What Empathy Is And What It Is Not At All

📅 15 May 2025 • 📖 6 min read

The term “empathy” is popular, yet fuzzy. Still, most of us know empathy as being able to understand how someone else feels by putting ourselves in their shoes.

Experts agree, adding that empathy is an emotion, a state of mind, and an attitude.

• As an emotion, it is feeling what another person is experiencing.
• As a state of mind, it is being open and willing to understand their feelings and experiences.
• As an attitude, it is the mindset of being supportive and caring when interacting with those around us.

If you notice, empathy is not something we feel alone. We need other people and shared experiences to feel it. That’s why David Brooks calls it a “social emotion.”

What Empathy Is: Empathy Defined

The APA dictionary defines empathy as “understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own, or vicariously experiencing that person’s feelings, perceptions, and thoughts.”

Psychology says empathy is our ability:

• to imagine and understand what someone might be thinking or feeling,
• to experience the emotions of another person as they feel them, and
• to use those insights to respond helpfully.

What Empathy Is Not: Myths of Empathy

If empathy means being able to put yourself in the shoes of another, then what if that person’s shoes are too large for you, and don’t pinch your feet at all?

Anne M. Dohrenwend writes in Academic Medicine:

• Empathy is not merely a basic listening skill. Rather, empathy is a master listening skill that demands a deeper, more nuanced engagement than simple reflective listening.
• Empathy is not altruism. While altruism involves an emotional response that drives us to help others without expecting anything, empathy enables self-understanding.
• Empathy is not sympathy. Whereas sympathy involves disclosing personal feelings, empathy involves recognizing and then setting aside one’s own feelings to fully understand the other’s experiences.
• “Finally, empathy is not “putting oneself in another’s shoes.” If I put my feet in your shoes, I will not understand you better. What is tight on me may be loose on you. What I consider worn, you might find comfortably broken in. My feet distract me from understanding you.”

So, empathy is not assuming a person’s distress from your angle. When a friend talks about the loss of a loved one, being empathetic means listening to their experiences and imagining their pain without letting your own memories overshadow their experience.

Showing empathy also does not mean you must agree with the person’s view. You can empathize without giving your approval, and say, “I can understand you, but I don’t agree with you.”

Also, to be empathetic, you do not have to show your emotional reactions or offer them help.

The Evolution of Empathy

• In 1873, German philosopher Robert Vischer used the word “Einfühlung” to describe the emotional experience of “feeling in” with a work of art.
• Later, another German philosopher, Theodor Lipps, expanded it to mean “feeling one’s way into the experience of another.”
• The modern term “empathy” was coined in 1909 by English psychologist Edward Titchener, who translated the German word “einfühlung” into English.
• Much of our modern understanding of empathy comes from Carl Rogers, an American psychologist. In his 1975 work, Empathic — An Unappreciated Way of Being, Rogers proposed that empathy is a process we can develop, rather than a fixed trait.

Biologically, empathy is a survival tool. Its roots lie in the genes we inherited from our ancestors. It let our ancestors share each other’s struggles and help each other survive and thrive.

Women have more empathy.

“Signaling their state through smiling and crying, human infants urge their caregiver to take action… females who responded to their offspring’s needs out-reproduced those who were cold and distant. This may explain gender differences in human empathy.” — Frans De Waal, GGSC

The 3 Types of Empathy

Paul Ekman, an American psychologist and pioneer in emotions and micro-expressions, classifies empathy into three types:

1. Cognitive Empathy: Also known as perspective taking. This involves recognizing and understanding another’s thoughts and feelings, essentially “feeling by thinking.” Psychopaths often exhibit high cognitive empathy, as they can identify what causes pain but lack sympathy. Research shows that those with higher cognitive empathy have more gray matter in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
2. Emotional Empathy: Also known as affective empathy, this type involves vicariously sharing feelings after an emotional interaction. Medical professionals often demonstrate this empathy, fully understanding and feeling another’s pain. Those with higher emotional empathy have more grey matter in the anterior insula, which is linked to empathic distress.
3. Compassionate Empathy: This is the action-oriented aspect of empathy, where understanding and feeling another’s experience leads to a desire to help. Compassion involves a tender response to suffering and a wish to act to reduce that suffering.

Some experts think empathy differs from the Theory of Mind (ToM), which is the intellectual ability to assume and presume others’ beliefs and intentions, while empathy focuses on sharing emotional experiences.

Meanwhile, the poets explain empathy in relationships as only they can:

Where Does Empathy Live In Our Brains?

Empathy is more than just a figure of speech; studies show we genuinely feel the pain of others in our brains.

Neuroscientists noted a “neural relay mechanism” that enables empathic people to subconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of others.

This is why when a needle pokes someone’s hand, the same parts of the brain fire in both the person in pain and in an observer watching from a distance. Brain scans revealed the brain area to be the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

Research by Rizzolatti identified “mirror neurons” in the ACC that activate when a rat sees another rat in pain, suggesting these cells form the biological basis of empathy and compassion.

The ACC is more active in highly empathetic individuals and less so in psychopaths.

Final Words

Empathy is in shared happiness as much as in shared suffering.

Sometimes the best empathy is just being there for them in their hour of challenge, sensing their emotions in silence.

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√ Also Read: Stephen Hawking Told Us, Why Is Empathy Important In Society