New Findings On Empathy, From Research

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— By Dr. Sandip Roy. Updated July 2026.

Summary

Empathy is the ability to understand and, to some extent, share or respond to another person’s feelings. Research links empathy-related processes with better well-being, more positive relationship functioning, greater prosocial behavior, and a lower likelihood of hostility.

Empathy is often divided into cognitive empathy (understanding another’s emotional state), affective empathy (being emotionally affected by another’s feelings), and empathic concern or compassionate empathy (caring about another’s suffering and being motivated to help).

People, especially strangers or bystanders, may show less empathy in stressful situations or when the social context discourages engagement, such as time pressure, emotional overload, group dynamics, or diffusion of responsibility. Repeated exposure to others’ distress can contribute to emotional strain and burnout in caregivers and healthcare providers, described as empathy fatigue or compassion fatigue.

Empathic response may depend on motivation or instruction. Brain scans of 18 psychopaths watching people in pain showed relatively normal levels of empathy when asked to empathize (“try to feel with the victim”), but not so when asked to “just watch the movies” (Keysers & Gazzola, 2013).

Empathy is linked to well-being and to the quality of our relationships with others across the lifespan. It can deepen connection, encourage altruism, improve forgiveness, and strengthen social understanding. At the same time, empathy is not a single, simple capacity. It has different forms, different uses, and, at times, different costs.

This post looks at empathy from several angles: positive psychology, neuroscience, social behavior, antisocial behavior, cyberbullying, and the medical profession. It considers findings that complicated some older assumptions. In that sense, empathy is best understood as a psychologically powerful and deeply human way of relating to others.

Empathy is an important construct in positive psychology, and empathic interventions have been used to increase altruism, reduce hostile behavior, increase forgiveness, and improve self-other agreement among both in-group and out-group members. Highly empathic people often report better psychological health, including lower levels of stress, anxiety, hopelessness, and depression; fewer risky behaviors such as drinking and smoking; and better regulation of stress (Adams, 2010; Au, Wong, Lai, & Chan, 2011; Diamond, Fagundes, & Butterworth, 2012).

According to social psychologist Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis, empathy motivates people to help others out of genuine concern for their well-being. If one feels a high level of empathic concern toward another person, one is more likely to act prosocially regardless of self-interest. (*32, *33)

Empathy is also an important component of Everett Worthington’s REACH model of forgiveness: Recall, Empathize, Altruistic gift, Commit, and Hold. (*34)

The modern concept of empathy has its roots in the German aesthetics term Einfühlung, or “feeling into” another. Philosopher Robert Vischer first used the term in 1873, and Edward Titchener later transliterated it into empathy in 1909. In between, Theodor Lipps helped bring the concept into social cognition as a way of describing our capacity to understand others.

Empathy is the experience of understanding and, to some extent, sharing another person’s condition from that person’s perspective. A casual expression that captures part of its meaning is: “I know how you feel.”

Empathy is often temporary, reflexive, and recognized most clearly in retrospect. It can also be learned. And even when we feel another’s pain, we still retain a separate sense of self.

Empathy should be distinguished from sympathy. Empathy is more about understanding another’s inner experience, whereas sympathy is more about feeling sorrow or concern for that person. Or, empathy is more about shared understanding, while sympathy is more about shared affect.

In recent years, psychologists have increasingly treated empathy as a multidimensional construct rather than a unitary one. Different writers have proposed categories such as mirror empathy, motor empathy, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, behavioral empathy, and reenactive empathy. For practical purposes, though, Paul Ekman’s three-part framing remains especially useful:

1. Cognitive empathy, or perspective-taking, is the ability to recognize and understand another person’s perspective and feelings.
2. Affective empathy, or emotional empathy, is the vicarious sharing of feelings, often through emotional contagion.
3. Compassionate empathy, or empathic concern, is the behavioral or motivational expression of the other two: understanding another’s experience, feeling moved by it, and responding in a caring way. (*31)

Eclectic Findings on Empathy

Empathy appears to contribute to happiness and well-being across age groups. It has been associated with positive well-being and better relations with others from ages 10 to 87. People with higher empathy also tend to describe their social interactions as more meaningful and more emotionally positive for both themselves and their partners. (*1)

While most researchers agree on the positive role of empathy in interpersonal relationships, its role is most prominent in marital partnerships. Empathy directly predicts marital forgiveness and marital quality. (*2) Yet this is not entirely uncomplicated. Accurately inferring what is happening in a partner’s mind can deepen understanding and strengthen the relationship, but it can also intensify conflict in an already strained bond. Love is often treated as inherently curative; empathy is not always so simple.

There is also evidence that brain systems and hormones are involved in empathic responding. Certain regions, such as the anterior insula, and hormones, such as oxytocin, have been linked to parenting and prosocial behavior. (*21) Mirror neurons have been proposed as part of the neural basis for understanding others’ actions since they fire not only when we perform an action ourselves but also when we observe another person performing it. In that sense, they may help us translate another person’s behavior into something experientially meaningful to us. (*29, *30)

Some research has suggested that people with a tendency toward depression may be highly empathic. Mildly depressed individuals, for example, have sometimes scored high on measures of empathy. (*5) This opens up an interesting possibility: that excessive empathy-based guilt, or heightened sensitivity to others’ suffering, may contribute in certain contexts to depressive or submissive tendencies.

Another surprising line of research concerns psychopathy. Psychopaths are often thought to lack empathy entirely. Yet neuroimaging studies by Keysers & Gazzola (2013) on 18 psychopaths showed they may have relatively preserved empathy ability (showing stronger neural/behavioral responsiveness when empathy is strongly encouraged) while showing a low empathy propensity (less spontaneous engagement when they are not encouraged to empathize). They further argue that this ability–propensity distinction may help characterize empathy in psychiatric disorders such as psychopathy and autism. (*6)

Finally, what is often called “intuition” or a “sixth sense” may not be a parapsychological phenomenon, but rather empathic inference: the ability to draw on observation, reasoning, memory, and social knowledge to understand what another person is likely feeling or thinking. (*3) And despite popular assumptions, women do not necessarily outperform men in empathic accuracy. Klein and Hodges (2001), for example, found no simple female advantage in this regard. (*4)

New Findings on Empathy

Rather than attempting a formal critical review, I originally surveyed some of the published literature on empathy from January 2014 through August 2015. The goal was not to claim any final answer, but to offer a ringside view of what was then emerging across different areas of psychology and neuroscience.

I. Neuroimaging into Empathy

By then, earlier work had already suggested that emotional empathy engaged the mirror neuron system more strongly than cognitive empathy. (*7) Later neuroimaging studies added further nuance.

Goerlich-Dobre et al. (2015) identified the left amygdala as a possible shared substrate for both alexithymia (“no words for feelings”) and empathy. They concluded that stronger empathic capacities were associated with greater left amygdala volume, whereas smaller volume was linked with alexithymia. (*8)

Kanske, Böckler, and colleagues (2015) developed a novel fMRI paradigm called EmpaToM that independently manipulated empathy and Theory of Mind. Their findings suggested that two distinct networks were involved: the anterior insula for empathy and the ventral temporoparietal junction for Theory of Mind. This helped support the idea that affective and cognitive aspects of social understanding can be distinguished neurally. (*9)

Robert Eres and colleagues (2015) used voxel-based morphometry and found that people with high affective empathy showed greater gray matter density in the insula, whereas those with high cognitive empathy showed greater density in the midcingulate cortex and adjacent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Their conclusion supported the idea that empathy is not one process, but several related ones. (*10)

Hortensius and de Gelder (2014) explored the neural basis of the bystander effect. Their fMRI scans suggested that, as group size increased, activity decreased in brain regions involved in action preparation, including the left precentral, left postcentral, and left mediofrontal gyri. (*16) In other words, the more bystanders there were, the less prepared an individual brain seemed to become for action.

II. Empathy Among Strangers

Empathy is usually stronger among in-group members and weaker toward strangers. This barrier is often described as an empathy gap.

Martin et al. (2015) found that the empathy gap can be reduced when the stress of social interaction with strangers is lowered through shared emotional experience. In their work with both rodents and humans, human participants first engaged in a shared gaming experience. Later, when asked to submerge an arm in ice-cold water and rate the pain, participants reported greater pain in the presence of someone who had become more familiar through that shared experience. The authors concluded that social stress inhibits empathy, but common emotional experience can soften that barrier. (*12)

Empathy also has a darker side. Bullies may use cognitive empathy not to care, but to manipulate. Cyberbullying or virtual bullying or ‘trolling,’ which includes harassment over social media and other digital platforms, has brought this issue into even sharper focus. Pew Research Center data from 2014 found that 40 percent of adult internet users had personally experienced some form of online harassment, while 73 percent had witnessed it happening to others. (*13)

One of the strongest counters to cyberbullying is taking responsible action by the “cyberstanders,” such as challenging the bully (confrontational) or siding with the victim (supportive). Yet empathy among bystanders remains inconsistent online. Shultz, Heilman, and Hart (2014), studying responses to a cyberbullying simulation on Facebook, found that although most participants recognized the bullying, only a minority said they would actively support the victim. Those who identified with the victim showed higher empathy than those who identified with the bully. (*14)

Diffusion of responsibility appears to operate online much as it does offline. Machackova et al. (2015), studying 257 Czech witnesses to cyberbullying incidents, found that people were more likely to help when only one or two other bystanders were present. (*15) Even in digital settings, group size can weaken moral response.

III. Antisocial Behavior and Empathy

As noted above, psychopaths may be able to engage cognitive empathy when prompted. That is not the same as saying they are compassionately empathic, nor does it mean they empathize spontaneously. Still, it complicates the assumption that psychopathy simply equals a total absence of empathic capacity.

Decety, Skelly, Yoder, and Kiehl (2014) found that high-scoring psychopaths showed consistently lower activation in the core face-processing network while viewing facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, and pain. At the same time, they still showed significant amygdala responses in several expression categories. (*11) This raises the possibility that empathic deficits in psychopathy are selective, context-dependent, or differently organized than we once assumed.

Saima Eman and colleagues, presenting work in 2014, examined how sensation seeking and empathy subtypes related to antisocial behavior in a sample of 540 undergraduates. They found different combinations of sensation seeking, social skills, emotional reactivity, and cognitive empathy predicted different aggressive or non-aggressive outcomes. (*17) The broader implication was that empathic deficits do not act alone; they interact with temperament and personality.

MDMA, popularly known as ecstasy, has long attracted interest for its reputed empathy-enhancing effects. Along with related phenethylamine derivatives, it has been described as an empathogen, a term coined to refer to substances that increase feelings of empathy and social closeness. Hysek, Schmid, and colleagues (2014) found that MDMA enhanced explicit and implicit emotional empathy, as well as prosocial behavior, mainly in men, but did not appear to alter cognitive empathy. (*18) At the time, MAPS was funding pilot work on its potential usefulness in PTSD. (*19) That said, MDMA had no accepted medical use in routine clinical practice and remained illegal outside restricted research settings.

Aggression and empathy have even been called “existential twins.” Jesper Juul argued that empathy is one of the strongest countermeasures against hostile behavior. Yet the empirical picture is mixed. Vachon, Lynam, and Johnson (2014) found that the relationship between empathy and hostile behavior was surprisingly weak and remained weak across verbal, physical, and intimate forms of aggression. (*20) That finding suggested that while empathy may matter, its role in aggression control may have been overstated in some intervention models.

IV. Empathy in the Medical Profession

Medical personnel are often assumed to be among the most empathic professionals, and for good reason. Clinical empathy has long been regarded as essential to the patient-doctor relationship. Higher empathy has been linked to greater patient satisfaction, stronger clinical competence, and better treatment adherence. (*22, *23)

At the same time, medical training and long-term exposure to suffering may sometimes dull empathic responsiveness. Some studies have suggested that, as medical students and physicians gain professional experience, empathy scores may decline. This may reflect emotional self-protection, repeated stress, time pressure, and the normalization of distress within clinical routines.

There is also a serious occupational cost to consider: ‘burnout,’ a term coined by Herbert Freudenberger, refers to the triad of emotional fatigue, depersonalization, and diminished self-value. Burnout is often caused by long-term occupational stress, while repeated exposure to patients’ suffering may contribute to compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress. In such cases, the healer’s own emotional resources can become overextended. Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished presence with patients may follow. (*24, *25)

This is why empathy in healthcare cannot be treated as a simple virtue that should be increased indiscriminately. It must also be supported, taught wisely, and regulated. There is increasing interest in whether empathy can be taught in medical education, and whether some forms of empathy are more protective than others. Perspective-taking, for example, may help clinicians understand patients without becoming overwhelmed by them. Unbuffered emotional over-identification may be more draining. (*26, *27)

Lamothe et al. (2014) reviewed the relationship between burnout and empathy in physicians and found that higher perspective-taking was associated with lower burnout. Other forms of empathy showed more complex relationships. (*28) This suggests that empathy in medical care is neither reducible to emotional softness nor adequately captured by a single score. Some forms may protect clinicians; others may tax them when not balanced by self-awareness and boundaries.

V. Empathy Update, July 2026

Empathy research is no longer well served by phrases like “the empathic brain.” Recent reviews point instead to a distributed network that repeatedly includes the anterior insula and anterior/anterior-mid cingulate cortex, with additional prefrontal and sensorimotor involvement depending on whether researchers are measuring pain empathy, affect sharing, or perspective-taking.

That distinction matters because newer methodological critiques argue that empathy findings can look quite different depending on the task, stimulus, and subcomponent being measured. In other words, the field is getting more precise: researchers are increasingly separating emotional contagion, cognitive empathy, and compassion, rather than treating them as one undifferentiated trait.

In clinical care, the evidence is stronger than “patients like nice doctors.” A recent systematic review of physician empathy in doctor-patient communication found that empathy is associated with better communication and better patient outcomes, not just a warmer bedside manner.

There is also now more outcome-focused evidence. A 2024 study on chronic pain reported that physician empathy was associated with more favorable outcomes than several common comparators, suggesting that empathic clinical interaction can function as a meaningful part of treatment rather than a cosmetic extra.

The burnout literature has also sharpened. Recent work in medical residents found a negative association between empathy and burnout, and newer review-level evidence reports that greater empathy, especially cognitive empathy, is associated with lower burnout in healthcare professionals.

So the best current summary is not that empathy is automatically good in every form. It is that well-bounded, cognitively informed empathy appears beneficial for patient care and clinician functioning, while vague claims about “feeling more” are giving way to more careful distinctions about which kind of empathy helps, when, and at what cost.

References for 2026 update:

• Physician Empathy and Chronic Pain Outcomes (Licciardone et al., 2024)
• Research progress on the mechanisms of pain empathy (Liu et al., 2024)
• The Neuroscience of Empathy: Why Methods Matter (Iannetti & Cimpian, 2026)
• Association between burnout and empathy in medical residents (Zakerkish et al., 2024)
• Empathy and burnout in healthcare professionals, BMJ Open (Edwards et al., 2026)
• Insular cortex: A hub for saliency, cognitive control, and interoceptive… (Menon, 2024)
• Physician Empathy in Doctor-Patient Communication: A Systematic Review (Zhang et al., 2024)
• Unraveling the Neurobiology of Empathy and Compassion (NCBI Bookshelf, National Academies, 2025)
• Downsides to the empathic brain? A review of neural correlates…, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, (Choi et al., 2024)

Final Words

Empathy has rightly become one of the central ideas in contemporary psychology. But the more we study it, the less it resembles a single moral trait and the more it looks like a family of related capacities: to infer, to resonate, to understand, and sometimes to care enough to act.

That complexity is precisely what makes empathy so important. It can support happiness, enrich relationships, improve caregiving, and motivate altruism. Yet it can also be biased toward those closest to us, strategically used by manipulative people, weakened by group dynamics, or worn down by chronic exposure to suffering.

Sympathy, by contrast, has come to mean little more than sorrow for another’s pain. Empathy asks for something subtler. We cannot feel exactly what another person feels, however much we try. But we can understand, imagine, respond, and remain humanly available.

That may be the real promise of empathy: a disciplined and compassionate form of connection more than an emotional fusion.

And perhaps that is where the future lies most fruitfully: in empathic concern, understanding another person’s inner world in a way that leads to wise, humane, and constructive action.

References for the studies cited above are listed separately here: Empathy Study References

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