Empathy: Recognizing What Others Feel

Empathy: understanding before responding

Empathy, within the emotional intelligence model, is the ability to pick up on someone else’s emotional state even when they don’t put it into words directly: a tone of voice, a silence that runs longer than usual, a gesture. It isn’t just “feeling the same thing” the other person feels, it’s understanding their perspective accurately.

It’s a component that makes relationships enormously easier, but it can also be draining if it isn’t paired with good self-regulation.

Disclaimer: This article is based on Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence and is intended purely for informational purposes. It doesn’t replace the assessment, diagnosis, or intervention of a mental health professional.

How it shows up

• They pick up on the other person’s emotional state without being told, from non-verbal cues or context.
• They put themselves in the other person’s shoes easily, even when the viewpoint is very different from their own.
• They adjust how they communicate based on how they sense the other person is feeling.
• They notice when someone says “I’m fine” without meaning it, from the tone or the silence around the words more than the words themselves.

Reading the emotion behind the emotion

Psychologist Leslie Greenberg, one of the leading figures in emotion-focused therapy, builds much of his approach around empathic attunement: the ability to accurately pick up on what someone else is actually feeling, even when what they’re showing on the outside is something else. Greenberg distinguishes between the primary emotion (the most direct response to what happened), the secondary emotion (a reaction to that first emotion, anger about having felt afraid, for instance), and the instrumental emotion (the one someone expresses, sometimes without being fully aware of it, to produce an effect on whoever’s in front of them), the same distinction we already saw applied to yourself in our article on emotional self-awareness.

This distinction is a practical tool for everyday empathy. When someone reacts with anger that seems out of proportion, the useful question isn’t just “what’s wrong with them?” but “what might be underneath this anger?”: often the visible emotion is secondary, and underneath it is pain, fear, or shame the other person hasn’t named, maybe not even to themselves. Learning to read that underlying layer, instead of taking the surface reaction at face value, is what separates accurate empathy from superficial empathy.

Factors the literature links to more accurate empathy

1. The underlying emotion, not just the visible reaction: psychiatrist Norberto Levy, in his concept of the “double reaction,” describes how the emotion shown on the outside is usually a response to an earlier emotion already experienced, not the original reaction; noticing that earlier layer helps you better understand what’s going on with the other person.
2. Listening without preparing your response: full attention while listening is linked, in the literature, with better picking up on what someone else is feeling.
3. Confirming instead of assuming: checking your read on an emotion, instead of taking it for granted, is linked with projecting your own feelings onto the other person less.
4. Your own emotional regulation: research describes sustained empathy without limits as a possible source of burnout, which is why it’s usually discussed alongside self-regulation as complementary components.

An example of the first idea: a coworker who snaps at a minor comment is probably not reacting to the comment itself, but to something else already there (exhaustion, an unrelated worry) that well-trained empathy tries to spot before responding only to the surface sharpness.