathy Trap

Do you prioritize other people's feelings over your own? You might be falling into the…

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Why Practice It?

Empathy is a building block of morality—for people to follow the Golden Rule, it helps if they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. It is also a key ingredient of successful relationships because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others. Here are some of the ways that research has testified to the far-reaching importance of empathy.

• Seminal studies by Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg have shown that people higher in empathy are more likely to help others in need, even when doing so cuts against their self-interest .
• Empathy is contagious : When group norms encourage empathy, people are more likely to be empathic—and more altruistic.
• Empathy reduces prejudice and racism : In one study, white participants made to empathize with an African American man demonstrated less racial bias afterward.
• Empathy is good for your marriage : Research suggests being able to understand your partner’s emotions deepens intimacy and boosts relationship satisfaction ; it’s also fundamental to resolving conflicts. (The GGSC’s Christine Carter has written about effective strategies for developing and expressing empathy in relationships .)
• Empathy reduces bullying: Studies of Mary Gordon’s innovative Roots of Empathy program have found that it decreases bullying and aggression among kids, and makes them kinder and more inclusive toward their peers. An unrelated study found that bullies lack “affective empathy” but not cognitive empathy, suggesting that they know how their victims feel but lack the kind of empathy that would deter them from hurting others.
• Empathy reduces suspensions : In one study, students of teachers who participated in an empathy training program were half as likely to be suspended, compared to students of teachers who didn’t participate.
• Empathy promotes heroic acts: A seminal study by Samuel and Pearl Oliner found that people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust had been encouraged at a young age to take the perspectives of others.
• Empathy fights inequality. As Robert Reich and Arlie Hochschild have argued, empathy encourages us to reach out and want to help people who are not in our social group, even those who belong to stigmatized groups , like the poor. Conversely, research suggests that inequality can reduce empathy : People show less empathy when they attain higher socioeconomic status.
• Empathy is good for the office: Managers who demonstrate empathy have employees who are sick less often and report greater happiness.
• Empathy is good for health care: A large-scale study found that doctors high in empathy have patients who enjoy better health ; other research suggests training doctors to be more empathic improves patient satisfaction and the doctors’ own emotional well-being .
• Empathy is good for police: Research suggests that empathy can help police officers increase their confidence in handling crises, diffuse crises with less physical force, and feel less distant from the people they’re dealing with.

For more: Learn about why we should teach empathy to preschoolers .

How Do I Cultivate It?

Humans experience affective empathy from infancy, physically sensing their caregivers’ emotions and often mirroring those emotions. Cognitive empathy emerges later in development, around three to four years of age , roughly when children start to develop an elementary “ theory of mind ”—that is, the understanding that other people experience the world differently than they do.

From these early forms of empathy, research suggests we can develop more complex forms that go a long way toward improving our relationships and the world around us. Here are some specific, science-based activities for cultivating empathy from our site Greater Good in Action :

• Active listening: Express active interest in what the other person has to say and make him or her feel heard.
• Shared identity: Think of a person who seems to be very different from you, and then list what you have in common.
• Put a human face on suffering: When reading the news, look for profiles of specific individuals and try to imagine what their lives have been like.
• Eliciting altruism: Create reminders of connectedness.

And here are some of the keys that researchers have identified for nurturing empathy in ourselves and others:

• Focus your attention outwards: Being mindfully aware of your surroundings, especially the behaviors and expressions of other people , is crucial for empathy. Indeed, research suggests practicing mindfulness helps us take the perspectives of other people yet not feel overwhelmed when we encounter their negative emotions.
• Get out of your own head: Research shows we can increase our own level of empathy by actively imagining what someone else might be experiencing.
• Don’t jump to conclusions about others: We feel less empathy when we assume that people suffering are somehow getting what they deserve .
• Show empathic body language : Empathy is expressed not just by what we say, but by our facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, and eye contact (or lack thereof).
• Meditate: Neuroscience research by Richard Davidson and his colleagues suggests that meditation—specifically loving-kindness meditation, which focuses attention on concern for others—might increase the capacity for empathy among short-term and long-term meditators alike (though especially among long-time meditators).
• Explore imaginary worlds: Research by Keith Oatley and colleagues has found that people who read fiction are more attuned to others’ emotions and intentions.
• Join the band: Recent studies have shown that playing music together boosts empathy in kids.
• Play games : Neuroscience research suggests that when we compete against others, our brains are making a “ mental model ” of the other person’s thoughts and intentions.
• Take lessons from babies: Mary Gordon’s Roots of Empathy program is designed to boost empathy by bringing babies into classrooms, stimulating children’s basic instincts to resonate with others’ emotions.
• Combat inequality: Research has shown that attaining higher socioeconomic status diminishes empathy , perhaps because people of high SES have less of a need to connect with, rely on, or cooperate with others. As the gap widens between the haves and have-nots, we risk facing an empathy gap as well. This doesn’t mean money is evil, but if you have a lot of it, you might need to be more intentional about maintaining your own empathy toward others.
• Pay attention to faces: Pioneering research by Paul Ekman has found we can improve our ability to identify other people’s emotions by systematically studying facial expressions. Take our Emotional Intelligence Quiz for a primer, or check out Ekman’s F.A.C.E. program for more rigorous training.
• Believe that empathy can be learned : People who think their empathy levels are changeable put more effort into being empathic, listening to others, and helping, even when it’s challenging.

For more : The Ashoka Foundation’s Start Empathy initiative tracks educators’ best practices for teaching empathy . The initiative gave awards to 14 programs judged to do the best job at educating for empathy . The nonprofit Playworks also offers eight strategies for developing empathy in children .

What Are the Pitfalls and Limitations of Empathy?

According to research , we’re more likely to help a single sufferer than a large group of faceless victims, and we empathize more with in-group members than out-group members . Does this reflect a defect in empathy itself? Some critics believe so , while others argue that the real problem is how we suppress our own empathy .

Empathy, after all, can be painful. An “ empathy trap ” occurs when we’re so focused on feeling what others are feeling that we neglect our own emotions and needs—and other people can take advantage of this. Doctors and caregivers are at particular risk of feeling emotionally overwhelmed by empathy.

In other cases, empathy seems to be detrimental. Empathizing with out-groups can make us more reluctant to engage with them, if we imagine that they’ll be critical of us. Sociopaths could use cognitive empathy to help them exploit or even torture people.

Even if we are well-intentioned, we tend to overestimate our empathic skills. We may think we know the whole story about other people when we’re actually making biased judgments—which can lead to misunderstandings and exacerbate prejudice.

Essay on Empathy

Introduction to Empathy

On a quiet park bench, a teenager sits, tears glistening in their eyes as they navigate the storm of adolescent struggles. Unbeknownst to them, a passerby notices the silent struggle and pauses, offering a comforting word and a listening ear. In this unscripted moment, empathy reveals its transformative power. Beyond scripted kindness, empathy unfolds as an authentic connection, transcending boundaries and nurturing the shared human experience. Empathy is a potent force in a society sometimes overshadowed by individualism, capable of weaving the threads of compassion that bind us all.

History of Empathy

The history of empathy is a rich tapestry woven through the annals of philosophy, psychology, literature, and sociology , reflecting humanity’s enduring quest to understand and connect with the experiences of others. Empathy has roots in ancient traditions and cultural practices emphasizing compassion, understanding, and communal solidarity. Although the term itself is relatively modern, dating back to the late 19th century.

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• Philosophical Origins : Ancient philosophical traditions, such as those of ancient Greece and India, laid the groundwork for empathy through concepts like sympathy, compassion, and the Golden Rule. Philosophers like Aristotle, Confucius, and the Stoics explored the ethical dimensions of empathy, emphasizing the importance of understanding and empathizing with the perspectives and suffering of others as a moral imperative.
• 18th and 19th Centuries : The Enlightenment era witnessed a resurgence of interest in empathy, with philosophers and thinkers delving into questions of human nature, morality, and social harmony. In his ground-breaking book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), Adam Smith introduced the concept of sympathy as a mechanism through which individuals understand and share the emotions of others. This notion laid the foundation for modern conceptions of empathy as a fundamental aspect of human psychology and social interaction.
• Development of Psychological Theory : Psychology’s emergence as a science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made empathy a primary focus of inquiry. Psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt, Theodor Lipps, and Edward Titchener explored the mechanisms underlying empathy, drawing on concepts of introspection, emotional resonance, and perspective-taking to elucidate its cognitive and affective dimensions.
• Empathy in Literature and Arts : Throughout history, literature, theater, and the arts have been powerful mediums for exploring empathy and human relationships. Poets, dramatists, and writers have created stories that allow audiences and readers to identify with characters from various experiences and backgrounds, leading to a deeper comprehension of the intricacies of interpersonal relationships and the human condition.
• Modern Psychological Perspectives : In the 20th century, empathy became a focal point of research within various branches of psychology, including developmental psychology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. Psychologists like Carl Rogers, who pioneered client-centered therapy, emphasized the importance of empathetic understanding in facilitating therapeutic rapport and promoting emotional healing.
• Contemporary Views and Challenges : In the 21st century, empathy continues to be a subject of scholarly inquiry and public discourse, with researchers exploring its role in fostering prosocial behavior, enhancing interpersonal relationships, and promoting social justice. Contemporary society faces challenges to empathy, such as empathy fatigue, cultural divides, and the impact of digital technology on interpersonal communication and empathy.

Importance of Empathy

Here are several vital reasons why empathy is vitally important:

• Enhanced Understanding : Empathy enables individuals to understand and appreciate the perspectives, emotions, and experiences of others. By putting oneself in another’s shoes, individuals gain insight into different worldviews, cultural contexts, and personal narratives, fostering mutual respect and appreciation for diversity.
• Improved Communication : Empathy forms the bedrock of effective communication , allowing individuals to listen attentively, validate others’ feelings, and respond empathetically. By acknowledging and empathizing with others’ emotions, individuals can establish trust, build rapport, and navigate conflicts constructively, fostering open and honest dialogue.
• Strengthened Relationships : Empathy is the glue that binds individuals together in meaningful relationships, whether in personal, professional, or community settings. By demonstrating empathy, individuals convey care, compassion, and support, strengthening interpersonal bonds and fostering a sense of belonging and connection.
• Promotion of Prosocial Behavior : Empathy motivates individuals to engage in prosocial behavior, such as kindness, generosity, and altruism, towards others in need. By recognizing and responding to others’ suffering or joy, individuals demonstrate solidarity, empathy, and a willingness to alleviate others’ pain and promote their well-being.
• Conflict Resolution : Empathy is crucial in resolving conflicts and overcoming interpersonal barriers. By empathizing with conflicting perspectives and emotions, individuals can de-escalate tensions, seek common ground, and explore mutually beneficial solutions, fostering reconciliation and understanding.
• Enhanced Emotional Intelligence : Empathy is a core component of emotional intelligence, enabling individuals to recognize, regulate, and navigate their own emotions and the emotions of others. By cultivating empathy, individuals develop greater self-awareness, interpersonal skills, and resilience to cope with life’s challenges and foster positive relationships.
• Cultivation of Compassionate Societies : Empathy catalyzes building compassionate societies characterized by understanding, solidarity, and social justice. By promoting empathy at societal levels, communities can address systemic inequalities, promote inclusivity, and foster collective efforts to address pressing social issues and promote the common good.

Types of Empathy

Here are some of the key types of empathy:

• Cognitive Empathy :

Cognitive empathy, also known as perspective-taking or mentalizing, involves understanding and intellectually grasping the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others. It entails accurately perceiving and interpreting someone else’s perspective without necessarily sharing their emotional experience. Individuals with cognitive empathy can recognize and comprehend different viewpoints, beliefs, and emotions, even if they do not resonate with them.

• Emotional Empathy :

Emotional empathy, often referred to as affective empathy, involves sharing and vicariously experiencing the emotions of others. It entails an emotional resonance with someone else’s feelings, where individuals can genuinely feel joy, sadness, fear, or pain in response to another person’s emotional state. Emotional empathy relies on activating neural circuits associated with emotional processing and affective resonance, such as the insula and anterior cingulate cortex.

• Compassionate Empathy :

Compassionate empathy integrates cognitive and emotional components to motivate caring, supportive, and prosocial behavior toward distressed others. It entails understanding and sharing someone else’s feelings and feeling moved to alleviate their suffering and offer comfort and assistance. Compassionate empathy drives acts of kindness, altruism, and empathy-driven helping behaviors aimed at promoting the well-being and welfare of others.

• Somatic Empathy :

Somatic empathy involves experiencing physical sensations or physiological responses to another person’s experiences or physical states. It entails feeling bodily sensations, such as pain, tension, or relaxation, in response to witnessing or imagining someone else’s bodily experiences. Somatic empathy reflects the interconnectedness of emotional and physical experiences, highlighting the embodied nature of empathetic responses.

• Perceptual Empathy :

Perceptual empathy involves attuning to and accurately perceiving nonverbal cues, facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tones that convey others’ emotional states and intentions. It entails sensitivity to subtle social signals and cues that provide insight into someone else’s inner experiences. Perceptual empathy enhances social perception and interpersonal sensitivity, enabling individuals to tune into the emotional nuances of social interactions and adjust their behavior accordingly.

The Neurobiology of Empathy

Understanding the complex brain mechanisms behind our capacity to comprehend and experience others’ emotions is made possible by research into the neuroscience of empathy. As researchers delve into the brain’s workings, they uncover a complex interplay of neural circuits and structures contributing to empathy’s multifaceted nature.

• Mirror Neuron System (MNS) : The mirror neuron system is a key player in the neurobiology of empathy. Mirror neurons are specialized cells that fire when an individual acts and when they see someone else performing the same action. Their discovery dates back to the early 1990s. Researchers think that individuals use the MNS to simulate the observed actions, emotions, and sensations of others, forming the basis for imitation, learning, and, importantly, empathetic responses.
• Prefrontal Cortex : Empathy relies significantly on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), primarily associated with cognitive empathy—understanding and interpreting others’ mental states. The vmPFC facilitates perspective-taking, moral decision-making, and attributing emotions to others, enhancing an empathetic understanding of diverse viewpoints.
• Insula : Emotional empathy, or the ability to share and feel other people’s emotions through vicariously experiencing them, is influenced by the insula. This brain region processes and integrates emotional information, such as pain, disgust, and joy. Observers note activation of the insula when individuals feel empathy for others, indicating its role in the emotional resonance that characterizes empathetic responses.
• Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) : Empathy’s emotional and cognitive dimensions connect to the anterior cingulate cortex. It is involved in detecting and responding to emotional cues, regulating emotional responses, and mediating the experience of empathy-induced distress. The ACC is engaged in affective empathy (feeling what others feel) and cognitive empathy (understanding others’ feelings), contributing to a comprehensive, empathetic response.
• Oxytocin and Hormonal Regulation : Neurotransmitters and hormones, such as oxytocin, modulate empathy. Linked to prosocial actions, emotional connection, and trust, oxytocin is also known as the “love hormone” or the “bonding hormone.” Studies suggest that oxytocin facilitates empathy by modulating the neural circuits involved in social perception and emotional processing.
• Genetic Influences : Individuals differ in their level of empathy, and genetic factors also play an essential role in this variation. Specific genes, such as those associated with oxytocin receptors, may influence the neural mechanisms underlying empathetic responses. Empathy varies due to genes and environment.

The Benefits of Empathy

The benefits of empathy extend across various aspects of individual well-being, interpersonal relationships, and societal dynamics. Here are some key benefits of empathy:

• Enhanced Emotional Connection : Empathy strengthens emotional bonds and fosters deeper connections with others by validating their feelings, experiences, and perspectives. When individuals feel understood and supported, they experience a sense of belonging and emotional security within their relationships.
• Improved Communication Skills : Empathy enhances communication by promoting active listening, empathy, reciprocity, and mutual understanding. When individuals empathize with others’ emotions and viewpoints, they engage in more meaningful and effective dialogue, leading to greater cooperation and collaboration.
• Increased Emotional Intelligence : Empathy is a core component of emotional intelligence, enabling individuals to recognize, understand, and regulate their and those of others. Individuals develop greater self-awareness, empathy, and interpersonal skills by cultivating empathy, enhancing their ability to successfully navigate social interactions and relationships.
• Promotion of Prosocial Behavior : Empathy motivates individuals to engage in prosocial behaviors, such as kindness, generosity, and altruism, towards others in need. When individuals empathize with others’ suffering or joy, they are more inclined to offer support, assistance, and compassion, contributing to a more compassionate and caring society.
• Conflict Resolution and Relationship Building : Empathy plays a crucial role in resolving conflicts, overcoming misunderstandings, and strengthening interpersonal relationships. By empathizing with others’ perspectives and emotions, individuals can de-escalate tensions, find common ground, and build trust and rapport, fostering healthier and more harmonious relationships.
• Stress Reduction and Emotional Support : Empathy provides emotional support and validation to individuals during distress, grief, or adversity. Empathetic support can alleviate stress and promote resilience.
• Promotion of Diversity and Inclusion : Empathy promotes diversity and inclusion by fostering understanding, respect, and appreciation for individuals’ unique backgrounds, identities, and experiences. When individuals empathize with others from diverse backgrounds, they cultivate empathy-rich environments that celebrate diversity and promote equity and social justice.
• Improved Health and Well-being : Researchers have linked empathy to improved physical and psychological health outcomes. When individuals experience empathy, they feel less isolated, more socially connected, and better supported, which can positively affect their overall well-being and quality of life.

Developing Empathy

Developing empathy is a lifelong journey that involves cultivating awareness, understanding, and compassion for the experiences and emotions of others. While empathy has both biological and environmental components, individuals can actively engage in practices and behaviors to enhance their empathy. Here are some strategies for developing empathy:

• Practice Active Listening : Remain attentive to others without criticizing or interjecting. Focus on understanding their perspectives, emotions, and concerns. Reflect on what you hear to demonstrate understanding and validate their experiences.
• Engage in Perspective-Taking : Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Consider how their background, beliefs, and circumstances may shape their worldview. To better understand someone’s perspective and foster empathy, try posing open-ended inquiries to entice them to talk about their emotions and ideas.
• Curiosity and Open-Mindedness : Approach interactions with curiosity and a genuine interest in learning about others’ experiences and viewpoints. Challenge assumptions and stereotypes by being open-minded and receptive to diverse perspectives and experiences.
• Practice Emotional Regulation : Develop emotional awareness and regulation skills to manage your emotions effectively in various social situations. Recognize and acknowledge your emotional responses while remaining empathetically attuned to the emotions of others.
• Seek Diverse Experiences : Expose yourself to diverse cultures, communities, and perspectives through travel, literature, art, and social interactions. Engage with individuals from different backgrounds and life experiences to broaden your understanding of human diversity and interconnectedness.
• Foster Empathetic Communication : Use nonverbal indicators like body language, eye contact, and facial expressions, along with sympathetic words, to project warmth, comprehension, and support. Practice empathy in both verbal and nonverbal communication by expressing empathy through words and actions.
• Practice Kindness and Altruism : Do good deeds for others, whether modest or significant. Show kindness, generosity, and compassion. Volunteer, donate, or contribute to causes that promote social justice, equity, and the well-being of others.
• Reflect and Self-Examine : Take time for self-reflection to examine your biases, assumptions, and limitations that may impact your ability to empathize with others. Challenge yourself to empathize with individuals whose experiences may differ, and consider how to broaden your perspective.
• Seek Feedback and Learn from Others : Solicit feedback from trusted friends, family members, or mentors on improving your empathy and communication style. Be open to constructive criticism and use it as an opportunity for growth and self-improvement.
• Practice Empathy Daily : Make empathy a daily practice by incorporating empathetic behaviors and attitudes into your interactions with others, personally and professionally. Celebrate and acknowledge moments of connection and understanding as you develop and nurture your empathetic capacities.

Empathy in Different Contexts

Empathy can appear in various settings, impacting how people interact with one another and move through different social settings. Its impact is profound and versatile, shaping interactions in personal relationships, professional settings, and broader societal dynamics. Let’s explore the role of empathy in different contexts:

Interpersonal Relationships :

• Family Dynamics: Empathy is crucial for understanding the emotions and needs of family members. It fosters a supportive environment, helps resolve conflicts, and strengthens familial bonds.
• Friendships: Empathy enhances the quality of friendships by promoting mutual understanding, trust, and emotional support. Friends who empathize with each other’s experiences build lasting connections.

Workplace and Professional Settings :

• Leadership and Management : Empathetic leaders understand the concerns and aspirations of their team members. This encourages effective leadership, a pleasant work culture, and employee engagement.
• Colleague Interactions: Empathy in the workplace facilitates collaboration, effective communication, and team cohesion. It contributes to a harmonious work environment and helps navigate challenges.

Education :

• Student-Teacher Relationships: Empathy is essential for educators to understand students’ diverse needs and learning styles. It enhances communication, promotes a positive learning environment, and supports students’ emotional well-being.
• Peer Relationships: Empathy among students fosters a sense of community, reduces bullying, and creates an inclusive atmosphere where everyone feels understood and valued.

Healthcare and Healing Professions :

• Patient Care: Empathy is a cornerstone of adequate healthcare. Empathizing with patients helps healthcare providers gain patients’ trust, improve patient satisfaction, and improve health outcomes.
• Therapeutic Practices: Empathy is central to therapeutic relationships. Mental health professionals, counselors, and therapists use empathy to understand clients’ experiences and provide compassionate support.

Social Justice and Advocacy :

• Community Engagement: Empathy plays a vital role in social justice movements. Advocates who empathize with marginalized communities more effectively understand and address systemic inequalities.
• Policy and Decision-Making: Empathy can inform inclusive policymaking by considering different populations’ diverse needs and experiences. It contributes to the creation of fair and just policies.

Global and Cultural Perspectives :

• International Relations: Empathy is essential in diplomatic relations, fostering mutual understanding and cooperation between nations. It can contribute to conflict resolution and the promotion of global peace.
• Cultural Exchange: Empathy helps individuals appreciate and respect diverse cultures. It promotes cross-cultural communication, reduces prejudice, and contributes to a more interconnected world.

Conflict Resolution :

• Mediation and Negotiation: Empathy is a key component of effective conflict resolution. Understanding the perspectives and emotions of conflicting parties can lead to mutually agreeable solutions.
• Restorative Justice: Empathy plays a role in restorative justice practices, emphasizing understanding and healing between offenders and victims.

Empathy vs. Sympathy

Empathy and sympathy are related concepts that involve understanding and responding to the emotions of others, but they differ in their nature and implications:

Are women more empathic than men?

Whether women are more empathic than men is complex and influenced by biological, social, and cultural factors. While some studies suggest gender differences in empathy levels, other research indicates variability across individuals and contexts.

• Biological Factors : Brain structure, hormonal influences, and genetics may contribute to empathy differences between genders, with some evidence suggesting higher activity in brain regions associated with empathy in women.
• Socialization and Gender Roles : Societal norms often urge girls to nurture and express emotions, while boys may learn to suppress emotions. These gender roles can influence how empathy is expressed and perceived.
• Contextual and Cultural Influences : Empathic responses vary depending on cultural values and social context. Collectivist cultures may prioritize empathy more than individualistic ones, impacting gender differences in empathic behavior.
• Individual Variation : Empathy is complex and varies widely among individuals regardless of gender. Personality, life experiences, and situational factors all play a role in shaping empathic responses.

Real-life Examples

Real-life examples of individuals and communities demonstrating empathy abound, highlighting the capacity for compassion, understanding, and solidarity in adversity. Here are a few inspiring examples:

• Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) : Fred Rogers, known affectionately as Mr. Rogers, dedicated his life to promoting empathy and kindness through his iconic television program, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Through his gentle demeanor, empathetic messages, and focus on emotional well-being, Mr. Rogers inspired generations of children and adults to embrace empathy, acceptance, and love for others.
• Malala Yousafzai : Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai has been promoting girls’ education. She has shown remarkable empathy and resilience despite facing threats and violence from the Taliban. Malala didn’t let these challenges stop her from speaking out for girls’ education. Her courage and determination have made her a global symbol of hope and inspiration.
• The Underground Railroad : An empathetic network of individuals, towns, and safe havens operated throughout the 19th century. Abolitionists, conductors, and sympathizers risked their lives to help enslaved individuals escape to freedom, showing empathy, solidarity, and a commitment to justice in the face of systemic oppression.
• Community Response to Natural Disasters : Communities frequently unite after disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires to show sympathy and support for those impacted. Volunteers, first responders, and organizations mobilize to provide aid, shelter, and emotional support to survivors, showcasing the power of collective empathy in times of crisis.
• The Free Hugs Campaign : The Free Hugs Campaign, initiated by Australian activist Juan Mann, spread a message of empathy, connection, and human kindness worldwide. By offering free hugs to strangers in public spaces, campaign participants aimed to break down barriers, promote empathy, and spread love and compassion in their communities.
• The Friendship Bench Program (Zimbabwe) : The Friendship Bench Program in Zimbabwe trains lay health workers, known as “grandmothers,” to provide empathetic counseling and support to individuals struggling with mental health challenges, particularly depression and anxiety. The Friendship Bench program empowers individuals to improve their mental well-being and resilience by offering a compassionate ear and practical coping strategies.
• Random Acts of Kindness : Everyday acts of kindness, compassion, and empathy demonstrate the power of empathy in action. Whether it’s offering a helping hand to a stranger, listening empathetically to a friend in need, or volunteering in the community, individuals demonstrate empathy through small gestures that make a meaningful difference in the lives of others.

Empathy is a beacon of compassion, fostering understanding, connection, and support in our complex world. From the smallest acts of kindness to the grand gestures of solidarity, empathy bridges the gaps between individuals and communities, nurturing relationships and promoting collective well-being. As we cultivate empathy in our hearts and actions, we create a more empathetic and compassionate society where we hear every voice, value every feeling, and see every person.

Check Your Level of Empathy.

Respond to the following questions and tally up your score at the end.

• For each “a” response, give yourself 2 points.
• For each “b” response, give yourself 1 point.
• For each “c” response, give yourself 0 points.
• I immediately try to understand their feelings and offer support.
• I may ask what’s wrong but not fully engage in their emotions.
• I tend to avoid emotional conversations.
• I often find myself feeling the characters’ emotions deeply.
• I can empathize to some extent, but not intensely.
• I don’t usually get emotionally affected by fictional stories.
• I share in their excitement and happiness.
• I congratulate them but might not express strong emotions.
• I may not react strongly, even if the news is positive.
• I understand the other person’s perspective and work towards a resolution.
• I can see both sides but may struggle to connect with their emotions fully.
• I prioritize my feelings and perspective.
• Yes, I often anticipate others’ needs and offer assistance.
• Occasionally, if it seems necessary.
• Not usually. I prefer to be asked directly.

Time for Result

Now, tally your responses and check your level:

• 8-10 points: Highly empathetic
• 5-7 points: Moderately empathetic
• 0-4 points: Developing empathy

Remember, this is just a fun and informal quiz. Empathy is a complex trait; this quiz provides a snapshot rather than a comprehensive assessment. Use your results as an opportunity for self-reflection and consider ways to enhance your empathetic skills if you wish to do so.

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Essay on Empathy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Empathy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Empathy

Understanding empathy.

Empathy is feeling what others feel. It’s like stepping into someone’s shoes and understanding their emotions. Empathy helps us connect with others.

Why is Empathy Important?

Empathy is important because it builds strong relationships. It helps us understand others better, making us kinder and compassionate.

Empathy in Everyday Life

We use empathy every day. When a friend is sad, we feel their sorrow. This understanding helps us be supportive.

Developing Empathy

We can develop empathy by listening and observing others. Remember, it’s about understanding, not agreeing. Practice empathy to grow as a person.

250 Words Essay on Empathy

Empathy, a fundamental aspect of human connection, is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It’s a cognitive attribute, allowing us to perceive the world from another’s perspective. It’s not merely about feeling the same emotions, but comprehending the emotional state of another, without losing the distinction between self and other.

The Types of Empathy

Empathy manifests in three primary forms: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate. Cognitive empathy refers to understanding someone’s thoughts and emotions, acting as a bridge for communication. Emotional empathy, on the other hand, involves sharing the feelings of others, often leading to a deep emotional connection. Compassionate empathy, the most actionable, combines understanding and feeling to drive us to help, if possible.

Empathy and Society

Empathy plays a pivotal role in society. It fosters tolerance, understanding, and mutual respect, acting as the glue that holds diverse communities together. Without empathy, societies would struggle to function harmoniously, leading to a rise in conflict and misunderstanding.

The Neurobiology of Empathy

Recent research in neuroscience has discovered the existence of ‘mirror neurons,’ cells in the brain that activate both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing the same action. This discovery has provided a biological basis for empathy, highlighting its inherent role in our lives.

In conclusion, empathy is a powerful tool that allows us to connect with others on a profound level. It’s an essential trait for maintaining harmony within societies and understanding the world around us.

500 Words Essay on Empathy

Introduction to empathy.

Empathy, a complex psychological phenomenon, is a fundamental aspect of human interaction. It is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, a bridge between self and others. Empathy allows us to perceive the world not only from our perspective but also from the viewpoint of other individuals.

The Two Dimensions of Empathy

Empathy is broadly divided into two dimensions: affective and cognitive. Affective empathy refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions. It’s the ability to respond emotionally to another’s psychological state. Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, involves understanding others’ emotions from a more intellectual perspective. It’s the ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions.

The Role of Empathy in Society

Empathy plays a crucial role in society. By fostering understanding and compassion, it helps build strong and healthy relationships. It’s the foundation of effective communication, conflict resolution, and cooperation. Empathy is also a key aspect of leadership as it helps leaders understand and address the needs and concerns of their team members.

Empathy and Moral Development

Empathy is closely linked to moral development. It is the emotional response that propels us towards altruistic behavior. Empathy encourages us to act in ways that benefit others, even at a cost to ourselves. It is the driving force behind acts of kindness and compassion, shaping our moral decisions and ethical conduct.

Empathy in the Digital Age

Empathy: a skill to be cultivated.

Empathy is not just an innate ability; it’s a skill that can be cultivated. Through active listening, perspective-taking, and emotional intelligence training, we can enhance our empathic abilities. By fostering empathy, we can promote a more understanding, compassionate, and harmonious society.

In conclusion, empathy is a vital human capacity that enables us to understand and share the feelings of others. It plays a crucial role in our interpersonal relationships, moral development, and societal harmony. In the digital age, cultivating empathy is more important than ever. By enhancing our empathic abilities, we can foster a more understanding and compassionate society.

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September 7

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Empathy in Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Connect with Your Readers

By   Joshua Turner

September 7, 2023

Writing is a powerful tool that allows us to connect with others, share our experiences, and convey our thoughts and emotions. However, it is not always easy to express empathy through writing.

Effective communication requires the ability to empathize with others and comprehend their emotions. In this article, we will explore the role of empathy in writing and discuss techniques that can help you show compassion in your writing.

Understanding empathy is crucial for effective communication. Empathy lets us put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and understand their perspective. When we are empathetic, we can better connect with others and build stronger relationships.

In writing , empathy can help us create more engaging and relatable content that resonates with our readers. As writers, we have the power to influence and inspire others, and empathy is a vital tool in achieving this goal.

Key Takeaways

• Empathy is essential for effective communication .
• Empathy allows us to connect with others and build stronger relationships.
• Empathy is a powerful tool for writers to create engaging and relatable content.

Understanding Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It is an essential quality that helps us build strong relationships with others. Empathy is not about feeling sorry for someone; it’s about understanding their emotions and showing compassion towards them.

Cognitive Empathy

Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand someone’s emotions intellectually. It involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and understanding their perspective. You can show cognitive empathy by actively listening to someone and asking questions to clarify their feelings.

Emotional Empathy

Emotional empathy  is the capability to feel what someone else is feeling. It involves experiencing the same emotions as someone else, such as joy, sadness, or anger. You can show empathy by expressing your emotions and validating someone else’s.

Compassionate Empathy

Compassionate empathy is the capacity to understand and feel someone else’s emotions and take action to help them. It involves showing kindness and compassion towards others.

You can show compassionate empathy by offering support , providing encouragement, and taking action to help someone in need.

Building great relationships with people requires having a solid understanding of empathy. You can connect with people more deeply and build lasting connections by displaying cognitive, emotional, and compassionate empathy.

The Role of Empathy in Writing

Empathy is crucial in writing, especially fiction. You can create an engaging, emotional, and memorable story by creating empathy for your characters and readers. As a writer, putting yourself in the shoes of your characters and readers is indispensable to creating a story that resonates with them.

Empathy for Characters

Empathy is an essential element in writing, especially when it comes to creating characters . As a writer, you need to be able to put yourself in your protagonist’s shoes, understand their motivations, and feel their emotions.

You can create a relatable, likable, and believable character. When readers empathize with a character, they become invested in their story and are more likely to continue reading.

To create empathy for your characters, you should focus on  their backstory, personality, and struggles . Give them a history explaining their actions and motivations , making them flawed and vulnerable. Readers may connect with the character this way and get emotionally immersed in their path.

Empathy for Readers

Empathy is not only important for creating characters but also for  connecting with readers . As a writer, you need to understand your audience  and what they want from your story. By empathizing with your readers, you can create a story that resonates with them and leaves a lasting impression.

To create empathy for your readers, you should focus on  the emotions and experiences that your story evokes. Write relatable and authentically, and use descriptive language to create vivid images in the reader’s mind. This way, your readers can connect with the story and feel like they are a part of it.

Techniques to Show Empathy in Writing

Using emotions.

A compelling approach to conveying empathy in writing is through the skillful utilization of emotions. As you engage in the process of writing, strive to imagine the reader’s perspective, considering the range of emotions they might be experiencing. By empathetically connecting with their feelings, you can craft a narrative that resonates deeply and authentically.

Use words that convey your understanding of their emotions, such as “ I can imagine how frustrating that must be ” or “ I understand how overwhelming that can feel .” Acknowledging their feelings shows that you care and are empathetic toward their situation.

Sharing Stories

Sharing stories is another effective way to show empathy in writing. If you’ve been through a similar experience as your reader, share your story with them. This can help them feel understood and less alone.

Even if you haven’t been through the same situation, you can still share the stories of others who have. This can help your reader feel like they’re not the only ones going through what they’re experiencing.

Body Language

Body language is not only important in face-to-face interactions but also in writing. When you write, use body language  cues  to convey empathy. For example , use phrases like “I’m here for you” or “I’m listening” to show that you’re present and engaged.

You can also use physical descriptions, such as “ I can picture you feeling overwhelmed ” or “ I can imagine the weight of that burden .” These cues can help your reader feel heard and understood.

By using these techniques, you can show empathy in your writing and connect with your reader on a deeper level. Place yourself in their perspective, share stories, and use body language cues to convey your understanding and support.

The Importance of Active Listening

Active listening is the key to showing empathy in writing. It is a crucial skill that involves hearing what someone is saying and understanding their perspective. When we listen actively, we are showing the other person that we value their thoughts and feelings.

Listening Techniques

There are several techniques we can use to improve our active listening skills.

• It is important to give the speaker our full attention. This means putting aside distractions and focusing on what they are saying.
• We should try to understand the speaker’s perspective by putting ourselves in their shoes. This requires empathy and an open mind.

• Another important technique is to ask clarifying questions. This shows the speaker that we are interested in what they have to say and want to ensure we fully understand their message.
• We can also use non-verbal cues, such as nodding or maintaining eye contact, to show that we are engaged in the conversation.

Active listening is crucial for showing empathy in writing. By giving our full attention, understanding the speaker’s perspective, and asking clarifying questions, we can improve our ability to connect with others and convey empathy through our writing.

Building Connections through Empathy

Empathy is the key to building connections, bonds, relationships, and love in your writing. By understanding your readers’ feelings and perspectives, you can create a deeper connection with them. Use personal stories, anecdotes, and language that conveys love and compassion to show your readers that you care about their experiences.

Creating Bonds

Building connections with others is crucial in any form of communication. Empathy is the key to creating bonds with your readers. By understanding their feelings and perspectives, you can better connect with them on a personal level. Use phrases like “ I understand how you feel ” or “ I can relate to your situation ” to show your readers that you care about their experiences.

Building Relationships

Empathy is also essential in building long-lasting relationships  with your readers. You can establish trust and credibility by showing that you understand their needs and concerns. Use personal stories and anecdotes  to connect with your readers on a deeper level. Building relationships takes time and effort, but it’s ultimately worth it.

Love and Empathy

Love is the ultimate form of empathy . When you love someone, you are willing to understand their emotions and feelings without judgment. The same is true in writing. When you love your readers, you are willing to go the extra mile to connect with them and understand their needs. Use language that conveys love and compassion, such as “I care about you” or “I want the best for you.”

Empathy and Emotional Growth

Understanding emotions.

Empathy is essential to understand the emotions of others to be able to connect with them and communicate effectively . To show empathy, you need to be aware of your own emotions and be able to recognize and understand the emotions of others. Understanding emotions helps you to connect with others and build stronger relationships.

Fostering Compassion

Compassion is the ability to feel empathy and take action to alleviate the suffering of others. To nurture compassion, you need to practice empathy regularly. You can achieve this by engaging in active listening, empathetically placing yourself in the other person’s position, and responding with genuine kindness and understanding. Showing compassion can bring happiness to others and yourself.

Empathy and compassion are skills that can be developed and improved over time . Practicing empathy and compassion regularly can improve your emotional intelligence and build stronger relationships with others. Understanding emotions and fostering compassion is essential for emotional growth and well-being.

Practical Applications of Empathy in Writing

Empathy in action.

When writing with empathy, it’s critical to understand your audience’s perspective. Consider their experiences, emotions, and backgrounds when crafting your message . Use inclusive language and avoid assumptions or stereotypes that could alienate readers. Doing so demonstrates that you understand and respect their point of view.

Supporting Characters

Empathy is about understanding your readers and the characters in your writing. Develop your supporting characters with depth and complexity, giving them their own unique perspectives and experiences. This will make your writing more engaging and help readers relate to the characters and empathize with their struggles.

Appreciating Readers

Showing empathy also means acknowledging and appreciating your readers. Thank them for their time and attention, and show genuine interest in their feedback. Respond to comments and questions with kindness and understanding, even if you disagree with their perspective. By doing so, you build a relationship of trust and respect with your readers.

In practical terms, empathy in writing means using language and tone that resonates with your audience, creating characters that readers can relate to, and valuing your readers’ perspectives. Incorporating empathy into your writing can create a more meaningful and impactful message.

The presence of empathy in writing is not merely a superficial attribute but a transformative force that enables us to forge a genuine and lasting connection with our readers. When we embrace empathy, we transcend the limitations of words on a page, delving into the realm of emotions and shared experiences.

By empathetically understanding our readers’ needs, desires, and challenges, we can craft narratives that touch their hearts, inspire change, and leave a lasting impact.

Empathy in writing prompts us to step into our readers’ shoes, see the world through their eyes, and communicate with a deep sense of understanding and compassion. Through this empathetic lens, we can effectively address their concerns, evoke emotions, and provide solace or guidance.

The ultimate guide to connecting with readers lies in our ability to empathize. It requires us to engage in active listening, immerse ourselves in their perspectives, and respond authentically and sincerely. Doing so creates an environment of trust, vulnerability, and shared understanding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. what are some effective ways to convey empathy in writing.

One effective way to convey empathy in writing is to use language that acknowledges the other person’s feelings. This can be done by using phrases such as “I understand how you feel” or “I can imagine how difficult this must be for you.” Another way is to actively listen to the other person’s perspective and respond in a way that shows you understand their point of view.

Q. How can I make my characters more empathetic in my writing?

Giving your characters a backstory explaining their motivations and experiences is vital to make them more empathetic. This can help readers understand why the character behaves in a certain way and can make them more relatable. It’s also necessary to show the character actively listening to others and responding in a way that shows they understand their feelings.

Q. Why is it important to show empathy in writing?

Showing empathy in writing can help build stronger relationships and improve communication. It can also help people feel heard and understood, which can lead to more positive outcomes in personal and professional relationships.

Q. What are some examples of empathetic writing?

Empathetic writing can take many forms, such as a heartfelt letter to a friend, a blog post about a difficult experience, or a news article highlighting a marginalized group’s struggles. The key is to use language that acknowledges the feelings of others and shows a willingness to understand their perspective.

Q. How can I write an essay that demonstrates empathy?

To write an essay that demonstrates empathy, it’s necessary first to understand the topic from multiple perspectives. This can be done by researching different viewpoints and actively listening to others. It’s also significant to use language that acknowledges the feelings of others and shows a willingness to understand their perspective.

Q. What are some techniques for showing concern in writing?

Some techniques for showing concern in writing include using language that acknowledges the other person’s feelings, actively listening to their perspective, and responding to show you understand their point of view. Be genuine and authentic in your communication and avoid making assumptions or judgments about the other person’s experience.

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Empathy and Its Development Essay

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Introduction

The meaning of empathy, connection between empathy and life in richmond, virginia, importance of empathy, works cited.

The rising economic hardships have forced many people to spend more time on hobbies and careers with little attention to other people’s lives. This means that they have no time left to listen to the woes of other people, to comfort those who are in pain, and to help them come of the problems surrounding them. Clearly, there is no doubt that we as human beings, ought to exercise empathy to the feelings, concerns, problems and predicaments facing other people. This article examines the meaning of empathy, the connection between empathy and life, and the importance of expressing empathy. It shows what it means to have empathy as a human being. The article will also examine the effects of expressing empathy and those of not expressing empathy.

We can define empathy as the ability to identify with a situation that another person is going through. In other words, empathy is the ability to put oneself in somebody’s situation as a way of expressing concern on what the other person is experiencing. When a person identifies with another person’s situation and tries to alleviate or mitigate the stressing factor in the situation, then one can say that he or she is expressing empathy. Acts of empathy may therefore include such actions as giving food to the needy in the society or providing shelter to those who are homeless. Generally, empathy has much to do with acts of kindness directed to people faced with situations, which are hostile. Thus, empathy is a form of kindness directed to people who need it based on how the donor or the person giving has perceived the situation at hand. For example, if a person living in Richmond loses a family member through death, the neighbors and relatives to come and comfort the family for the loss. In this way, they are expressing their empathies to those who affected (Eisenberg 3-7).

Most importantly, for a person to express empathy there must be bad scenarios that brings fear, discomfort, pain, and suffering. These scenarios must have created a clear psychological difference between the person being empathetic and the one who is the subject of empathy. Generally, two persons in the same unfortunate situation may not manifest empathy feelings towards each other. This is because of undergoing the same situation and neither of them may be in a position to help the other. However, if two people are experiencing different unfortunate circumstances at the same time, they may be able console each other thus, they may show empathy to each other. For instance, a bereaved person living in Richmond, Virginia may show empathy to another person who has lost his or her house to fire.

The word “empathy” is synonymous to “awareness” meaning that people who show empathy to others are sympathetic and would love to help those in trouble. For example, a youth living in Richmond, Virginia can express empathy to his or her friend experiencing loneliness by visiting the friend, and even watching a movie together. In some instances, some students offer to help others who are weak in math and sciences. Some people also show empathy by listening to the woes affecting other people while sharing a cup of coffee. In fact, empathy dwells more on emotional development than just being aware of the problems facing other people. For instance, in college, I have found some of my friends depressed just because they did not score good grades in the test. All they needed was sympathy and someone to encourage them that there is always another time to perform better. Somebody to make them understand that they need to change their reading habits or change some tactics in order to score good grades (Gallese 175-176).

As we have seen above, empathy is the ability to express feelings towards troubles, problems, and challenging times facing another person by showing sympathy and understanding. Sometimes, life can fix. When I first came to Richmond, I experienced homesick for a long period. A simple thing can cause me cry and I felt so much depressed. I had no friends at that time. Luckily, I met a colleague friend of mine who had noticed my depression. After lecture, he will invite me to accompany him to a restaurant where he could tell me the history of Richmond, studies, and his hobbies as we took coffee. With time, the homesick I used to experience disappeared. Indeed this is a classic example of empathy involving two people. Definitely, I was in a hostile situation and that friend came to assist me come out of that situation. It is worth noting that acts of empathy or helping others who are a hostile situation or in a position that need assistance should be on a voluntary basis. In other words, if someone wants to help a disadvantaged person, it should be voluntary and he or she should not expect something in return. Therefore, empathy has everything to do with the willingness to help out of one’s own volition or free will (Vincent 16-19).

Empathy is an important virtue possessed by human beings. People can express empathy in different ways. There is no doubt that people of all classes live in the city. There are those who are rich, while others are less privileged. Those who privileged should help those living in deplorable conditions. For instance, we have very many organizations in Richmond that assist the less privileged. We have also seen people visit children homes where they donate clothing and food to the children. Most of the children in these homes are orphans, and therefore, they do not have someone to cater for their needs. By spending time with them, playing and talking with them, they feel part of the community. This is important as it enables them to develop self-confidence and enhance their self-esteem. Apart from spending time with them, people also have time to educate them on necessary issues. By talking to them, the children also feel cared for and they can go on with their lives as if they have their biological parents (Slote 57-73).

Just like in any other society, people in Richmond also fall sick. Once admitted in hospital, they experience psychological stress, as they stand separated from their family members. It is the prerogative of the members of the family and friends to visit patients in hospitals, say encouragement words to them, and wish them quick recovery. This will definitely make them feel happy (Hojat 15-24).

Nobody should underestimate the importance of empathy to the community. In Richmond, many primary schools emphasize the importance of empathy to pupils, and they encourage them to help always their classmates, family members, and other people who may be in problems. Additionally, people should learn that indifference and insensitivity do not help at all, and they should express sympathy to those facing difficulties in life.

Eisenberg, Nancy. Empathy and Its Development . New York: CUP Archive, 1990. Print.

Gallese, Vittorio. “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity”. Psychopathology 36.4(2003): 171–180. Print.

Hojat, Mohammad. Empathy in Patient Care: Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and Outcomes . New York: Springer, 2007. Print.

Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Vincent, Steve. Being Empathic: A Companion for Counselors and Therapists . New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2005. Print.

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Empathy Essay | Essay on Empathy for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Empathy Essay:  Empathy is the ability to understand an individual emotionally. It is the ability to understand what the other person feels. It is seeing things from their point of view. It is putting yourself in someone else’s position. It is the capability of imagining how someone else might be feeling.

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Long and Short Essays on Empathy for Students and Kids in English

We are providing the students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words in English and a short essay of 150 words on Empathy in English.

Long Essay on Empathy 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Empathy is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Empathy is a highly valued trait and is essential for social interactions. Empathy is the ability to understand a person’s emotions and feelings. It is an essential component for both professional as well as personal lives. It is the ability or trait to understand other people’s values, beliefs and cultures.

Empathy is the power of connection. It is a sensation of experiencing what the other person is going through. It is seen as a cognitive ability—a trait to imagine future scenarios or solve problems based on past experiences. Empathy makes an individual capable of creating a psychic and emotional connection with another person. It enables a person to enter into another individual’s mindscape. If a person feels connected to another person’s mindset, it is impossible to mistreat them, except unintentionally. A person gets to recoil from their experience of suffering in the same way of recoiling for their individual suffering. It brings a sense of desire to aid the person suffering.

There are several states of empathy which include, cognitive empathy, affective empathy and somatic empathy. Cognitive empathy is the capability to understand another person’s mental state. Affective empathy is also known as emotional empathy. It is the ability of a person to respond with an appropriate emotion to another person’s mental state. Somatic empathy is based on the physical reaction of an individual. It is based on mirror neuron responses.

Empathy manifests in education as well in between teachers and students. Empathy becomes difficult when there are differences between people regarding culture, language, skin colour, gender and age. Empathy is considered as a motivating factor for unselfish behaviour. Lack of empathy is similar to antisocial behaviour. Empathy develops deep roots in our brains, as our evolutionary history. Having empathy does not mean that a person is willing to help someone. It is an essential step toward compassionate action.

Empathy forms one of the most critical components of creating harmonious relationships. It reduces stress and enhances emotional awareness. People are well attuned to their feelings and emotions. Getting into someone’s head can be challenging at times. People tend to be empathetic when they listen to what others have to say. It makes an individual overwhelmed by tragic incidents. Empathy can make an individual concerned about the well-being of another individual.

Empathy helps to make an individual a better person. By understanding what people are thinking and feeling, people can respond appropriately. Social connections build up as a result of empathy. It helps in both physical and psychological well-being. Empathizing with others helps to regulate a person’s own emotions. It helps an individual to manage his feelings even at times of great stress.

Empathy helps a person to engage themselves in helpful behaviours. Not everyone experiences empathy. Some people may be more naturally empathetic than others. How a person perceives another person can influence empathy to a great extent. Being empathetic towards others will help to understand other’s suffering and create harmony in the world.

Short Essay on Empathy 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Empathy is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Empathy is a trait where an individual experiences an emotional response to another person’s sufferings. It is very different from sympathy. It is walking in someone else’s shoes and sharing their feelings. Feeling heard by someone and understood is one of the human needs everyone deserves to be understood. Empathy helps an individual to get in touch with his or her feelings and gives him or her emotional understanding of themselves and other people.

Empathy can be learned and practised. It is a vital aspect of our everyday lives. It enables an individual to show compassion. It helps to relate to other people, relatives, colleagues, loved ones and helps to impact the world in a positive way. Some people are born with empathy while some learn it and can increase or decrease it. It is a part of the emotional intelligence, which can be taught to the children at a very early stage. Children can be taught to be empathetic by sharing their things and not hurting others.

10 Lines on Empathy in English

• In the absence of empathy, relationships remain shallow.
• Empathy does not form a part of intuition; it is about understanding others.
• Empathy is basically a learned behaviour.
• The capacity of being empathetic to another person depends on each individual.
• Empathetic people tend to help others more.
• Painkillers can reduce your capacity of being empathetic towards other people.
• Anxiety and tension can influence empathy to a great extent.
• An individual can heighten their empathy through meditation.
• All humans are inclined towards empathizing others in their pain and sufferings.
• A genetic defect can reduce an individual’s empathy.

FAQ’s on Empathy Essay

Question 1. What is too much empathy, called?

Answer: Too much empathy is known as Hyper-empathy. Having too much empathy can lead a person to burn out.

Question 2. What can cause a person to have a lack of empathy?

Answer: Lack of empathy can be caused due to narcissism, antisocial- personality and its disorders, a genetic defect or even psychopathy.

Question 3. How can you overcome Hyper-empathy?

Answer: Hyper-empathy can be overcome by shifting the feeling of empathy to a skill. Making the mind clear that empathy is not behaviour; it forms a part of a skill. Setting clear boundaries and taking everything in a light manner can reduce a person from being too much empathetic about someone.

Question 4.  Does lack of empathy lead to autism?

Answer: No, it does not lead to autism.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Emotions & Feelings — Empathy

Empathy Essays

Hook examples for empathy essays, anecdotal hook.

"As I witnessed a stranger's act of kindness towards a struggling neighbor, I couldn't help but reflect on the profound impact of empathy—the ability to connect with others on a deeply human level."

Rhetorical Question Hook

"What does it mean to truly understand and share in the feelings of another person? The concept of empathy prompts us to explore the complexities of human connection."

Startling Statistic Hook

"Studies show that empathy plays a crucial role in building strong relationships, fostering teamwork, and reducing conflicts. How does empathy contribute to personal and societal well-being?"

"'Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.' This profound quote encapsulates the essence of empathy and its significance in human interactions."

Historical Hook

"From ancient philosophies to modern psychology, empathy has been a recurring theme in human thought. Exploring the historical roots of empathy provides deeper insights into its importance."

Narrative Hook

"Join me on a journey through personal stories of empathy, where individuals bridge cultural, social, and emotional divides. This narrative captures the essence of empathy in action."

Psychological Impact Hook

"How does empathy impact mental health, emotional well-being, and interpersonal relationships? Analyzing the psychological aspects of empathy adds depth to our understanding."

Social Empathy Hook

"In a world marked by diversity and societal challenges, empathy plays a crucial role in promoting understanding and social cohesion. Delving into the role of empathy in society offers important insights."

Empathy in Literature and Arts Hook

"How has empathy been depicted in literature, art, and media throughout history? Exploring its representation in the creative arts reveals its enduring significance in culture."

Teaching Empathy Hook

"What are effective ways to teach empathy to individuals of all ages? Examining strategies for nurturing empathy offers valuable insights for education and personal growth."

The Value of My Life: Personal View

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Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.

Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.

Empathy-based socialization differs from inhibition of egoistic impulses through shaping, modeling, and internalized guilt. Empathetic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, especially in the long-term. Empathy-induced altruism can improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups, and to improve racial attitudes, and actions toward people with AIDS, the homeless, and convicts. It also increases cooperation in competitive situations.

Empathetic people are quick to help others. Painkillers reduce one’s capacity for empathy. Anxiety levels influence empathy. Meditation and reading may heighten empathy.

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Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person, animal, or fictional character. Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately. It involves experiencing another person’s point of view, rather than just one’s own, and enables prosocial or helping behaviors that come from within, rather than being forced.

Some surveys indicate that empathy is on the decline in the United States and elsewhere, findings that motivate parents, schools, and communities to support programs that help people of all ages enhance and maintain their ability to walk in each other’s shoes.

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Empathy helps us cooperate with others, build friendships, make moral decisions, and intervene when we see others being bullied. Humans begin to show signs of empathy in infancy and the trait develops steadily through childhood and adolescence . Still, most people are likely to feel greater empathy for people like themselves and may feel less empathy for those outside their family, community, ethnicity , or race.

Empathy helps us connect and help others, but like other traits, it may have evolved with a selfish motive: using others as a “social antenna” to help detect danger. From an evolutionary perspective, creating a mental model of another person's intent is critical: the arrival of an interloper, for example, could be deadly, so developing sensitivity to the signals of others could be life-saving.

Babies display an understanding that people’s actions are guided by intentions and are able to act on that understanding before they are 18 months old , including trying to comfort a parent. More advanced reasoning about other people’s thoughts develops by around age 5 or 6, and research shows that parents who promote and model empathy raise more empathetic children.

Empathy, sympathy, and compassion are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same . Sympathy is feeling of concern for someone else, and a desire that they become happier or better off, while empathy involves sharing the other person’s emotions. Compassion is an empathic understanding of a person's feelings accompanied by altruism , or a desire to act on that person's behalf. 

Researchers believe people can choose to cultivate and prioritize empathy. People who spend more time with individuals different from themselves tend to adopt a more empathic outlook toward others. Other research finds that reading novels can help foster the ability to put ourselves in the minds of others. Meditation has also been shown to help cultivate brain states that increase empathy.

Some neuroscientists have advanced the concept of "mirror neurons” as a possible source of empathy . These neurons, it is theorized, enhance the capacity to display, read, and mimic emotional signals through facial expressions and other forms of  body language , enhancing empathy. But whether mirror neurons actually operate this way in humans is a subject of longstanding scientific debate, and some scientists question their very existence. 

The ability to convey support for a partner, relative, or friend is crucial to establishing positive relationships. Empathy enables us to establish rapport with another person , make them feel that they are being heard, and, through words and body language, mimic their emotions. Perspective-taking , or the empathic ability to assume the cognitive state of another person and see a problem through their eyes, can further cement a connection.

In healthy relationships, people expect their partners to empathize with them when they face hardship or personal struggles, but the ability to empathize with a partner in good times may be at least as important. In one study, displaying empathy for a partner’s positive emotions was five times more beneficial for relationship satisfaction than only empathizing with his or her negative emotions.

People high in narcissism, or who have narcissistic personality disorder , can exhibit empathy and even compassion. However, that ability only goes so far, as ultimately their own needs come first. Some researchers believe narcissists can develop greater empathy by developing greater self-compassion, which can increase their own feelings of security and self-worth and enable them to open up to hearing others.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can be beneficial, but when it becomes one’s default mode of relating to others, it can blind an individual to their own needs and even make them vulnerable to those who would take advantage of them.

People who regularly put the feelings and perspectives of others above their own may experience feelings of emptiness or alienation and develop generalized anxiety or low-level depression . Psychopaths, on the other hand, are capable of empathic accuracy , or correctly inferring thoughts and feelings, but may have no experiential referent for it: a true psychopath does not feel empathy.

First responders, humanitarian aid workers, doctors, therapists, journalists, and others whose work involves opening themselves up to others’ pain tend to be highly empathic. However, they may come to share the heartbreak of those they help or whose stories they record. As such “emotional residue” accumulates, they may shut down , burn out , and become less willing or able to give of themselves.

Empaths are often characterized as being highly sensitive and overly focused on the needs of others. They may benefit from time alone, as they find it draining to be in the presence of other people. People who are very empathic are more likely to be targeted by manipulative individuals. For this reason, it is important to create healthy boundaries in all relationships, and to be cognizant of relationships with "energy vampires," who are draining to empaths and non-empaths alike.

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Empathy: How to Show Empathy in Writing

by Ruthanne Reid | 34 comments

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Stories create empathy. Stories bring hope. Stories change history. Yes, even yours—especially when you know how to show empathy in writing.

While there are many serious examples of stories affecting human rights and other causes, I'm going to start my point with something simpler.

The Little Red Lighthouse

Not far from where I live is a little red lighthouse. Here it is:

It's cute, right? It's just a lighthouse. There's nothing special about it—except that the George Washington Bridge was built almost on top of it not long after it was completed, rendering it redundant.

For completely logical reasons, the Coast Guard decommissioned it and made plans to sell it or tear it down.

Ah, but that's not the end of the story!

In 1942, an author named Hildegarde H. Swift wrote an adorable children's book called  The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge   that made the lighthouse into a character. This lighthouse did its job with joy, leading ships to safety in the worst of fogs. But then *gasp* the bridge was built overhead with enormous lights, and the lighthouse lost its purpose.

It struggled with feeling useless and unwanted, until one day, an enormous storm came, and the boats could not see the lights on the bridge. The little red lighthouse rediscovered its purpose as it once again led people safely through the storm, and came to the realization that though it was small, it still had a place in this world.

It's a great story, and it changed that lighthouse's fate. When the Coast Guard tried to auction it off, the locals who'd grown up reading that book made such an outcry that instead of being sold, the little red lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

( This is all true .)

I don't think Ms. Swift intended that outcome when she wrote the story, but it still had that effect because it was relatable. Behold the power of empathy!

The Power of Empathy

When you write, you're writing from your barrel of experiences . Whenever you go through something, it ends up in that barrel—all your joy and pain, your fears and questions, your successes and your victories.

(This is actually one of the reasons older writers are sometimes better writers. It has nothing to do with talent. There's just more in the barrel to draw from.)

Your readers can relate to what you pull from your barrel because they have barrels of their own. Everyone does. Your readers can relate because they're human, too (presumably).

Quick demonstration. Ever wondered why anime, of all things, is so popular? Simple: even though Japan's culture is distinct from others around the world, the very  human experiences of the characters speak to those who watch. For example:

Those expressions and feelings work across cultures because we're all human. We can relate to the experiences, even if we don't know the details. I, for one, have never dealt with fifty-foot robots, but I can  relate to the sorrow of a friend's passing.

So how do you communicate this  without  a visual medium? Well . . . you have to pay attention.

How to Show Empathy: Your Barrel of Experience

Wondering how to show empathy in writing? Pro tip: Typing “He was so sad” does not work.

You have to draw from your barrel of experience.

• What physical sensations did you experience when you were sad/angry/bored/happy?
• What kind of thoughts did you have? Uncharitable? Overly gracious? Dismissive?
• How did your view of the people and world around you change as your emotions shifted?

When I'm sad, I feel alone, which usually leads to fear. When I'm angry, I often feel robbed, like justice isn't being done by those around me. When I'm bored, my mind wanders, landing on anything but what I'm supposed to be working on. When I'm happy, I want that moment to last forever, and smaller problems like chronic pain seem to shrink.

Do you get the picture? If your chest hurts when you're grieving,  then your character's chest may hurt.

If you have trouble breathing when you're anxious, then maybe your character has trouble breathing when they're anxious.

When you're angry, do you have trouble controlling what comes out of your mouth? Your character may say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

We all know what it is to be angry and quiet or angry and loud;  any emotion and its outward expression is something we all know well.

So do your readers.

Aim For the Experience, Not the Details

Let's say you're writing a bad guy. A really, really bad guy who robs and hurts people. You have (hopefully) had no experience with that, but you do know what he felt: greed, anger, a sense of entitlement, fear of being caught, a certainty that he had the right to do this thing. You can put those into the story to make him slightly more relatable.

You're a woman writing a male character? No problem. Men are people, too (shocking, I know), and experience the emotions you do, even if they show them differently: they can be unsure or overly certain, fearful or full of themselves, struggling with failure or relaxing in victory.

You're writing an alien creature? Awesome! You can still use your experience to establish this character, either by giving it relatable emotions or by drawing the contrast between them. For example, maybe the alien is standing over a freshly squished astronaut and  not feeling victory,  not  feeling the fear of being caught, but instead nothing at all—which, by contrast, makes the alien more frightening to the reader.

Every human feels these things. They know the stomach-churning feeling that comes right before doing something that requires courage—whether that's speaking in front of a class or leaping out of a helicopter to fight in a war.

The Magic of Your Barrel

You want your story relatable? Share what's in your barrel.

It doesn't matter if you're writing on earth or in space, in ancient times or modern. Your readers don't have to have the same  details to have the same  experience , and as long as your characters' reactions echo your human readers' reactions, they will relate to your story.

Have you read something you could relate to recently? Do you have other tips for how to show empathy in writing? Let us know in the comments .

It's time to practice writing relatable stories. Pick one scene from your WIP with some kind of emotional content, and take  fifteen minutes  to expand it with relatable emotional experiences.

Or, think of an emotional experience you had recently, and take  fifteen minutes  to write about what that felt like. What physical sensations did you experience? What thoughts did you have?

When you're done, share your writing in the comments . Be sure to leave feedback for your fellow writers, too!

Ruthanne Reid

Best-Selling author Ruthanne Reid has led a convention panel on world-building, taught courses on plot and character development, and was keynote speaker for The Write Practice 2021 Spring Retreat.

Author of two series with five books and fifty short stories, Ruthanne has lived in her head since childhood, when she wrote her first story about a pony princess and a genocidal snake-kingdom, using up her mom’s red typewriter ribbon.

When she isn’t reading, writing, or reading about writing, Ruthanne enjoys old cartoons with her husband and two cats, and dreams of living on an island beach far, far away.

P.S. Red is still her favorite color.

34 Comments

So basically it explains that when am writing, I have to include the emotional feelings of what one feels.

There has to be something for the reader to relate to. You can show that by how your character responds to things, the choices they make, that sort of thing.

Empathy is about to understand and even share the feelings and emotions of someone else. While sympathy is the ability to feel for someone,

That’s correct, Danny! And empathy is the best thing for readers to have for your characters.

Showing emotion is great as long as you don’t overdo it. Be careful to not to tell them your main character is sad but show them, his quivering lips, the teardrops in his eyes.

Evil characters should always have a very good background, your story will stand or fall with the antagonist. If you have a bad guy that wants to kill off all the humans he should better have a reason for it.

Absolutely! Show, not tell, is generally the rule around here. 🙂

I agree 110%; I sometimes wonder how books get published when the authors write, “he was furious,” “fear crouched in her eyes,” etc on almost every page.

What a good exercise! Thank you, Ruthanne.

She pulled into a parking space at the local grocery store, turned off the engine, and forced herself to take a deep, slow breath. Head down, avoiding the possibility of eye contact, reluctance slowing her step, she entered the store and took a cart – the small size, never the large one, even after all these years. She had been desperately poor, struggled to feed her children on never enough until even the thought of shopping made her ill. Now, she was wealthy enough to purchase anything here she wanted, yet the symptoms continued. She forced herself to stand up straight, to practice what she’d been taught, to confront her fear. She surveyed the wealth of fresh fruits and vegetables displayed. Aloud, she said, “Thank you, Lord.” It was supposed to help. But still, the memory of poverty choked her breath, her vision narrowed and, helpless, she wept.

Hi Cathy. I’m trying too and I did relate to your character. Tanks

This was short but powerful. You really got the point across that even though she’s wealthy, being poor really affected her and she’s still grieving from it. Good job!

“You’re a woman writing a male character? No problem. Men are people, too (shocking, I know),” Ha ha ha! I loved it! Very funny! Good stuff by the way.

It was really funny.

I can believe a woman’s insight into a male character’s feelings about “God, Hunger, Thought, or Battle” because they seem to be similar to ours. I’m less convinced that we can ever get inside the alien thought process men report, of just looking at what looks like another human being and instantly wanting to fight or rut, sometimes even before making sure that it *is* another human being.

(One reason to use a cat picture: people have to react to what I’m saying, not the way I look.)

What a barrelful I am carrying – most of it repressed but I’ll give the exercise a try.

She was only seven but her mother had trusted her to take her baby brother for a walk in his high pram. She feels so proud and important. Walking along the village street, pushing the pram she is delighted at all the adults who stop to look at the baby and tell her how good she is being to look after him so well. This makes her feel really tall and special – no longer a youngster aged only seven. Eventually she realises reluctantly that she must return home and so turns the pram around and heads back. Close to home she passes a neighbour’s house and as she struggles to push the pram across the gravel chips, she begins to feel stressed. Why is itso difficult to push the pram? Can she manage it? She tries hard, and pushes and pushes. She is starting to sweat with the effort. Then she panics as the pram suddenly up-ends. She flees the scene in terror. She’s thinking she may have killed her little brother as she doesn’t hear him cry. She runs and hides away from the scene of her crime. Her thoughts are in turmoil. What can she do? What will her parents do? She feels so guilty. She really didn’ mean to do it. The neighbour has seen from her kitchen window what has happened. She comes out, calmly rights the pram, checks that the harness securing the baby is in place and pushes the pram the small distance required back to its own home. Our seven year old has witnessed this from her hiding place, and begins to realise with relief, that all is possibly well, so she ventures home in trepidation. How relieved and delighted she is when she finds her mother feeding the baby as normal. Her precious little brother is alive and well. No questions asked. No recriminations. What a feeling of relief that normality has returned to her life.

This makes her feel really tall and special

I really like this line. It made me smile and understand her completely. Poor child, thinking she may have killed her baby brother, and then everything is well again. These certainly were different times, when a 7 year old could take a baby out alone, yes?

Nicely done.

Thanks Cathy – 60 odd years ago!! Times are certainly different now!

Aww poor girl. I felt the panic she had when she thought she’d killed her brother. Great work, Evelyn!

709 thank you – it’s so encouraging to get responses to my efforts.

I absolutely loved this! I felt as though you did a brilliant job at capturing the pure innocence of the young girl and I felt just as worried as she did as I read through. Wonderful work!

Thank you, Sarah. It’s a true story and I can smile about now, but not then.

Beginning of a scene from my WIP that represents a turning point in the relationship of the main characters. Asterisks denote italics. Reviews are always appreciated! (Note: both characters are women)

*Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.*

“Ungh?” I squinted into the bright light worming through the sleep sand in my eyelashes. My cellphone was ringing. I dragged it off the nightstand and answered. “Yeah?”

For a moment, silence. Then a familiar husky voice said, “Dr. MacBride?”

“Detective Cameron? What time is it?”

“Near three in the morning I believe.”

“What happened? Is someone dead?”

“No, nothing like that, I – I couldn’t sleep and I wondered if maybe you might be awake.”

Oh. That was – that was nice. Really nice, actually.

Detective Cameron must’ve interpreted my silence differently. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll see you at the station tomorr-”

“No, it’s fine! Really. Do you want to come to my place?”

“Are you sure?”

“Definitely.” I gave her my address and we hung up. *How long will it take her to get here? Can’t be more than ten minutes. Shit.* I turned on the lamp and caught sight of my reflection in the window. *Oh God, my hair!*

I vaulted out of bed, shucking off my t-shirt and sweatpants. *What do I wear?* This would be the first time she would see me out of my work clothes. I pulled open all the drawers in the dresser. *Jeans, yes, jeans are good.* I wriggled into a pair of dark wash skinnies and looked wildly around for a shirt. My first instinct was to grab a comfortable tee, but I decided against it. To the effortlessly elegant detective I would probably look a slug. Didn’t want to seem like I was trying too hard though. I found a light oatmeal sweater – suitable.

I rushed to the bathroom to tug a comb through my hair. Not perfect, but it would have to do. I switched off the lights there and in the bedroom and let myself into the living room.

Oh no. Boxes.

The next several minutes were a blur of madly stacking boxes and shoving them into meager hiding places – next to the couch, under the coffee table. There was nowhere in that apartment where you could cover something completely. My frantic tidying was interrupted by a distant knock. Crap.

I rushed downstairs; I straightened my sweater, took a steadying breath, and opened the door.

I really enjoyed reading this! I felt as though I could really understand how stressed you character was when they were frantically trying to prepare for their visitor. I felt quite stressed myself just reading it! Keep up the good work!

Okay, so I’ve taken a scene from my WIP (set in 1806 England). It is the false black moment. Here goes… Hopefully, people will empathise with Scar and his predicament!

Scar paced the floor behind his desk. This time he would do it properly. On one knee if necessary. And his wretched heart on his sleeve if that was what it would take.

His heart stumbled, then moved into a slow, heavy beat not unlike the beat of the drum marking the death march of a prisoner on his way to the gallows. A groan rumbled from his throat and tiny beads of moisture prickled his hairline and turned his hands clammy. His mouth dried and his stomach churned and his legs trembled.

He halted beside his chair, closed his eyes and forced his breath to slow. Or tried to.

His gaze darted to the carriage clock. Three of the clock. Any moment now…

He smoothed his hands over his hair, smoothed the fall of his tailcoat, smoothed the front of his jacket. What if she still says no?

The soft snick of the door latch split the silence like a pistol shot. And there she stood, a living portrait framed in the doorway. Something flashed in her eyes—he could not discern what, for it was gone in an instant, her expression shuttered.

Her lips shaped a smile. The smile did not encourage conversation. His churning guts roiled. He forced his gaze to the footman behind her. “You may close the door.”

“It would be best if the door remained open,” she said. Veiled but clear, it was a reprimand and the footman disappeared. She took two paces into the study. Stopped. “Your summons was most fortuitous, for I must speak with you.” Her chin came up. “Last night I accepted the Earl of Mettleford’s offer of marriage.”

His legs buckled and his hand shot out, seized the back of his chair. His feet managed the small box step around the chair before his legs gave out. He dropped into his chair, his lungs far too big for his chest and his head filled with such a whooshing sound, he heard not a word she spoke. Her lips shaped and delivered words that didn’t reach him.

He had to be having a nightmare…

Lips moving all the while, she approached his desk, slapped some documents before him, snatched up his quill and thrust it at him. He stared at the quill, then looked at her.

Impatience flashed in her gaze. “Come on. Sign it.”

He looked at the document. A marriage agreement. The rest of the text was a blur, one massive miserable murky mass of blurry grey-black stripes streaking the page. How could they prepare a marriage agreement so fast? “How—”

“Our solicitors collaborated all morning. Fitzwilliam’s and my family’s,” she said. “Note that Mr. Scribbard has also signed it.”

Old fool. Scar rubbed his eyes. Rubbed his palms against his thighs. Unearthed from his memory the litany of objections she’d voiced each time she’d refused him. “What of your determination to never wed?”

She dismissed the question with a hitch of her shoulder. “I have long held Fitzwilliam in great affection, so take this blasted quill, dip it in that handsome inkwell, and sign the blasted marriage agreement!”

“Affection? Do you… love him?” Say you don’t… He’s almost old enough to be your father. “Here.” She thrust the quill at him. “Take this—”

His fingers clamped around the armrests of his chair. “You cannot wed him if you do not love him.” He watched her crush and master her temper. In other circumstances her self-restraint would have been admirable.

“Do not speak to me of love.” She drew a deep breath. “I am now convinced you had the right of it,” she continued, her voice calm, her tone almost…dismissive. “Love is mere caprice and not a sound basis for an agreeable marriage.” Tapping the tip of the feather quill against her cheek, her gaze flicked over him. “You were prepared to marry me, and with no love involved.”

His heart lurched into a frantic gallop as his body retreated into the backrest of his chair. He crossed his arms over his midriff. “You would do as a duchess.”

“I will do even better as a countess.” She set her jaw. “Now do your legal duty and sign, or I shall think you do not wish to be rid of me after all.”

It was far too close to the truth. Behind his ribs, an aching sensation spread and swelled and pushed against the walls of his chest. He hugged himself tighter. “Do not be misled. I would be overjoyed to see you stuffed, mounted, put in a glass case, labelled Utter Stupidity and left in the British Museum.” It sounded truculent, even to him. Nothing he could do about that.

“Then sign, blast you,” she said on a burst of temper, the quill in her outstretched hand. “I do not take orders from anyone, and certainly not a female.”

A wry smile softened the obstinate cast of her countenance. “Where is your sense of duty and responsibility to your ward?”

“But I am being responsible and doing my duty. Your father would not fault me were he alive.”

She huffed out a breath spiked with impatience. “Then where is your precious honor? You must own that marriage is more acceptable to Society than depositing me at the British Museum.”

He ignored the proffered quill. “You will lose control of your precious fortune if you marry.”

Her gaze shifted, eyes narrowing. “That inkwell looks rather heavy, and I have perfect aim.”

“And quite apart from losing your fortune, I am of the opinion that you need someone strong, not someone who will accommodate your every whim.”

“Someone like you?” A tiny snort of derision slipped past her lips. “That I can do without thank you.”

Somewhere inside, he flinched.

“You were right,” she said. “I am of marriageable age and to secure my future I must marry. Once I accepted that, I did as you wished and chose a husband.”

Did she hear the hiss of his indrawn breath? There was nothing in her countenance to suggest she had.

She leaned over his desk. “So sign, or I will run you through with this blasted quill.”

Her glower drilled into him, but he cared not. Logic decreed the Earl of Mettleford a suitable match for an earl’s daughter, but God’s teeth, handing her into Mettleford’s keeping was like death by amputation.

He looked at the quill. Her hand. Both were rock steady.

She had made her choice….

And left him no choice.

Just honor.

He took the quill, gripped it with numb fingers, signed his name, then shot the quill into the standish.

She scooped up the document, and hesitated, not even a flicker of triumph in her unsmiling gaze. Hope flared, hot and fierce and cold and fragile, then vanished as she left without another word.

Not even a polite ‘thank you’.

Cavernous silence settled over his study. Empty. Endless.

And bloody honor tasted bitter.

She reached to his calloused hand, gently opened his palm, brought it up to her lips and softly left a kiss. As she did this, He could only look down, he couldn’t dare catch her eye. A small eruption of their past might waterfall from his eyes if he did. He couldn’t move, could hardly think, he felt like the cracked black and white checkered floor would fissuring and was slipping down. She cupped his hand to fist, as if the kiss was to be kept, as if it was something real. He felt her big brown eyes upon his brow, as he continued to stare at the floor. She blew a sigh and took her hands away from his fist leaving it closed tight, palm up frozen. He watched her black boot twist on its toe and slowly out of his vision as he kept on the floor. He then looked at this fist and opened it face up and it started to blur as a big watered tear danced on his eye before it fell to the floor.

The following is from the first draft of my current WIP. My protagonist wants to get… intimate… with her husband for the first time since his accident. Leni, my protagonist, has spread Mardi-Gras rose petals all over the bedroom. WARNING: Sexual themes abound as this is a love scene.

She tickled him, on the sides of his torso, his muscles jiggled and contorted, nothing seemingly out of place. With a mild jerk she tilted her hips, a cascade of petals falling from her, exposing herself, offering herself to him.

He hardened further, they rolled into each other and he stopped. He stopped laughing, he stopped smiling, he stopped thrusting. A wave of vagueness, of absence, swept his face, he put his hands on her back. He cradled and rubbed her lower spine and presently his Schwanze recreated the piton event from Sukapak, Alaska.

This time, Leni could not save him from his slip. Nor could she save herself from hers. She held on as long and as hard as she could, but it was of no use. As their summit cracked and crumbled and faded back into fondness, yesterday and regret; as Paul peered into her eyes, confused, astonished, sorrowed and sorry, two other facts became obvious.

That her man was not home. Not yet. That he was not home, not coming inside, not yet safe.

And that each of them, for the first time in their lives, was alone.

Alone. Even before each other, they were each in their own destitution of hope.

Wow, I really felt that. That phrase, ‘destitution of hope’, hits hard.

Thank you! I thought it was very much an act of telling, but one that works.

She sat with a smile on her face. Her friends were usually talking about things she wasn’t interested in. They always talked about latest shows and celebrities. She tried once catching up with what they talked about, but she gave up. She never liked the shows or celebrities they liked. This time though, her friends weren’t talking about a show. Instead, they were talking about an outing they wanted to have together. “Hey, are you coming today, Lily?” One of her friends asked the other. Lily played with her hair before answering, “I don’t think so. I just want to stay home and sleep today.” “Come on! You have to come! it would be amazing, I promise.” Her friend answered. They went back and forth arguing of whether she should go or not. Melody watched them quietly and waited for any of them to ask her. She’s always been listening to them talking about the multiple times they hung out together. Her genuine smile wasn’t so genuine as she remembered that she never was invited to hang out with them. “What are they arguing about?” Melody turned to Nathan who just joined the little group with a confused face. “They’re trying to convince Lily to join them today,” she answered quietly. Melody turned back to her friends once Nathan joined in on the conversation. She waited and waited and waited until the bell rang and lunch was over. They never turned to her; they never asked her if she’ll join them, and she never asked if she could. She interacted normally with her friends for the rest of the day, but she felt hurt and rejected. **** ‘I’m finally home,’ Melody thought to herself as she plopped onto the bed. ‘Weekend’s started and I can finally relax’. She turned over onto her stomach and grabbed the book she was currently reading from the nightstand. She got carried away with the story. She was so engrossed by the events when a ping sounded from her phone. She marked where she topped and closed the book. Opening her phone, she found a new post from one of her friends. She debated in her mind whether she should open it or not; at the end, she decided to see it. The smile she had on her face slowly fell as she saw a video and another along with pictures of her group of friends out and enjoying their time. She felt happy that they were enjoying their time, but at the same time, she felt left out. ‘So many times,’ she thought to herself, ‘so many times I’ve watched them make plans together and I’ve seen their posts with one another and never once was I invited. Never once was I in a picture with them.’ With those thoughts running in her mind and that suffocating feeling intensifying, she hugged a pillow tightly and cried out. She cried and till there were no more tears. She cried until she fell asleep.

Thanks for this, Ruthanne. I love your opener … great description of character, using the lovely story of the red lighthouse!

I am currently writing a story called Mono no Aware. As of late I have been struggling to write it. I was just wondering, how can I get people emotionally invested in the characters and the story? https://thequiddity.wixsite.com/blog Please feel free to read Mono no Aware and my other writings on my blog.

The man stood beside her in a suit and tie. “Just answer the questions, little girl. So we can help you.”

They didn’t want to help her. They wanted to help themselves. Her voice quivering, she said, “I’ve told you all I know.” All she knew she could trust them with, anyway.

“We’ve asked nicely. We’ve provided you protection. Now we need something from you.”

They’d never asked. And Shadow had protected her, not these strangers in suits. Her scalp burned and fire lit in her stomach. She wanted to scream. Wanted to let the tears roll down her face while she shrieked at them that the only thing they’d done was help the man who’d hurt her, Doctor Harrison. But she held back the scream and she blinked to pull back the tears.

Folding her arms tight, she stared straight ahead at the wall. “I…want…Shadow.” Then she pressed her lips together.

A few moments of silence passed.

Then the man slammed his hands on the tabletop and she flinched at the loud smack of his palms against the metal. “Doctor Harrison tortured you,” he shouted. “You should want to tell us every single detail so we can find him and stop him from–”

“No,” she yelled back as she snapped her head in his direction and glared into his face. A pounding throb thumped in her head. “You people want to find him so you can make a deal with him.” Her hands fisted. “Not so you can stop him from hurting someone else!”

The back of his hand slapped her cheek like an iron skillet.

She toppled from her chair, saliva and blood welling in her mouth, and caught herself before her head could crack against the tile floor.

“You will cooperate, young lady,” the man said in a low voice.

She lifted her head and glared at him through her blur of tears. Her cheek stung, and when she touched it, it was already swollen. “This is how you fix problems?” Her voice broke and sobs gathered under her ribcage. “This is how you protect people?”

I’d appreciate any comments/feedback. Thank you!

I loved the beginning mixture of emotion and thoughts when the brave young girl was fighting to hold back her scream and “blinked to pull back the tears.” You engaged me with a great balance of dialogue, emotion, thoughts and actions. I wanted to know what happened next.

I wrote a love story in 84-85 and while it was a good story ( in my opinion) and one I read over and over because I wanted that kind of love one day. But there was a scene where the guy died and while I know how one feels when you lose someone the feeling was different from losing a say grandmother or dad than losing a husband/ boyfriend/ significant other. You have more invested in that kind of love well… About two years ago I lost my husband and best friend of 13 yrs. I journaled that loss and the feelings I was going through. The actions I took and what I felt when it happened as well as the days that followed…. While I haven’t rewritten the love story., I have those feelings to now draw on when I do write it again.

( Currently editing nano right now- and the wounds of that loss are still very fresh even after 2 years)

Wow, there’s a lot of good writers here! So happy to see that!

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How to Write an Empathy Essay

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Article structure

Empathy Essay

What are the main features of empathy essay, how to start an empathy essay: tips on how to start, how to create an outline: outline structure, how to write a thesis for an empathy essay, how to write an introduction, how to write body paragraphs: tips on body writing, how to finish an empathy essay: tips on conclusion writing, tips on revision, empathy essay sample.

Have you ever felt sad or experienced difficulty that your colleagues go through as well as having the emotional feelings? Well, you have empathy towards others. However, can you express such empathy in an essay? Empathy essay elaborates on the aptitude that detects on the feelings of other people and emotional experience of the essay writer .

When writing such a paper, you should consider the following features:

• The essay should be in first person narration .
• It has an empathic task especially the understanding of the thought of the character in a situation.
• It should have facts and feelings.
• It should be comprehensive with writers giving more information about a character.
• This paper should have the proper interpretation of the reaction of the character (content about the feeling of the character).
• Use the style and language of the character such as the use of slang, form or informal as well as colloquial.
• Identify the feeling of the character about the subject and those of other characters.
• Identify special words to use in the essay.
• Prepare relevant quotations for the main characters or important ideas.
• Use the first person narration.
• Apply adjectives in writing and give an honest thought as the character speaks or thinks.

INTRODUCTION

• Provide a thematic subject.
• Highlight the first aspect of the subject.
• Highlight the second aspect of thematic subject.
• Highlight third aspect of thematic subject.
• Give reason/thesis statement for choosing the specific number of characters as example to the point.

First character

• Reason for selecting the character to demonstrate the theme.
• How the character shows thematic point of view.
• How the person illustrates the second thematic subject.
• How the person illustrates the third thematic subject.
• Summary of the way the character elaborates your point.

Second character

Third character

• Reason for selecting the character to demonstrate the theme

CONCLUSION (Summary paragraph)

• Provide the synthesis of the essay in a different way.
• Synthesize the first subtopic.
• Synthesize the second subtopic.
• Synthesize the third subtopic.
• Final statement

When writing a thesis statement, the writer should give a specific claim that supports his or her empathy. Besides, you should present the subject, your position and reason for defending the position. Furthermore, you should provide the number of thematic points or characters in the essay. Lastly, the statement should appear at the end of the introduction.

The introduction should begin with an engaging statement that reveals a thematic subject or point. The writer author follows in with the aspects of the thematic position in the order as they will appear in the body. Lastly, thesis statement appears at the last part of the introduction.

The following are the tips for writing body paragraphs of an empathy essay:

• Provide a clear topic sentence for each character elaborating on thematic point for every paragraph.
• Give specific evidence to support the point.
• Provide examples on how the character illustrate the thematic point.
• Provide a summary on how the character demonstrates the point.
• Use transitions between the sentences and the paragraphs.
• Provide an overview of the essay.
• Synthesize the thematic points in the body paragraphs as viewed by different characters.
• Provide the final statement and direction to the reader.

After completing empathy essays, students should

• Read the essay aloud and correct the mistakes within the paper.
• Invite a family member, a schoolmate or a friend to read the paper and identify the simple mistakes.
• Follow the instruction of the tutor regarding the format.
• Run the essay in Grammarly software to correct grammar mistakes, spelling errors, spacing errors and misused vocabularies before turn it in.

Mr. Robson:

“Don’t ever dare to come near my family! Crank. You think you can divert my attention and pay attention to your yappy mouth? Love! What about it? You moron get lost!”

Mrs. Robson:

“My dear I beg your pardon. He just wanted to express his opinion. However, his thoughts of meeting you have lowered your social status. Please, can we accord him a chance? Young men of today take time to learn etiquette and need some time to appreciate the elderly. Do you recall when you first approached my dad concerning our courtship? Well, it was a hell you went through.”

“Father, I hate, but I just have to admit that you don’t mean good for my courtship. I have dated Thompson for half a year, we’ve been in college for three years, and I am 26. Dad can I have some peace of mind?”

“Indeed Sheila is right Father. However, she ought to have notified your mood before allowing Thompson to speak out his mind. Meanwhile, I appreciate your concern as a father who wants the best for his family. For now, I will rest my thoughts with your opinion until you permit Sheila to plan her wedding. Goodbye.”

“Sorry sir I never intended to hurt your feeling, but I felt it right to inform you of my plans. However, I need no rush into wedding plans without your blessings. But, it will be a death warrant if I hurt her feelings! She loves her life, and I am exactly that! Will you lose her for good?”

After all, marriage is sacred, and everybody has a right to start a family. Robson won nothing.

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Rae Greiner, “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English”

The word “empathy” first appeared in English in 1909 when it was translated by Edward Bradford Titchener from the German Einfühlung , an old concept that had been gaining new meaning and increased relevance from the 1870s onward. While today we often treat “empathy” as a synonym for “sympathy,” if not—and more commonly—as an improvement on it, empathy at the turn of the century was used to describe a unique combination of cognitive effort and bodily feeling thought to characterize aesthetic experience. Such experience was not limited to contemplating works of art, however; for several of its earliest theorists, empathy named our aesthetic experiences of other people. It would seem to some that a radical break had been made between sympathy, seen as a primarily moral (and moralizing) activity, and a more scientific, physico-psychological process for which the human brain was hardwired. Yet the empathy of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may also be seen as sharing key features with sympathy, particularly as the latter was conceptualized by eighteenth-century moral philosophy and Romantic and Victorian aesthetics.

Empathy is a hot topic these days, on the lips of cognitive scientists, philosophers, literary critics, and U.S. Presidents alike. But what is it? Consider the opening paragraph of the opening essay of a 2011 collection entitled The Social Neuroscience of Empathy . In “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” C. Daniel Batson writes:

Students of empathy can seem a cantankerous lot. Although they typically agree that empathy is important, they often disagree about why it is important, about what effects it has, about where it comes from, and even about what it is. The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena. These phenomena are related to one another, but they are not elements, aspects, facets, or components of a single thing that is empathy, as one might say that an attitude has cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Rather, each is a conceptually distinct, stand-alone psychological state. Further, each of those states has been called by names other than empathy. Opportunities for disagreement abound. (3, original emphasis)

As Batson goes on to suggest, empathy can be difficult to define because it is often invoked “to provide an answer to two quite different questions” (3). The first is this one: how do we know what others think and feel? And the second: how can we explain the impulse to respond to the feelings of others? The first is principally a question of knowledge. It asks how we are able to infer the contents of other minds, or how and to what extent we project those contents from our own. The second, centered on motivation and behavior, is primarily ethical. It seeks to understand as well as “promote prosocial action” (4).

The empathy of the moment has accrued a number of unique (and contradictory) meanings and associations, from benevolent, altruistic care to the biochemical and physiological responses of our minds and bodies as we mimic or mirror the feelings of others—as, for example, in the “primitive empathy” of motor mimicry, an automatic or reactive bodily response that (some say) is carried out unselfconsciously, without intention or will (Bavelas et. al.). We might well wonder, then, what relation empathy has to sympathy, a concept with which it is sometimes aligned, sometimes treated synonymously, and sometimes contrasted. It might seem intuitively correct to assume a wide distance between the two, if one takes as a starting point such recent titles as “The Empathetic Brain” and “Imitation, Empathy and Mirror Neurons.” [1] Empathy is without a doubt the preferred term for describing brain phenomena that, it would appear, only the most cutting-edge technology has made visible. Yet empathy in the late-nineteenth-century, Darwinian era looks surprisingly like the empathy of today. There was, of course, no talk of mirror neurons then, but the material body and the interworking of its parts had become vital to those whose interest in loosening the grip of morality on our understanding of human experience had directed their attention to muscles and nerves. [2] Indeed, we find family resemblances when we look back farther still. When, in 1987, the psychology professors Nancy Eisenberg and Paul A. Miller distinguished empathy from sympathy—defining empathy as a vicarious “emotional matching” occurring in the apprehension of another’s affective state and sympathy as involving “sorrow or concern for another’s welfare”—they opened their essay with references to David Hume and Immanuel Kant (92). Hume is among the first in a long line of thinkers who stress the emotional origins of moral behavior; Kant stands with those for whom cognition is key. If it is true that “psychologists generally have been less concerned than philosophers with delineating the ontological nature of morality,” the status of the emotions and the thinking mind, as well as the ostensible divide between them, has continued to occupy students of empathy and sympathy since the Scottish Enlightenment (Eisenberg and Miller 91).

Edward B. Titchener

Indeed, empathy, or rather sympathy, had been understood in aesthetic terms at least since Adam Smith, Hume, and their eighteenth-century contemporaries began the rigorous study of moral feeling, into which aesthetic experience fell. The highly physicalized empathy of the early twentieth century in many ways represents a continuation of, rather than a radical break from, a sympathy that in Smith and Hume’s day was not without its own bodily discourse of taste and appetites, or its embroilment in debates concerning the nature of attraction and repulsion. Even the architectural, geometrical emphasis that, as we shall see, characterized empathy for writers like Vernon Lee was not without precedent. In Beauty & Ugliness (1912; first published in two-part essay form in 1897), a work attributed to both Lee and Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson, Lee contends that to articulate properly the aesthetic process one must connect an analytic vocabulary to an affective one: “visible qualities” like “red, blue, tall, long, triangular, [and] square,” she writes, “tell us of no aesthetic peculiarities”; “[f]or those we must go to the names of our moods: pleasant, unpleasant, harmonious, jarring, unified, etc.” (271, original emphasis). Lee, following Lipps’s lead, goes on to describe in brilliant detail how we empathize with triangles and squares. But in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume too had had a good deal to say about the relationship between shape and color, ideation, and emotional response, as when he describes how we “revolve in our mind the ideas of circles, squares, parallelograms, [and] triangles of different sizes and proportions,” or describes a man looking at a kind of color wheel missing a particular shade of blue (1.1.7.20). “Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be placed before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest,” Hume writes; “it is plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting. . . . Now I ask, whether it is possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses?” (1.1.1.10). Hume answers in the affirmative, drawing a parallel between color perception and sympathy with others. Both require imagination for filling in the gaps, yet neither is simply “subjective.” Our sympathetic responses are modified and corrected in the same way as are our judgments of color, line, and size. Both become objective in accordance with general rules.

Empathy’s significance to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories of the visual and plastic arts may thus be seen as an extension of (if also distinctive from) that early connection between sympathetic responsiveness, judgment, and aesthetic form. In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (1994), Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou describe the crucial twenty-year period during which Einfühlung acquired that modern significance as an important background for understanding the aesthetic transformations that would epitomize early-twentieth-century art. The formal experimentation of Futurism, Cubism, and Neoplasticism, they suggest, “was not without intellectual pedigree,” specifically in the shift away from “the erstwhile philosophical and physiological problem of how we perceive form and space” toward “the fledgling psychological problem of how we come to appreciate or take delight in the characteristics of form and space,” and the “analogous problem of how we might artistically exploit pure form and space as artistic entities in themselves” (1-2). The emphasis on pleasure is important. Though the intellectual tradition they trace leads them all the way back to Kant’s conception of “purposiveness” ( Zweckmäßigkeit ), which they define as “the sense of internal harmony that we presume to exist in the world” and thus “the heuristic rule or standard by which we relate to the forms of nature and art,” the final decades of the nineteenth century were marked by a profound attention to bodily response (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 6). Translating Einfühlung as “in-feeling,” Mallgrave and Ikonomou are keen to emphasize the physiological basis of, for instance, Robert Vischer’s “muscular” empathy, which links aesthetic appreciation to the rhythmic experiences of the body’s “self-motions,” or his conviction that certain “loud” colors “might actually provoke an auditory response” (23). As Vischer puts it, “[w]e move in and with the forms” (101). Whether carried far away in observing “fleeting clouds,” or mentally attempting to “scale [the] fir tree and reach up within it,” we “caress [form’s] spatial discontinuities”; by moving in this way “in the imagination,” we reproduce the kinetic motion of our internal organs and project it into other, even stationary, objects (101). This experience of a rhythmic continuity between self and other, outside and in, defines empathy in Vischer’s view. By objectifying the self in external, spatial forms, projecting it into and becoming analogous with them, subject merges with object. Self and world unite.

Mallgrave and Ikonomou underscore how radical this proposal can seem once we recognize the pervasiveness of empathy in our unconscious, everyday activities. For Vischer’s conception of empathy involves “a pervasive attitude, an openness that we maintain with the world,” which in turn suggests (as Hume had done) that the self is a fiction, a form borne of imagination and maintained “only by force of habit” (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 25). One of empathy’s most pleasurable rewards, then, might be in the letting go (or loosening up) of that fiction. External objects lose their distinctiveness from the self when my feeling and my “mental representation” of a given object “become one” (25). This has important implications for the artist whose attempts at intensifying expressions of form do not attempt to copy nature but reveal the richly affective and energic processes “concealed therein”: art might strive “to objectify the human condition in a sensuous and harmoniously refined form,” translating “the instability of emotional life and the chaotic disorder of nature into a free, beautiful objectivity” (26). As Titchener explained in his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (1909), an author’s “choice and arrangement of words” could produce “attitudinal feels”: visceral pressures, muscular “tonicity,” and altered breathing and facial expressions felt by authors and readers alike (181). This collection of responses he calls “empathy,” yet it is not simply that aesthetic experience leads to physiological effects. For even ordinary, run-of-the-mill thinking and understanding involve similar exertions, in a kind of “motor empathy” in which one “act[s] the feeling out, though as a rule in imaginal and not sensational terms” (185). “Not only do I see” such abstract concepts as “gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness,” Titchener explains; “I feel or act them in the mind’s muscles” (21).

Such an empathy seems to have come a long way from sympathy as it is commonly understood, especially if by that word we mean something closer to the sentimental pitying often associated with Victorian morality (as we saw at the beginning of this essay, sympathy retains for many contemporary theorists an association with pity that empathy does not). Suzanne Keen reminds us in Empathy and the Novel (2007) that Victorian novelists like George Eliot were explicit in “articulat[ing] a project for the cultivation of the sympathetic imagination,” whereby novel readers “might learn, by extending themselves into the experiences, motives, and emotions of fictional characters, to sympathize with real others in their everyday lives” (38). Sympathy was urged as an urgent ethical response to the increasingly urban, disconnected, and morally uncertain world of full-blown capitalism. For some, though, that possibility came with messages fraught with danger, as from those who worried that novel reading corrupted readers (especially girls) by causing them to think and feel things they ought not, as well as from those who, from a different angle, considered sympathy a poor, overly personal substitute for large-scale social reform. Such concerns were as old as the novel itself, as was the sneaking suspicion that sympathy provided a cover for less than noble desires. As one Madame Riccoboni wryly remarked in 1769, “[o]ne would readily create unfortunates in order to taste the sweetness of feeling sorry for them” (qtd. in Boltanski 101). Yet Keen’s use of the terms “empathy” and “sympathy” more or less interchangeably marks an effort to rescue sympathy from the bad press it received not so much then as now, once empathy, having shed the moralistic overtones that had accrued to sympathy, was judged the more modern and better of the two. As I have written elsewhere, after 1909 (if not before it), sympathy seemed to belong to the Victorians, empathy to us (“Thinking” 418).

How this came to pass over the course of the nineteenth century is a story too long and complex to cover fully here. [3] Yet in some ways the shift is easy to explain. As Neil Vickers writes, “in eighteenth-century Britain, ‘proto-psychology’ and ‘proto-aesthetics’ laboured under a common burden”: that of having to “prove their worth in moral terms” (4). [4] The first “psychologists” we might say—admittedly, by stretching the term—were the “moral doctors” described by Karl Philipp Moritz in 1782 as the physicians of heart and head (qtd. in Vickers 5). The shift from moral medicine to morality-free scientific rigor (if it ever, finally, took place) was neither quick nor unambivalent. As Vickers reminds us, Samuel Taylor Coleridge apologized for using the term “psychological” in series of lectures he gave on Shakespeare in 1811-12 (the “patient” was Hamlet). Yet serious examination of the mind—studied attention to the relay between perception, cognition, and affective response—was beginning to lead many thinkers toward more neutral, less patently moral explanations for human behavior. And as psychology (along with many other branches of science) became increasingly professionalized as the century progressed, so a new psychological aesthetics developed in tandem with other scientific developments, and, as Carolyn Burdett explains, “physiology and psychology converged” ( “Introduction” 1).By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Burdett argues, evolutionary theory offered new ways “to understand such psycho-physiological phenomena” as reflex actions and spontaneous emotional response, thus “linking even the most seemingly sovereign of human experiences, such as the feeling of love for another person or the love of God, to vestigial instinctive behaviors which had once conferred evolutionary advantage” (1). As emotion fell under the powerful sway of physiology, so too did aesthetic response. If love was in some fundamental way biochemical, perhaps a sensation borne of the nervous system, the same might be true for experiences of the beautiful, including the sympathetic facility—now becoming “empathetic”—to have aesthetic experiences with, and of, others. As Lipps argued in “Empathy, Inner Imitation and Sense-Feelings” (1903), when in empathy with another person I experience “a spatial extension of the ego,” I assume “the place of that figure. I am transported into it. As far as my consciousness is concerned, I am totally identical with it” (qtd. in Jahoda 155). That, he continues, “is aesthetic imitation, and it is at the same time aesthetic Einfühlung ” (155). For Lipps, “aesthetic enjoyment is objectivated self-enjoyment” in that it enabled a formal experience of self (Pinotti 94). For Lee, following from Lipps while carving out her own theory of “anthropomorphic aesthetics,” empathy involved emotional memory: physical motions, grown abstract through continual repetition, are sensations that in empathy we feel, thrillingly, to have been revived ( Beauty 1). [5]

For many such writers, empathy necessarily involved a cognitive component, though how strong, and how dominant, varied. As Burdett notes, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s Beauty & Ugliness offered “an empirically-based account of aesthetic experience” in which bodily sensation precedes and leads to emotion: “we fear because we tremble,” not the other way around (“Vernon Lee” 3). But Lee balked at entirely severing morality from aesthetic experience. Inspired, Burdett argues, by a proposition central to Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man —that “female aesthetic choice” shapes and even dictates (hetero-)sexual selection—Lee was at once receptive to arguments for the primacy of sensation and resistant to any mechanistic understanding of aesthetic response (11). From Vischer she took the idea that we imaginatively experience our own bodies via those external objects into which our emotions are projected; from Lipps’s Spatial Aesthetics and Optical Illusion (1897), she took the notion that the seeming vitality of objects, including the erectness and “balance” of a Doric column, is among those “ ideas of movement” and dynamism produced by empathy (Burdett “Vernon Lee” 20, original emphasis). Such ideas are “made out of the accumulated and synthesized, ‘abstracted’ memory store of our experiences of sensory motor activity, out of imagined similar movements, and out of an unconscious knowledge of primordial dynamism as such” (Burdett 20). They are, for Lee, “tantamount to life,” for beauty confirms us to ourselves: “forms and shapes,” she believed, “are how we keep feeling that we are alive” (Burdett 20).

If by 1932 empathy had become a widely accepted term amongst psychologists, sympathy had in certain circles suffered a decline, at least in popular perception. [6] It is worth remembering, however, that the moral and social theories of Smith and Hume are thick with references to the mental activities, perceptual and imaginative acuities, and ethical conundrums that, in the parlance of our own day, can seem to belong exclusively to empathy as well as the moment. Projection and mirroring, the role of inference, fiction, and the imagination in inhabiting other minds—these were central to the broad eighteenth-century attempt to reconceive how feeling fundamentally affected nearly every aspect of human life. Though their aims and conclusions sometimes differ, Smith’s insistence that our sympathies arise not simply by viewing another’s emotional expression firsthand, but from reflecting upon “the situation which excites it,” isn’t so far from the “in-feeling” that interested Lipps, Lee, and the rest (12). It too involves an experience of form, in what Smith calls the “going along with” others: imaginatively re-creating their mental movements, crafting narrative accounts so as to understand (and simulate) their attitudes, feelings, and thoughts (83). As with Lee’s “abstracted” memories, feelings in Smith’s sympathetic process must first be abstracted—turned into the stuff of story—to be imaginatively passed on and shared. His denial that feelings could pass from one body to the next in the contagious fashion Hume described, and his resistance to the idea that our sympathies arose in response to bodily feeling of any kind, turned sympathy into a mental process. It also made emotion thoroughly social. No man can “think of his own character,” Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), without imagining how he appears to the minds of others; lacking that mental “mirror,” even the self is an “object which he cannot easily see, [and] which naturally he does not look at” (110). Smith illustrates the point by describing a man living in total isolation: on a good day, he might “view his own temper and character with that sort of satisfaction with which we consider a well-contrived machine”; on a bad day, he is but “a very awkward and clumsy contrivance” (192-93). Selfhood is so unthinkable on the social margins that only a minimal subjectivity is possible outside it. A man who cannot “suppose the idea of some other being, who is the natural judge of the person who feels,” is also incapable of having a self (193). Physiological accounts of empathy thus share with Smithian sympathy a crucial insight: that we project our feeling into other forms in order to experience ourselves.

Indeed, it is also worth remembering in closing that empathy and sympathy were overlapping terms even for those who initially sought to clarify empathy’s aesthetic dimensions or to distinguish it from the moral sentiments associated with sympathy. In his commentary on Doric columns, for instance, Lipps had written that while the arrangement of materials constituted its “technical” creation, only a “combination of aesthetic relations for our imagination constitutes a work of art”: “the essential of the work of art,” he continues, “is an imaginary world unified and self-contained” (qtd. in Lee “Recent” 434). It may be difficult to see how any ordinary morality could function in this “self-contained,” “imaginary world.” Yet in “Recent Aesthetics,” published in 1904 in the Quarterly Review , Vernon Lee cites this same passage, declaring that

[t]his phenomenon of aesthetic “Einfühlung” is . . . analogous to that of moral sympathy. Just as when we “put ourselves in the place” or more vulgarly “in the skin” of a fellow creature, we are, in fact, attributing to him the feelings we should have in similar circumstances, so, in looking at the Doric column . . . we are attributing to the lines and surfaces, to the spatial forms, those dynamic experiences which we should have were we to put our bodies into similar conditions. (434)

As sympathy with “the grief of our neighours” can constitute “a similar grief in our own experiences,” so too an “aesthetic attribution of our own dynamic modes to visible forms implies the realisation in our consciousness of the various conflicting strains and pressures, of the resistance and the yielding which constitute any given dynamic and volitional experiences of our own” (434). The Doric column’s valiant effort to defy gravity revives in us a sense of the human condition. Its is “a little drama we have experienced millions of times” (434). [7]

Certainly, one must be wary of overstating the similarities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of sympathy and a fin de siècle empathy bearing the undeniable stamp of its post-Darwinian making. At present, though, the pendulum often swings too far in the opposite direction, making empathy seem inarguably superior to its old-fashioned cousin. In Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions (2003), Martha Nussbaum offers a corrective, asserting the continuing relevance of a sympathy that, unlike empathy, always entails an ethical stance: “a malevolent person who imagines the situation of the other and takes pleasure in her distress may be empathetic,” she writes, “but will surely not be judged sympathetic. Sympathy, by comparison, includes a judgment that the other person’s distress is bad” (302). There are no doubt plenty of good reasons why a recent study citing evidence for the altruistic behavior of rats toward their distressed fellows should refer to such behavior as empathetic rather than sympathetic (the moral question, surely, is number one). [8] But Nussbaum’s distinction may nevertheless give us reason to pause before jettisoning sympathy altogether in explaining more human endeavors. We will do well, as historians and scholars of a long and lengthening nineteenth century, to continue scrutinizing the empathy/sympathy relation as well as its ostensible divide.

Rae Greiner is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University and editor of the journal Victorian Studies . Her book, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction , is forthcoming from The Johns Hopkins University Press.

HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)

published March 2012

Greiner, Rae. “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History . Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net . Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].

WORKS CITED

Bartal, Inbal Ben-Ami, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason.“Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.” Science 334.6061 (2011): 1427-30. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.

Batson, C. Daniel. “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena.” The Social Neuroscience of Empathy . Ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge: MIT P, 2011. 3-13. Print.

Bavelas, Janet Beavin, Alex Black, Charles R. Lemery, and Jennifer Mullett. “Motor Mimicry as Primitive Empathy.” Empathy and its Development . Ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 317-38. Print.

Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

Burdett, Carolyn. “Introduction: Psychology/Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011): 1-6. Web. 7 Nov. 2011.

—. “‘The Subjective Inside Us Can Turn into the Objective Outside’: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011): 1-31. Web. 7 Nov. 2011.

Eisenberg, Nancy, and Paul A. Miller. “The Relation of Empathy to Prosocial and Related Behaviors.” Psychological Bulletin 101.1 (1987): 91-119. Psycarticles . Web. 4 Jan. 2012.

Greiner, Rae. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction . Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print.

—. “Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy v. Empathy in the Realist Novel.” Victorian Studies 53.3 (2011): 417-26. Print.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature . Ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Iacoboni, Marco. “Imitation, Empathy and Mirror Neurons.” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 653-70. Annual Reviews . Web. 15 Sept. 2011.

Jahoda, Gustav. “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy.’” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41.2 (2005): 151-63. Academic Search Premier . Web. 4 Nov. 2011.

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Lee, Vernon. “Recent Aesthetics.” Quarterly Review 199.398 (1904): 420-43. Vol. 199 (London: John Murray, 1904). Google Book Search . Web. 3 Jan. 2012.

Lee, Vernon, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty & Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics . London: John Lane, 1912. Print.

Mallgrave, Harry Francis, and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 . Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994. Print.

—. Introduction. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 . Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1-85.

Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.

Pinotti, Andrea. “Empathy.” Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics . Ed. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree. Heidelberg: Springer, 2010. 93-98. Google Book Search . Web. 8 Jan. 2012. 

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments . Glasgow ed. Ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982. Print.

Titchener, Edward Bradford. Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes . New York: Macmillan, 1909. Google Book Search . Web. 1 Dec. 2011.

Vickers, Neil. “Coleridge on ‘Psychology’ and ‘Aesthetics.’” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011): 1-14. Web. 7 Nov. 2011.

de Vignemont, Frederique, and Tania Singer. “The Empathetic Brain: How, When and Why?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10.10 (2006): 435-41. Science Direct . Web. 15 Sept. 2011.

Vischer, Robert. “On the Optical Sense of Form: a Contribution to Aesthetics.” Mallgrave and Ikonomou 89-123.

[1] For instance, see de Vignemont and Singer’s “The Empathetic Brain: How, When and Why?” and Iacoboni’s “Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons.”

[2] Though no one was talking of “mirror neurons” in the late nineteenth century, neurons had been named in 1891 by Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz; three years later, Franz Nissl successfully stained them with dahlia violet. My thanks to the anonymous reader of this essay who clarified this point.

[3] I cover some of this ground in my forthcoming book on sympathy and realism, forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012. For a more thorough account, Keen’s work is a good place to start.

[4] Vickers’s essay is part of a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century devoted to nineteenth-century psychology and aesthetics.

[5] Lee found Lipps’s account of empathy overly abstract: “[o]ne might almost believe that it is the dislike of admitting the participation of the body in the phenomenon of aesthetic Empathy which has impelled Lipps to make aesthetics more and more abstract, a priori , and metaphysical” ( Beauty 60). From Lipps’s study “has come,” she writes, “if not the theory, at least the empirical and the logical demonstration of the process to which Professor Lipps has given the convenient but misleading name Einfühlung ” (60).

[6] As Gardner Murphy wrote that year in An Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology , “the term Einfühlung (‘empathy’) has in fact come into general psychological use” (qtd. in Jahoda 162).

[7] According to Jahoda, Lipps treated empathy and sympathy interchangeably except in the case of “negative Einfühlung ,” which Jahoda calls “rather an elusive concept” (158).

[8] See Bartal et.al., “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.”

Essay on Empathy for Students

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It’s something we all possess but not everyone uses. When empathy is present, we feel what others are feeling and respond with caring and compassion.

With empathy, we can see where others are coming from and offer unconditional support.

Empathy is a fundamental part of who we are, and it’s our responsibility to nurture it. We can’t live without empathy because it affects how we interact with others, which in turn impacts our individual health and well-being.

When we see others in pain, our natural response is to want to help. This is one of humanity’s great qualities–our empathy.

However, this quality can be taken too far if we begin to take on the emotions of other people without knowing them well.

Origin of Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It’s a powerful tool that can change both us and the world around us. The word empathy comes from the Greek word “empatheia.” “Empatheia” is a combination of two words: “en” and “patheia.”

Etymologically, this means that we feel with or suffer along with someone else. Empathy brings us together and makes the world a smaller place. Here, are some ways empathy has changed lives and made our world a better place.

What is empathy?

When we feel compassion for someone and want to help, it means we care about them and want them to feel better.

Many people have difficulty describing how they feel about a particular situation, and that’s OK. They might feel grief over the loss of a loved one and think of themselves as the grieving person, for example. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about the loss, it just means they have a hard time describing their feelings.

Why is empathy important?

Research has shown that we can express our feelings more openly, be more sympathetic, and connect to others more easily when we empathize.

There are three major advantages to empathy.

Second, empathy is the basis of compassion. Compassion is an emotion that inspires and supports us to act, love, and care for others.

Finally, empathy is how we develop relationships. Empathy is an emotional skill that starts in early childhood.

Benefits of empathy

Empathy brings compassion, selflessness, and integrity to any job, and it can also have an immense impact on our lives as individuals.

Here are some ways empathy can benefit society as a whole:

How empathy helps with people’s mental health

People who have an empathetic attitude can have positive effects on their mental health. Their positive behaviors and feelings are contagious to others and that leads to a lot of positivity for everyone involved.

People can help others if they have empathy for them. They feel what others feel and are motivated to reach out to them, because they can see that they need it.

A health psychologist might say that empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of another person.

It’s a great skill to have, because it can reduce feelings of isolation and help people feel loved and cared for.

How to develop your own empathy skills

The good news is that empathy is something that can be learned. Our thoughts and actions have consequences, and the most powerful part of any relationship is to choose the one we want to have.

How we can use empathy

Why do we need empathy? It is the key to building a strong community. By using empathy, we can connect with others.

This allows us to understand each other and respond with care and compassion.

It’s important that we take care of each other and help others whenever possible. It’s also important to understand what is going on in people’s minds and hearts.

We should make the effort to understand what people are feeling and experiencing, rather than just seeing what they do.

A valuable skill that is now so essential in our society, we should help kids develop the skill, and parents can start training their children from a young age.

They can begin to model empathy, and teach them how to be kind and giving by example.

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Empathy: The Power of Connection

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Originally published in Natural Health magazine, 2012

In recent years, the process of ‘restorative justice’ has been used more and more frequently as a way of dealing with crime. As a part of the process, offenders are brought face to face with the victims of their crimes, to hear how they have suffered as a result. The aim of this encounter is to bring healing, for both victim and offender. The victim transcends their rage with some understanding and forgiveness towards the offender, and the offender empathises with the victim, becoming aware of the real meaning of their crimes. This process changes lives. Victims feel free of the weight of hatred and are able to move on; offenders have a wider sense of perspective, and are less likely to re-offend. Sometimes offenders don’t meet their specific victims, but just the victims of similar crimes. But this still leads to a new awareness, and new patterns of behaviour.

This highlights the amazing power of empathy. To a large extent, all crime and all cruelty are the result of a lack of empathy. It’s a lack of empathy which makes someone capable of attacking or oppressing other people. A lack of empathy for another tribe or country makes warfare and conflict possible. A lack of empathy towards other ethnic groups, social classes or castes makes oppression and inequality possible.

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to ‘feel with’ another person, to identity with them and sense what they’re experiencing. It’s sometimes seen as the ability to ‘read’ other people’s emotions, or the ability to imagine what they’re feeling, by ‘putting yourself in their shoes.’ In other words, empathy is seen as a cognitive ability, along the same lines as the ability to imagine future scenarios or to solve problems based on previous experience. But in my view, empathy is more than this. It’s the ability to make a psychic and emotional connection with another person, to actually enter into their mind-space. When we experience real empathy or compassion, our identity actually merges with another person’s. The separateness between you and the other person fades away. Your ‘self-boundary’ melts away, so that in a sense – or to an extent – you become them.

If you experience this state of connection with another person, then it’s impossible to treat them badly, except unintentionally. You recoil from their experience of suffering in the same way that you recoil from your own suffering. In fact, you feel a strong desire to relieve their suffering and aid their development.

Empathy has powerful psychological benefits for us too. Research shows that people who are more empathic feel more satisfied with their lives, and have better relationships. Some scientists used to belief that human beings are naturally selfish and individualistic, but more and more research is showing that empathy – not selfishness – is ‘hard-wired’ into us. Animals often show empathy towards one another, even to members of different species, and this manifests itself in random acts of kindness. As Lynn McTaggart – author of The Bond – puts it, ‘Animals often partner up with members of unrelated species…There are even instances of an animal from one species adopting those of another.’ And within their own species, animals often share food to make sure that weaker members of their group are fed, even when they have to sacrifice their own food.

Are Women more Empathic?

Studies have suggested that women are generally more empathic than men. For example, studies have shown that women are significantly better at ‘reading’ people’s emotions purely from looking at their eyes. Other research has shown that women’s friendships tend to based on mutual help and problem sharing, whereas men usually develop friendships based on shared interests, such as sports and hobbies. Men and women have also been shown to have different speaking styles. Women’s conversations usually last longer, because of their use of more ‘back channel support’, such as nodding, smiling and other gestures. If they disagree, they tend to express their opinion indirectly rather than making a statement, helping to avoid confrontation. On the other hand, men tend to more blunt and opinionated. They use more imperatives and tend to ‘talk over’ more. As the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen puts it, ‘men spend more time using language to demonstrate their knowledge, skill and status.’ This makes sense: after all, the vast majority of ‘man’s inhumanity’ throughout history really has been man’s. Almost all wars have been orchestrated and fought by men, and most social oppression has been inflicted by high status men, seeking to protect and increase their power and wealth.

This also makes sense in terms of women’s role as mothers. Surely their nurturing role encourages empathy, because of the need for a strong emotional connection to children. At the very least, you could say that this emotional connection would have made it more difficult for them to lose the ability to empathise.

Empathy with Nature

Empathy can spread beyond other humans, to other living beings and to nature itself. Many of the world’s tribal peoples respect nature because they sense that it’s alive, and because they feel connected to it. They sense that all natural things – not just animals but plants, stones and the whole Earth itself – are not just objects but beings, who are part of the same web of creation as them. They empathise with plants, animals and the Earth, and so are reluctant to damage or destroy them. As the great Native American philosopher Luther Standing Bear wrote, for the Lakota Indians, ‘Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them.’ As a result, wrote Luther Standing Bear, anticipating the modern animal rights movement, ‘The animals had rights – the right of a man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness – and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal, and spared all life that was not needed for food and clothing.’

This attitude brought a sense of responsibility. Many indigenous peoples saw – and still see – themselves as the caretakers of nature, with a responsibility to preserve harmony. As Chief Edward Moody of the Nuxalk Nation says, ‘We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can’t speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees.’

To a large extent, our environmental destruction is a manifestation of our lack of empathy for nature, and the Earth. Our strongly developed ego means that we experience a sense of ‘otherness’ to nature, that we can’t sense its aliveness, and so don’t feel any qualms about exploiting and abusing it.

Healing through Empathy

Just as the lack of empathy makes cruelty and oppression possible, the presence of empathy heals conflict. The wider empathy stretches – from victims to offenders, from one ethnic group to another, from nation to nation and religion to religion – the less brutal and more harmonious a place the world will become.

And perhaps most importantly, as Restorative Justice shows, to some degree empathy can be nurtured. When people are brought together in a neutral context, with an open, trusting attitude, empathy naturally establishes itself. Distinctions of ethnicity, religion and other superficial ‘identity badges’ begin to fade away, as does the sense of grievance and rage derived from past events. The same could be said of nature too: when human beings spend time in natural surroundings, relaxing into its stillness and space, a bond naturally establishes itself.

And it’s this bond which is surely our true nature. Empathy shows that the concept of separateness is an illusion. Empathy is simply the experience of our true connectedness, the exchange of feeling through the channel of shared consciousness which unites not just all human beings, but all living and non-living things.

Empathy meditation

Think of someone you love, and be aware of the warm feeling that wells up inside you. Hold on to that warm feeling, and let it spread throughout your body, including to any parts of you body where you feel discomfort. Let it flow into your mind too, so that you feel empathy and compassion to your own thoughts, even the negative ones. Think of all the people around you, in the rooms or buildings close to you, and imagine that warm glow of compassion leaving your body and spreading to them. Think of all the people in your city, in the streets and buildings, and expand the warm feeling to them too. Thinking of all the people in this country, across the towns and countryside, and expand the feeling to them too. Then expand it further, to all the people on this planet, the millions of people in all the different countries. Feel the glow of compassion spreading from your being to the whole world, and into the space above you, rising up into the sky and the whole universe.

Cultivating Empathy

• Use your imagination to picture how the world looks through other people’s eyes. Think about how other people’s predicaments make them feel, and how their experiences mould their perceptions.
• When you speak to other people, give them your full attention. Don’t think about other things, look into the distance or look at your i-phone. Giving people your full attention shows that your respect them, and establishes a strong connection, which enables empathy to flow between you.
• Before you condemn another person for behaving badly, think about the reasons for their behaviour. Is it because of bad experiences they’ve had in the past, or because of personality traits that they have no control over?
• Be altruistic and kind to others. Make sure that your life contains an element of service, where you part the needs of others before your own e.g. caring for the sick or elderly, charity or voluntary work. Altruism and service help us to transcend separateness, and to connect with others, creating a follow of empathy.

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How to Write a Personal Narrative: A Step-by-Step Guide

“As I sat down to write this article, memories flooded back, each one a brushstroke in the painting of my past…”

That could be the beginning of your personal narrative. Writing it lets you turn your memories and experiences into stories that click with others. This type of writing goes beyond school assignments or essays for college applications; it’s a chance to get really good at sharing your life's events in ways that matter. 

In this article, we're going to explore what personal narratives are all about and guide you through a simple seven-step process to create your own. You’ll learn how to pull out moments that make your story stand out and how to tweak your writing until it’s just right. We’ve got practical examples for you to follow along, making sure you have everything you need to tell your story. 

What is a Personal Narrative?

A personal narrative is a way to tell your own story. It's a style of writing that puts your experiences front and center, inviting readers into your world. Teachers often assign personal narratives to encourage free, expressive writing. 

The personal narrative definition is wider than academic settings, though. . These narratives can also show potential employers who you are beyond your resume. At its core, writing a personal narrative is a form of storytelling, using a first-person perspective to bring real-life tales to life. Whether it's for a grade, a job, or just for fun, it's about getting your story out there.

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How to Write a Personal Narrative: Steps

In this section, we'll break down the process into manageable steps, starting with how to zero in on the right topic that speaks about who you are.

Step 1. Choosing a Personal Narrative Topic

The first step in crafting your personal narrative is picking the perfect topic. It should be something meaningful to you, something that has not just happened, but also shaped who you are or has a significant story behind it. Here’s how to frame your personal narrative ideas:

• Story Arc : Your narrative is like a mini-movie. Start with setting the scene, build up to the main event, and wrap up with a reflection. For example, if you’re writing about your first solo travel experience, begin with your initial feelings, describe the challenges you faced, and end with what you learned about yourself.
• Thematic Focus : Instead of moving through time, center your narrative around a central theme. Maybe it’s about resilience, and you could link different times you had to be resilient, ending with a major life challenge.
• A Day to Remember : Sometimes a single day can tell a lot about you. Pick a day that was particularly memorable and unpack it from start to finish. Maybe it was a seemingly ordinary day that brought unexpected lessons or joys.

Step 2. Working on Your Personal Narrative Outline

When putting together your personal narrative, starting with a solid outline can help keep your story on track. Here's how you can lay it all out:

• Introduction: Kick things off with a hook that grabs attention, like an intriguing question or a vivid snapshot of a key moment. Set the scene and introduce the main theme.
• Setting and Characters : Give a good sense of where your story is unfolding and who's involved. Paint a clear picture of the backdrop and the key people.
• Plot Development : Lay out the events in the order they happened, or group them around major themes. Build up to your main event, adding conflicts or challenges as you go.
• Climax : This is the high point of your story, where everything comes to a head. Make it a moment that has the most impact.
• Resolution : Wrap up the main storyline, showing how things settled down after the climax.
• Reflection : Spend some time reflecting on what happened. Share what you learned or how you changed because of the experience.

If you're looking for help crafting your personal narrative, consider checking out some legit essay writing services to get professional guidance.

Step 3. Writing the First Draft of Your Personal Narrative

Now let’s move on to the fun part! Don't worry about getting everything perfect right away — the first draft’s goal is to let your story flow naturally:

• Start with Your Hook: Revisit the introduction you outlined and flesh it out. Begin with the attention-grabbing sentence that will make readers want to continue.
• Let the Story Unfold: Follow your outline, but allow yourself some flexibility. As you write, new memories or details may come to mind. Embrace them! Think about what you saw, heard, and felt during these moments. Were you sitting in a sunlit room, listening to the hum of a busy street outside? Maybe you felt the chill of an autumn breeze? 
• Stay True to Your Voice: This is your story, so let your unique voice shine through. Whether you're humorous, reflective, or serious, maintain a consistent tone that feels authentically you. Keep the tone conversational and straightforward, as if you’re telling this story to a friend. 

Once the first personal narrative draft is done, set it aside for a bit before revisiting it with fresh eyes.

Step 4. Revising Your Personal Narrative

Once the first personal narrative draft is done, set it aside for a bit before revisiting it with fresh eyes:

• Tighten Up the Story : As you go through your draft, focus on making everything clear and to the point. If you’ve talked about how nervous you were before a big event more than once, try to combine those thoughts into one powerful sentence that really captures how you felt.
• Keep Your Tone Consistent : Make sure your voice stays the same throughout the story. If you start off with a casual, conversational tone, like saying, “I couldn’t shake the nerves before my big test,” stick with that style instead of suddenly becoming formal later on.
• Adjust the Pacing : Pay attention to how smoothly your story flows from one part to the next. When you’re describing a key moment, like meeting someone important or going through a major experience, give it the detail and time it deserves. Let those moments develop naturally without rushing.
• Enhance Your Descriptions : Make your imagery more vivid to help the reader visualize your story. For example, instead of just saying, “The room was noisy,” you could say, “The room buzzed with excited chatter.” These small tweaks can make your story feel more alive and engaging.

Step 5. Adding Personal Touches

As you polish your personal narrative, focus on making it uniquely yours. You can include personal reflections on your experiences. For example, if you’re writing about a challenging project, discuss not just the struggle but how it impacted you personally and professionally.

Besides, add unique details that only you can share. Instead of generic descriptions, use specific anecdotes or sensory details, like how the scent of freshly baked cookies from your grandmother's kitchen made you feel nostalgic.

Last but not least, incorporate dialogues or direct quotes from people involved in your story to add authenticity and depth. For instance, if your mentor gave you advice, include their exact words to capture the moment’s impact. This approach will help you understand how to write a personal narrative that is both engaging and deeply personal.

Not sure where to begin? You can always buy a narrative essay from experts who can help shape your story.

Step 6: Editing for Clarity and Style

When you’re editing your personal narratives, the goal is to make sure everything flows smoothly and makes sense. Here’s how to get it just right:

• Clarify Your Message: Check for any parts of your story that might be a bit confusing. If you talked about being excited about a project and then suddenly shifted to its challenges, make sure to connect these thoughts clearly. For instance, you might rephrase it as “I was excited about the project, but I soon faced some unexpected challenges, like tight deadlines.”
• Simplify Complex Sentences: Break down long or complicated sentences. Instead of saying, “My enthusiasm for the project, which was incredibly high despite the difficulties I faced, was the driving force behind my perseverance,” you could simplify it to, “Even though the project was tough, my excitement kept me going.”
• Smooth Transitions: Check how your paragraphs and sections flow together. If you jump from describing a problem to the solution without a clear link, add a transition. For example, “After struggling with the project’s challenges, I realized that asking my mentor for help was the key to overcoming the obstacles.”

Oh, and read your narrative out loud. This can help you spot any awkward phrases or spots where the story might be a bit choppy. It’s a great way to catch any issues and make those final tweaks to get everything just right.

Personal Narrative Prompts

Here are ten personal narrative prompts to get you thinking about different moments in your life:

Need more tips on how to get started? Check out this guide on how to start a narrative essay to kick off your writing with a strong opening.

Personal Narrative Examples

Here are a few personal narrative beginnings to spark your creativity. These snippets are designed to get you started and inspire your own storytelling.

Wrapping Up

As you finish up your story, think about how those moments shaped who you are today. It's not just about what happened, but how it changed you. When learning how to write a personal narrative, it’s important to focus on the moments that truly matter to you and tell them in your own voice. This way, your narrative can really connect with others. 

Remember, the best stories come straight from the heart, so trust yourself and let your experiences shine through!

If you're working on a personal statement, you might want to explore a personal statement service that can help you create a compelling narrative.

Turn Memories into Masterpieces

Let us transform your experiences into a beautifully crafted narrative that stands out and makes an impact.

How to Start a Personal Narrative?

Can a personal narrative be about anything, what is the format of a personal narrative.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

• The New York Times. (2020, January 7). Personal Narrative Essay Winners. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/learning/personal-narrative-essay-winners.html