This is empathy

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. Thanks to Ken for the idea for this post.

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.

Affective empathy can be when someone is struggling and you focus on what they are feeling and see through their eyes. Cognitive empathy is understanding that while we may be different but we’re not on different sides. Your ability to see the world as others do is cognitive empathy.

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences and it is one that all animals have. Over the last several decades, we’ve seen increasing evidence of empathy in other species. One piece of evidence came unintentionally out of a study on human development. Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, visited people’s homes to find out how young children respond to family members’ emotions. She instructed people to pretend to sob, cry, or choke and found that some household pets seemed as worried as the children were by the feigned distress of the family members. The pets hovered nearby and put their heads on their owners’ laps.

Emotions trump rules. This is why, when speaking of role models, we talk of their hearts, not their brains. We rely more on what we feel than what we think when we see others in distress. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial.

When someone is struggling, they don’t always need someone to swoop in and fix things. They may just need someone to understand where they’re coming from. Empathy might, in fact, be the positive aspect of all of this: whatever our circumstances, it’s clear that we all need to feel seen and heard. If empathy doesn’t come easily to you, the good news is that it can be learned and practiced. Empathy can help us know ourselves and our own feelings. It can help us lead, help us communicate and help us support and connect with others. At home. At work and at school.